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.

PG Connects

I will have more insights to share Monday next week on the topic, as I will be speaking at the Big Screen session of PG Connects in London!

 

 

13 replies
  1. Asselin
    Asselin says:

    Very interesting!
    Have you got any data on the amount pledged in each category in 2019?
    I’m especially interested in understanding how game is compared to design and tech?

    Reply
  2. Amadeusz
    Amadeusz says:

    Hi! Great job with this summary, a lot of data presented. Is there any possibility to have same for 2020 or even 2021? I’ll be glad to read it!

    Reply

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. […] The recent release of the UKIEpedia initiative in the UK made me realise that I haven’t shared data specific to the country in quite some time. This a very good opportunity to do so, using the same dataset that we collected for the yearly state of the game for Kickstarter. […]

  2. […] information comes via a blog post on Ico Partners by CEO Thomas Bidaux, who performs an annual audit on how games perform on Kickstarter. 2019 was […]

  3. […] information comes via a blog post on Ico Partners by CEO Thomas Bidaux, who performs an annual audit on how games perform on Kickstarter. 2019 was […]

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *