Geek Native has been tracking tabletop RPG crowdfunding projects on Kickstarter since the end of October 2020.
Kickstarter Heat is calculated every week with a formula based on the number of launches and how much the campaign is asking for. A week is measured as the time between the weekly Routinely Itemised RPG news summary on Friday, to the next one.
The idea is Kickstarter Heat is a measure of how bullish publishers are feeling. If confidence is high, it is more likely that there will be many launches asking for higher campaign targets. Last week was the hottest since records began.
The Kickstarter Heat formula hit 614, and the week before 384, and that compares to the Christmas period, where Heat dropped to around 40.
Zine Quest is partly to blame, and the weekly Heat total always climbs. 513 was the previous record in the first week of February 2021, and Zine Quest 3.
However, last week’s Kickstarter Heat was not exclusively down to Zine Quest. Geek Native tracked 90 launches; the week before had 101, and before that, 122.
Geek Native tries to include all tabletop RPGs on Kickstarter (hard when some games are hidden away in odd categories) and a representative sample of tabletop RPG accessories such as dice, STL files, minis, maps or even crowdfunding campaigns for gaming tables. Board games, as a rule, aren’t included unless the designer insists the game is essentially an RPG in box.
In addition to the volume of games in the system thanks to Zine Quest, last week saw some campaigns with high targets.
These big hitters include;
- Dwarven Forge’s Cities Untold: Lowdown which asked for $200,000 and currently has $2,222,000.
- Artefact Games’ Dice Tomes Vol 2 which asked for £25,000 and with two weeks to go, is at £17,338.
- Acheron Books’ Apocalisee – John’s Guide to the Armageddon for 5E which asked for €25,000 and has €181,454 already.
It’s not been straightforward as G.M. Bardi (now with a deleted account) asked for €30,000 in the Alteria launch. The project was cancelled with €0 pledged.
Of the most significant projects, though, Wyrmwood’s Modular Gaming Table asked for $1,000,000 and hit that with $1,705,000 already in the bank and more than three weeks to go.
Analysis shows that the average ask for last week is high but certainly below all-time highs.
What does all this mean? It means if you launched a Kickstarter last week, you did so amongst fierce competition, and that’s unlikely to drop this week radically.
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