ICO Partners are a UK agency that helps with the marketing of your self-published games. Cleverly, they track Kickstarter. Geek Native has been tracking them, writing up the growth of the tabletop games category on Kickstarter.
Now, new data from ICO Partners shows that the start of 2020 was a record-breaking six months despite Covid.
You can check out ICO’s report over on their new Medium.
The gotcha, as ICv2 points out, is that Frosthaven happened.
Gloomhaven’s expansion funded in this window (May 2020) and took a cool $13 million, becoming the richest tabletop game in Kickstarter’s history.
There’s a distortion effect here.
Despite the megabucks Frosthaven has brought in, ICO’s data shows tabletop games on Kickstarter is reasonably robust health. The number of projects successfully funded is up month-on-month compared to 2019 expect April and May. Those peak Covid months are only down by a dozen or so games.
Sadly, the reports this year don’t use the same format as previously, and I can reverse engineer so Geek Native won’t be updating the tracking of the ICO data.
Happily, ICO has this animated bar chart race. Games is in grey. You’ll be able to see how categories battle for first, second and third spot in a way that has them lurching around madly. It’s smash hits like Frosthaven which are, largely, responsible for the big swings.
ICO Partner’s CEO, Thomas Bidaux, has been tweeting some additional data. One of the tweets give us a better look at the cash in the tabletop games section in Kickstarter.
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