Score +2 For Million Dollar Crowdfunders!

This time last week, The Arcane Library's The Western Reaches for Shadowdark looked set to be the only game in town--so far--for TTRPG million-dollar crowdfunders this year. And it's still projected to break the top six of all time in the Million Dollar TTRPG Crowdfunder Club, which currently stands at 42 members.

However, two other crowdfunders rallied in their closing days, both squeaking in just past the million dollar mark! While it had always looked close, most people felt these two campaigns would just fall short of that magical--albeit arbitrary--number. However, The Magnus Archives RPG: Tangled in the Web from Monte Cook Games closed at $1015,475; and Fallen London: The Roleplaying Game from Magpie Games crossed the line with $1,028,103.

This means that the total number of million dollar TTRPG crowdfunders this year went from 0 to 3 in the space of a week! You can see the full list here.

It's noteable that none of these three are D&D 5E projects but this is easily ascribed to the fact that a new edition of D&D has just come out, making 5E crowdfunding creators and backers cautious all throughout 2024 and into 2025. Additionally, from the creator front, there is no official SRD (System Reference Document) available yet for the new edition of D&D, which is the rules document which D&D owner Wizards of the Coast puts out under the Open Game License--or, more recently, Creative Commons--as a developer tool for third parties. While this does not stop publishers making 2024 D&D-compatible products using the older SRDs (after all, WotC has gone to great lengths to point out that this is the same game, and not technically a new edition) it may have caused some to hold tight and wait for 'official' word.

Anyhow, after a quiet start, it looks like the million-dollar TTRPG crowdfunders are back again this year! 2024 saw 8 such projects, so it remains to be seen if 2025 will beat that!

 

[Morrus]

Agreed, although I'm not as baffled by the numbers when compared to videogames for a few reasons:

1. Average age of audience is (likely) significantly higher for TT games than videogames, which means more disposable income.
2. Lower turnaround time for (most) TT crowdfunding campaigns, since most of them are just trying to recoup the relatively small development costs of the game, pay for art/other finishing touches, and pay for printing fees before delivery. Videogame campaigns, on the other hand, are usually trying to gather operational funds before committing major time to development, which can take years.
3. It's (relatively) easy to demonstrate to potential funders what a TT game will play like in its final incarnation. You can share prototype rulesets, record demo games, and show off key art, miniature sculpts, etc. A videogame campaign might have a short trailer ready to show off, but most don't have proper gameplay to show off, and even if they do, it's hard to gauge whether you'll enjoy a videogame just based on watching someone else play it.
4. Finally, there's simply more worthwhile stuff to pay for in a TT campaign. The stretch goals usually involve entire expansions to the base game, extra miniatures, organizational tools, etc., that expand and enhance the game significantly. Videogame campaigns can promise, realistically, some extra content and some physical or digital freebies like soundtracks or swag.

It's basically #4. Getting a million dollar Kickstarter means pushing the average pledge level up beyond $100, and to do that you load it up with dice, pins, maps, dice trays, all sorts of extra stuff. Only two TTRPG crowdfunders ever have made a million with just the game materials.

 

[Parmandur]

Average age of audience is (likely) significantly higher for TT games than videogames, which means more disposable income.

Seems a majorly flawed assumption, on several points: we are st the point where people in their 50s grew up woth video games now, and video games simply have a larger audience.

 

[Potocki]

Seems a majorly flawed assumption, on several points: we are st the point where people in their 50s grew up woth video games now, and video games simply have a larger audience.

Very good point, and definitely a bit of flawed reasoning on my part. However, I would argue a similar point that the TT audience is historically more used to funding small-scale/creator-owned projects. There's not a massive gap between advertising your new game (which hasn't actually started printing yet) in the pages of White Dwarf or Dragon or seeding a small-print run at your LFGSs, and launching a Kickstarter campaign.

 

[Parmandur]

Very good point, and definitely a bit of flawed reasoning on my part. However, I would argue a similar point that the TT audience is historically more used to funding small-scale/creator-owned projects. There's not a massive gap between advertising your new game (which hasn't actually started printing yet) in the pages of White Dwarf or Dragon or seeding a small-print run at your LFGSs, and launching a Kickstarter campaign.

Video game crowd funders have been around for like 15 years, minimum, and small game studios have been around basically forever at this point (as history began in 1985, that is)