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Over 100 tabletop games made $500,000 on Kickstarter last year for the first time

Crowdfunding site hits another record figure, despite recent blockchain controversy.

Tabletop projects broke another record on Kickstarter in 2021, with more games funded and more money raised than ever before.

101 tabletop projects crossed the $500,000 crowdfunding mark in 2021, according to a blog post from Ico Partners’ Thomas Bidaux - the first time that over 100 tabletop games have made more than half a million dollars.

In total, tabletop games made $272 million on Kickstarter last year - the seventh consecutive year that tabletop projects have set a new record for the amount of money raised. Bidaux noted that growth slowed slightly year-on-year, increasing 13% from 2021 to 2022 versus a third from 2020 to 2021.

The number of tabletop projects being successfully funded also grew to new heights, with over 3,500 games hitting their target in 2021. The number of tabletop games that have surpassed their funding goal has grown every year since Kickstarter launched in 2009.

“Looking at the size of the projects overall, the amount of money raised by each projects tiers, is sensibly the same as in 2020 - and the same is true for [the] total number of funded projects in each tier who grew in the same proportion,” Bidaux wrote, describing the ongoing increase as a “very steady growth”.

“Many professionals I have talked took [sic] are very afraid of a bubble, and the platform becoming less reliable to finance their projects, but 2021 is not showing this sort of signs.”

Tabletop games continued to vastly outpace video games on Kickstarter. 2021 saw more than 400 video game projects funded, a total of 441, only the third time that figure has been surpassed since 2009. However the amount of money raised by video game projects fell to $24 million from $26m in 2021 - less than 10% of the figure raised by tabletop games.

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The record numbers for tabletop games on Kickstarter come despite a backlash from creators and backers at the end of 2021 to the announcement that the platform would move to the blockchain this year. A number of board game and tabletop RPG creators announced that they would look to move projects onto other platforms, with several designers and publishers having since launched games via rival crowdfunding site Gamefound and indie marketplace Itch.io. Gamefound - which launched last year and focuses solely on tabletop projects - recently revealed that projects on the site raised $22 million in 2021 alongside a surprise $4.5m investment from veteran publisher Ravensburger.

“With a number of large projects having launched on Kickstarter competing platform Gamefound, tabletop games and crowdfunding are on track to keep their very heathy [sic] relationship,” Bidaux commented.

“Regardless of where the projects get funded, the past trend show that games, both on tabletop and on digital platforms, have a strong future with crowdfunding still.”

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About the Author
Matt Jarvis avatar

Matt Jarvis

Editor-in-chief

After starting his career writing about music, films and video games for various places, Matt spent many years as a technology, PC and video game journalist before writing about tabletop games as the editor of Tabletop Gaming magazine. He joined Dicebreaker as editor-in-chief in 2019, and has been trying to convince the rest of the team to play Diplomacy since.

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