Having a company that just goes from Kickstarter to Kickstarter is one model, and there’s nothing that stops them from doing it. And I think they need to do what’s best for them. But a lot of companies just need to be sustainable long term, and different companies have different needs. Unless you just have a huge campaign that raises $43 million out of the blue. “For a company to be sustainable you have to have things happening throughout the year, usually. “I think different companies have different needs,” said Ritter-Roderick. So is crowdfunding the best option for companies looking for the capital they need to operate, year after year? That failure directly resulted in layoffs, announced in January. Look no further than Wyrmwood, which failed in its quest to raise $3 million for its modular standing desk. The boom-and-bust cycle of crowdfunding can be dangerous. With so many teams using Kickstarter to launch new tabletop products into the world, many have begun to wonder if crowdfunding is the best way to support a healthy ongoing business and its workers. Also on that list is Steamforged Games, which brought in roughly $4 million for Elden Ring: The Board Game - its 15th campaign since 2016. Among them was CMON, which had two campaigns in the top 10 - its 50th and 53rd campaigns, respectively, since 2012. But the list is also crowded with companies that have run many, many campaigns over the years. The top 10 highest-earning projects on Kickstarter in 2022 included several of the biggest campaigns in that platform’s history. Heroes of Might & Magic III The Board GameĬthulhu: Death May Die - Fear of the Unknown Most-funded tabletop Kickstarters, 2022 Name And I think that we just came off of 2020, 2021 - very profitable years for us - but also a lot of people investing in themselves.” “Once the world starts talking about a recession, then all of a sudden, everyone kind of locks down a little bit,” Ritter-Roderick said. But the overall pessimism among consumers in the United States appears to have substantially contributed to Kickstarter’s declines. The pace of that work, said senior director of communications Kate Bernyk, will be driven in part by the efforts of its new CEO, Everette Taylor. Ritter-Roderick said that internally at his company the calendar will be filled with product launches and upgrades in 2023 - what he termed as substantial improvements to the Kickstarter platform. But its longevity has also bred competition: Gamefound and Backerkit both pushed hard into the tabletop space in 2022, no doubt eating into Kickstarter’s revenue. On the plus side, Kickstarter crossed the $2 billion mark for total money pledged to games (including video games) projects since its launch in 2009. Those determinations happen in retrospect, of course - only once a recession is in full swing or has already passed.ĭollars pledged to successful tabletop projects on Kickstarter through 2022 Meanwhile, the United States Federal Reserve has yet to officially signal that the economy is in recession. What’s clear is that large organizations like Microsoft, Amazon, and even Polygon parent Vox Media are making cuts to their workforces, which will directly impact the spending power of workers in the future. This is outside of Kickstarter.”Īnecdotal evidence supports those conclusions, but hard data on the hobby games industry is hard to come by. The sales for the majority of the industry went down last year. “There’s macroeconomic things happening in the world that we are not immune to, and that the entire tabletop industry is not immune to. “I think there are things that we cannot control,” Ritter-Roderick told Polygon in an interview last week. Jon Ritter-Roderick, director of games at Kickstarter, placed the blame squarely on the current global economic slump. The 12.4% decline from 2021 is the first of its kind since 2014, marking the end of more than a decade of continued growth in that sector for the crowdfunding giant. Kickstarter’s revenue from tabletop projects was down $33 million in 2022.
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