Kickstarter and Games in 2019

The annual review of the performance of games projects on Kickstarter in the past 12 months.

January 15, 2020

3 Min Read

A year has passed and it is time again to look at how the Kickstarter landscape for games has evolved over the past 12 months.

The Games category keeps growing

Whether you look at the total number of projects submitted, the number of projects, or the total amount of money raised, there is no question that the Games category has kept growing in 2019. The number of funded projects is growing faster than the number of projects submitted to the platform, meaning the percentage of projects that get funded is also going up. With the quality of the campaigns improving, this is quite an impressive trend.

Tabletop Games are leading the charge

Most of the growth is again through Tabletop Games projects:

+$11m year-on-year raised by successful projects
2,712 projects funded, up from 2,336, a +16% increase
67% of all the tabletop projects managed to reach their goal

Looking at the projects per tier of funding is probably the best health indicator of the ecosystem. In 2019, there was the same number of projects raising $500,000+ (68), raising a similar amount (about $83m across these projects). Most of the growth for the total amount of money raised was done by projects raising between $100,000 and $500,000, as well as projects raising between $10,000 and $50,000. The vast majority of the money was raised by projects in USD, representing 73% of the tabletop category, followed by projects in GBP and projects in EUR. All the other currencies combined represent about 6% of the money raised in 2019.

Stable year for Video Games

A few more projects got funded (+28), more money was raised (+$425,000), but overall, the year was quite similar to 2018 where video games on Kickstarter are concerned. Where it comes to project by tiers, there were about the same number of $500,000+ projects as in 2018 (6 projects in 2019 for 5 in 2018), but there was a decline in the total numbers of projects raising between $100,000 and $5000,000 (from 25 in 2018 to 19 in 2019). The (small) growth seen in the video games category was all through projects raising $100,000 and less. A trend specific to the video games category, when compared to tabletop games, is the weight the different currencies for the successful projects.