Kickstarter game projects top $1 billion, with tabletop making up 69% of pledges

Games represent one of the biggest categories on Kickstarter, and it looks like it’ll stay that way. Today, the crowdfunding site announced that gaming collectively brought in over $1 billion in donations to creators since 2009.

This total comes from the 3.2 million people who pledged money to almost 17,000 game-related projects. And while a lot of indie developers found success on the platform over the last decade — like Double Fine with Broken Age and Yacht Club Games with Shovel Knight and its expansions — the category is more than just video games.

Tabletop board games and pen-and-paper role-playing games are actually responsible for most of that $1 billion, earning $686 million compared to the $236 million from video games. Breakout tabletop hits include Exploding Kittens ($8.8 million), Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5 ($12.4 million), and Dark Souls – The Board Game ($4.9 million).

Of course, this means that Kickstarter itself pulled in a lot of money as well: The company takes a 5% cut for every successfuly funded campaign.

Here’s the full breakdown of where that $1 billion went to, according to a representative from Kickstarter.

• Tabletop games: $686,696,897
• Video games: $236,598,100
• Playing cards: $25,376,895
• Games (no subcategory selected): $22,028,478
• Gaming hardware: $21,368,200
• Mobile games: $7,230,806
• Live games: $2,942,176
• Puzzles: $1,868,466