Tabletop games are responsible for 30% of ALL the money raised on Kickstarter in 2018 so far

If you want proof that tabletop games have never been bigger on Kickstarter, look no further.

Analyst Thomas Bidaux of ICO Partners has put out a detailed breakdown of the statistics for tabletop crowdfunding campaigns in 2018 so far, revealing that tabletop games successfully raised a whopping $80 million (£61m) in the first six months of the year. That’s almost $10 million (£8m) more than they made during the same period last year, and the highest amount for any first half of a year on record.

What’s even more staggering is that this amount wasn’t just impressive for tabletop games on the platform, but that tabletop campaigns are responsible for almost a third – 30% – of all the money raised on Kickstarter during the year so far, up from just under a quarter, 23%, in 2017. Unsurprisingly, tabletop games were found to be the biggest category for Kickstarter as a whole.

1,649 tabletop campaigns have been launched on Kickstarter in 2018 to date versus 1,538 during the same period in 2017, with 1,048 of those successfully funding – leaving 601 not funded.

The number of successful projects is actually lower than the 1,080 funded in the first half of 2017, but the overall proportion of projects funding successfully has risen. A higher percentage of tabletop projects were successfully funded in 2018 – 64% – than during the same period of any year before, beating the previous all-time high of 62% in the first half of last year.

There’s more projects successfully funding than ever before, and those projects are getting bigger, too. Bidaux says that more tabletop games are making over $50,000 (£38,000) on Kickstarter than ever before, with 32 separate campaigns gathering over half a million dollars in pledges during the first six months of 2018 – that’s 13 more projects than the previous all-time high recorded in the first half of 2017.

Alone, these $500,000-plus (£384,000-plus) projects brought in a total of $40 million, making up half of the total amount raised by tabletop games – and 15% of all the money on Kickstarter.

Of course, the promise of more money has resulted in more people trying their chances on the crowdfunding platform – this week alone has seen two high-profile projects cancelled prematurely after raising thousands of dollars from backers.

Overturn: Rising Sands was pulled from Kickstarter with mere hours left in its campaign after its creators were accused of plagiarising several other successfully crowdfunded games including Massive Darkness and Conan, while a popular campaign for a board game spin-off of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog bit the dust after its designer admitted they hadn’t cleared the rights to use the licence to the cult web series.

Bidaux observes in his blog that the second half of the year tends to be even bigger for tabletop projects on Kickstarter, so expect to see these new records broken in due course. As Bidaux concludes: “The bubble is not bursting.”