August TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

 

Buckle up folks, August's data has an outlier in it - a big one.

• 141 campaigns
• 20 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 121 Kickstarter
• $20,184,787.10 raised
• $1,580,419.62 on Backerkit
• $0 on Crowdfundr
• $18,604,367.48 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 16 accessories
• 29 adventures
• 3 advice
• 2 audiobooks
• 14 campaign settings
• 2 platforms
• 1 podcast
• 1 reprint
• 39 supplements
• 34 systems
• 55 distinct systems used (21 original)
• 49 campaigns (34.75%) used D&D 5E and raised $1,956,290.32 (9.69% of all money raised in August)
• 29 campaigns used AI in some form (20.57% of total)
• These campaigns raised $145,005.70 (0.72% of all money raised in August)
• 17 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 34.69% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns

Backerkit's August

The top 5 crowdfunding campaigns on Backerkit in August were:

1. Our Golden Age: An Ultraviolet Grasslands RPG []equel by Exalted Funeral ($489,412 from 4,071 backers)
2. ION Heart - A Lo-Fi Solo Mech TTRPG by Parable Games ($275,913.96 from 3,097 backers)
3. Nimble 5e: A Fast, Tactical, 5e Compatible, RPG by Nimble Co. ($265,912 from 4,290 backers)
4. Faerie: A Realm Wanderer's Guide | Feudal Fey Expansion for 5e! by The Dragons Vault ($218,167.88 from 2,547 backers)
5. Rifts® for Savage Worlds - Core Reprint by Pinnacle Entertainment Group ($64,855 from 416 backers)

Backerkit's top 5 list has more Dungeons & Dragons in it than usual, but Nimble 5e is the one that catches my eye a bit. Originally Kickstarted back in November 2023, the project raised $17,815 from 1,762 backers. At the time, it was just a small rules booklet of suggested tweaks to the existing 5e ruleset, but the more recent Backerkit campaign has ballooned to the classic 3-book set that has served WotC so well in the past. It raised nearly 15 times as much money from close to 2.5 times the number of backers, showing (perhaps) the value of building an audience with a smaller project first.

This campaign has also benefitted from two other factors, though.

Firstly, a well-established ecosystem of D&D YouTubers who shouted out the project when it first came around on Kickstarter and again on Backerkit. Some of these are featured on the campaign pages, some have been shared on NimbleCo's Twitter, and I'm sure there are many more. This is very similar to the success of DC20 back in June and July, except that The Dungeon Coach (DC20's designer) is a YouTuber in his own right with almost 66K subscribers.

Secondly, the fairly new Cross-Collab feature on Backerkit that allows two campaigns to offer incentives for people who back both (assuming both campaigns succeed). Unbeknownst to me, there has already been an appearance of this feature in TTRPG crowdfunding back in June: MAZES City of Skull x Vast Grimm Horde: No Safe Haven. This time around, it's Nimble 5e and Faerie: A Realm Wanderer's Guide. But how much of a benefit does this provide? 815 backers chose to back both, accounting for 32% of Faerie's support and 19% of Nimble 5e's. Conversely, 55-56 backers chose to back both MAZES and Vast Grimm Horde, accounting for 11% and 10% of their respective support. There's obviously no way of knowing who would have backed both campaigns without the cross-collab incentive in either case, but for all four campaigns this is not an insignificant amount of money. If the average pledge is indicative in any way for these cross-collab backers, they represent:

• $50,513.70 for Nimble 5e
• $69,812.90 for Faerie: A Realm Wanderer's Guide
• $5,657.28 for MAZES City of Skull
• $4,742.79 for Vast Grimm Horde

Now there's a decent possibility that cross-collab backers might have given less money to each campaign than the 'average' backer since they're paying for two things at once, but the reverse argument could be advanced as well based on the logic that anyone who can afford to back two large campaigns at once might have the disposable income to give a lot to both. Either way, I'll be keeping my eye out for future Cross-Collabs to see how this gets used in the future.

Kickstarter's August

The top 5 crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter in August were:

1. Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere® RPG by Brotherwise Games ($15,149,874 from 55,106 backers)
2. Moonsoon by Arcane Minis ($465,775 from 3,344 backers)
3. Neopets - Tabletop Roleplaying Game Official TTRPG by Geekify Inc ($410,786 from 7,114 backers)
4. Iron Kingdoms: Strangelight Workshop (5e) by Steamforged Games Ltd ($255,049.77 from 2,022 backers)
5. Berserkr by Slightly Reckless Games ($193,105.89 from 2,435 backers)

The Cosmere® RPG has not only become the highest funded TTRPG Kickstarter, it's the highest funded tabletop game Kickstarter period (beating out Frosthaven and Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5, both smash hit sequels to already smash hit board games) and the third-highest funded Kickstarter of all time (only a cool $26M short of the highest funded Kickstarter of all time, Brandon Sanderson's Four Secret Novels campaign). This in and of itself is fine, a lot of interesting designers got to work on the system, but I'm not wild about one of the biggest authors in the world crowdfunding a game based on his novels as though he can't make it happen any other way. I know that Brotherwise Games are the ones actually making and distributing it, but c'mon. These people are the "official games partner for Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere® universe," made an official Dragon Prince tie-in game, and worked with Patrick Rothfuss in one of their previous boardgames.

Combine this with the Neopets project, a joke of a campaign that features barely a single specific mechanic on the page (aside from "it started as D&D 5e but now it's something else that still uses a d20"), and we're in for a rough time of it folks. Crowdfunding seems to be rapidly becoming an easy cashgrab for lazy projects with a brandname attached or a glorified pre-sale storefront for projects that would have been pretty successful regardless. I hope there's enough room left for everyone else.