The Impact of Kickstarter on Board Game Design

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Gamefound have connected backers' purchasing power directly to designers, enabling games that traditional publishers would have rejected as lacking a market, being too costly to produce, or being insufficiently appealing.
02
The paper argues this shift has weakened the influence of conventional gatekeepers (publishers, distributors, and to some degree reviewers) and disrupted the traditional three-tier distribution model, with changes that appear largely irreversible.
03
Kickstarter has raised expectations for visual aesthetics and component quality, and these expectations shape design decisions from the earliest stages of ideation.
04
Campaign structures and backer expectations influence game selection, mechanics, and fiction, with the material and visual demands of crowdfunding both constraining and expanding a game's design space.
05
The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with 35 veteran board game designers and critics conducted between 2016 and 2020, plus the author's own experience self-publishing six board games and several expansions through Kickstarter from 2015 onward.
06
The author's self-published Kickstarter projects each raised between USD 100,000 and USD 350,000, and most were translated into four to eight languages and distributed internationally.
07
The paper, presented at DiGRA 2022 by Gordon Calleja of the University of Malta, aims to give academics practical guidance for designing games for crowdfunding platforms and an analytical account of how crowdfunding affects the design process.

Summary

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2022 by Gordon Calleja of the University of Malta, examines how Kickstarter and similar crowdfunding platforms such as Gamefound have reshaped board game design, production, marketing, and distribution. Its central thesis is that crowdfunding has changed the industry in ways that appear largely irreversible: by connecting backers' purchasing power directly to designers and publishers, the platform has enabled games that traditional publishers would have rejected as lacking a market, being too costly to produce, or being insufficiently appealing. The paper argues that this has weakened the influence of conventional gatekeepers, including publishers, distributors, and to some degree reviewers, and has disrupted the traditional three-tier distribution model.

The analysis draws on two sources. The first is semi-structured interviews with 35 veteran board game designers and critics conducted between 2016 and 2020. The second is the author's own practical experience designing and self-publishing six board games, along with several expansions, through Kickstarter from 2015 onward. Each of these projects raised between USD 100,000 and USD 350,000, and most were subsequently translated into four to eight languages and distributed internationally. The author handled nearly every stage personally, including design, art direction, marketing, logistics, and campaign management, which gives the paper an unusually close view of the crowdfunding production process.

The paper identifies several concrete effects on design. Kickstarter has raised expectations for visual aesthetics and component quality, and these expectations shape design decisions from the earliest stages of ideation. Designers interviewed reported that considerations of product design and materiality have altered how they organize the design process itself. The paper further argues that campaign structures and backer expectations influence game selection, mechanics, and fiction, with the material and visual demands of crowdfunding both constraining and expanding a game's design space.

The stated aims are twofold: to offer practical guidance on creating games for crowdfunding platforms, particularly for academics seeking to design their own games, and to provide an analytical account of how crowdfunding affects the design process. The paper concludes by synthesizing interviewee perspectives on the future of the board game industry and the continuing role of crowdfunding platforms within it.