Exploding Kittens’ Success is Great for Tabletop

Posted by Hex on February 25, 2015

Unless you were living in a kitten-proof bomb shelter last month, you know that Kickstarter –ahem– EXPLODED when The Oatmeal launched their latest crowdfunding endeavor alongside former XBOX creatives Elan Lee and Shane Small:

Exploding Kittens had a meager goal of $10,000 and blew past that in less than an hour. In 7 hours, they broke $1 million. Four days later, they became the most funded tabletop game in Kickstarter history. On their final day, they tipped over the Ouya’s previous record as the most funded campaign in the game category, settling at $8.7 million dollars. The only two projects that have ever raised more money on Kickstarter are the Coolest Cooler and the Pebble.

The Oatmeal brought in 219,382 backers, doubling the previous record of number of backers held by Reading Rainbow. Just a brief overview of the 62,000+ comments on the Kickstarter reveals that a significant number of the backers were brand new to crowdfunding. There was so much engagement that a fan community for the card game, called the Kitten Corps, formed from the campaign. That engagement was driven by unorthodox stretch goals. These included photos of Weaponized Back Hair and Batmen in a Hot Tub.

Exploding Kittens had already cracked $1 million before they announced their stretch goals. The campaign showed less interest in increasing the monetary total, but rather growing the community. Not that the community wasn’t already sizable – in fact, The Oatmeal’s built-in community, proved once and for all that that the best way to succeed in crowdfunding is to have a crowd already. “Exploding Kittens is pure catnip for the Internet,” the kitty-critics claim, “the game was rigged from the start, of course they were going to succeed.”

According to a recent Polygon article, Kickstarter games (both tabletop and video game) struggled in 2014. While nearly 500 more game projects were funded last year than 2013, total funding for Kickstarter games dropped by more than $30 million. More projects sharing less money means more barely-funded projects.

This begs the question: will backers of the Exploding Kittens campaign stick around and support other tabletop projects? Early evidence says yes!

Backers that joined Kickstarter for Exploding Kittens seem to have stayed and started looking around. More than that, they’re looking at other tabletop games, such as How to Serve Man and Ako Dice. Why? Because they had a BLAST with the very act of supporting Exploding Kittens. The engagement was fun and built positive memories and a great community . Backers want to experience that thrill of supporting a project again. The bubble could certainly burst, after all – now other tabletop projects have to compete with the insanity of The Oatmeal’s uncanny kitten campaign. But now that the kitten genie is out of the bottle, the gaming community has the opportunity to follow suit and keep the tabletop nation ever-growing with fun and engaging campaigns.

Do you think that the Kickstarter tabletop community will improve because of Exploding Kittens? I certainly do. Comment below on how wrong or right you think I am!