I was right about Kickstarter... maybe

Don't look back, Gamefound might be gaining on you

I’d like to interrupt our scheduled programming for this month to comment on a recent BoardGameWire article, in which Mike Didymus notes that Gamefound seems to be grabbing substantial market share from Kickstarter in the tabletop games space. Kickstarter remains the leading crowdfunding platform for tabletop game creators, with $220 million raised there in 2024. However, tabletop game projects on Gamefound raised $156 million last year, half again as much money as in 2023.

Now, the amount of money raised is one of those statistics that you can pry open and root around its innards to show why it’s not as useful as it might seem. And indeed, the BoardGameWire article does point out that Gamefound has always derived a notable percentage of its funds raised from projects launched by Awaken Realms, a publisher connected to Gamefound because both were founded by Marcin Swierkot. But Awaken Realms’ share decreased to 20% in 2024 from 35% in 2023, so clearly, incestuous relationships are not the cause of Gamefound’s rise.

It strikes me as more important that less and less money has been raised on Kickstarter over the last few years, following a dramatic rise during the COVID lockdown. Tabletop gaming money raised on Kickstarter fell 12.4% year-over-year in 2022, an estimated 4.3% in 2023 (by Tabletop Analytics, because Kickstarter refused to release its own figure that year), and then by 2.7% last year. If I’m reading this correctly, this means that Kickstarter’s market share has been declining over the last few years at a time when Gamefound’s share has risen dramatically. When you take into account that Backerkit has also horned in on the market of hosting initial campaigns over the last couple of years (Didymus does not even mention this), it seems that Kickstarter’s position has eroded even further in the last five years.

My Kickstarter profile. 8 years ago, those credentials struck a lot of people as impressive.

I take this as support for my contention that the rise of Gamefound and Backerkit as primary crowdfunding platforms has split the audience for crowdfunding games, to the detriment of some of us who have been relying exclusively on Kickstarter. If Kickstarter is raising less money in aggregate (Didymus also notes that the average amount of money raised by a successful Kickstarter campaign has fallen since 2021), then something of a zero-sum game is playing out here. Having more players in the market is not increasing the size of the market, it’s taking share away from the largest established player, Kickstarter.

I don’t think it’s a leap of logic to assume that much of the time that people used to spend browsing Kickstarter for projects to support is now being spent on Gamefound and Backerkit instead. Yes, Kickstarter is still the industry leader and it still draws plenty of big-dollar projects; no, there is no law of man or nature that says that you can’t participate in all three platforms. But the fact that Kickstarter is raising less and less money suggests that it is losing backer activity, and that time their backers used to spend browsing the site is now being spent elsewhere. Again: Having three platforms is not growing the pie, it’s creating a messy fight over the same quantity of pie.

I also argue that this hurts smaller creators like Ramen Sandwich Press most of all. The creators with recognizable brands and big marketing budgets will still raise plenty of money. But for those of us who toil a tier or two down from them, we’re less likely to get noticed. Like boxers on the undercard, no one comes to Kickstarter just to see us. If we put on a good show, we may catch the notice of fans who came to see the title bout. But if Kickstarter is no longer the only promoter in town and Gamefound is staging another show on the same night, you may skip one to go to the other — or you may try to go to the title bouts at both shows and give up on watching the undercard. The undercard fighters won’t get the same amount of attention if the audience is split.

Now, I’m not saying that Kickstarter should be granted a perpetual monopoly on tabletop game crowdfunding. But I’m certain that competition is not an unalloyed good for Ramen Sandwich Press. Here’s another way of looking at it: I used to hang out a lot in the eBay seller forum, and someone would always pop up with the wish that there was another auction site that would give eBay a run for its money because they weren't happy with how eBay was treating sellers. Oh really, I would say. Because you know, if eBay truly had a peer competitor, it would split the market for that Derek Jeter bobblehead you’ve got there. Let’s say 1,000 people are interested in it. If eBay is the only site where it made sense for you to auction it, you have a captive audience of 1,000. If you split that audience between two peer competing sites, your audience shrinks to 500 because you have to choose one venue over the other. Even if the split is, say, 60/40 or even 70/30 rather than 50/50 it would still dilute the buyer pool and weaken the sellers’ position. No one ever had an answer for that.

So I am still convinced that it is Kickstarter’s fault, not ours, that Severed Heads and Broken Blades and The Hobgoblin’s Fortress did poorly. Kickstarter is losing market share and we’re losing eyeballs on our project out of proportion to the big headline-grabbing projects. The question is, what do we do about it? Do we stick with Kickstarter and hope we don’t sink this time? Do we try another platform? Do we launch multiple balls into the air and juggle more than one venue at the same time? That’s something I’ll have to ponder while working on Lair of the Storm Giant.