OSR Kickstarter Trends

Ben Milton of Questing Beast did some neat work tagging kickstarter projects as OSR or not and played out some of the trends over time - see video. He generously shared his data - [edit: building upon the original dataset by Hans Messersmith] and I wanted to dig through and see what else we can see.

From the data-sheet - classification was done by:
Original = Adventures/supplements/etc. explicity for old forms of D&D; New games that are direct or near directly clones of D&D (e.g. OSE, OSRIC); adventures, supplements for those direct clones
Scene = new games considered to be part of the "OSR scene"; new games inspired by older forms of D&D; adventures/supplements/etc for those games
If a project is listed with multiple systems/games, it will be categorized as Original if at least one of the systems is Original, otherwise Scene
Reprints of actual older D&D products (e.g. the recent reprint of Caverns of Thracia by Goodman Games) are included in Original
Includes projects that started between January 1, 2014 and December 31, 2023, inclusive. Therefore, some projects that started late in 2023 and ended in 2024 are included.
Listed year is the year the project started, not ended

Sticking on my analyst hat we can pull out some interesting trends. First, to recap what was shown in Questing Beasts video and give ourselves a baseline, we see an overall increase in projects for every category.

I did some work to extract the median and top quartile values of project per category to get a sense of what most projects are doing, conscious that the very large projects at the high end skew things significantly otherwise. These are in tables at the bottom of this post. We have seen the median value of project jump about but broadly converge towards the lower end of the $5k-10k bracket.

This I found somewhat surprising - I would have thought that 5e or 'other' categories, representing broader pools of players, would be higher.

Looking at top quartile kickstarters and we see a bit of seperation in 2020, 2021 that has closed up again in 2022, 2023.

But if you want the chance to really go viral and make pots of money, 5e is the place to be, having a more-than-$2m kickstarter in four of the past six years.

I had a couple of hypotheses starting this - that we would see greater difference between OSR and 5e projects across the board, not just at the top end (false) and/or that we might see a tail off in the value of 5e projects from a '5e glut' side of things (false).

The one place where we do see clear blue water between the categories is in the fraction funded - where OSR kickstarters have a 10% higher likelyhood of funding compared to the 5e and Other categories.

So If I was a market analyst, did not give a fig about anything but making money and my private equity vultures had just bought some hapless shop of content creators, I would say to them to steer towards the OSR space - your competition is lighter, your projects are going to fund 19 time out of 20 and make the same median money even if you were less likely to get your blow-out multi-million dollar campaign.

No idea why this is true but it is a pretty consistent trend. OSR stuff always was likely to fund - other things have closed the gap somewhat in the past ten years - from ~1/3 fails to 1/5 fails - but all along OSR stuff failed 1/10 times or less.

Caveats, direct from the data-sheet:
Likely missed some new RPGs that did not reach a minimum threshold of notability
Likely excludes system-neutral products that are OSR in feel but state no system and never specifically mention terms like "old-school", "OSR", "D&D" etc and thus were labeled as generic/universal
Prior to 2020, anything for 5E was ONLY listed as for 5E, even if it also was for another game
Likely human error

Data tables - all from Questing Beasts original work.

Project Count	All Other	5E	OSR Scene	OSR Original
2023	880	633	190	71
2022	596	485	178	63
2021	793	443	111	59
2020	628	294	57	50
2019	499	228	45	28
2018	383	155	21	14
2017	317	119	16	5
2016	286	86	12	11
2015	298	42	18	3
2014	302	4	10	10

Median Value ($)	All Other	5E	OSR Scene	OSR Original
2023	4995	4961	7667.03	5686
2022	6603	6362	7826.22	9161.9
2021	6084	10624	6254	4818
2020	5857	8849	7202	4500
2019	7820	5552	7169	3014
2018	11585	7505	20133	7743.74
2017	9552	5994	7911.12	3531
2016	11021	6891	11314	9260.24
2015	9181	5725	12530	3030
2014	9031	33541	26604.12	3135

Top Quartile ($)	All Other	5E	OSR Scene	OSR Original
2023	15169	17969	15782.5	11937.75
2022	21843	27539	21145	21698.5
2021	19627	38962	15639.25	12885.85
2020	19010	34462	19987.275	10115
2019	28857	25041	12486.5	11383
2018	33623	23266	28068	16028.75
2017	29890	23571	19542	7042.12
2016	35919	18655	15947.5	26421.475
2015	23368	11291	21652	7719.475
2014	22207	48739	55593	6726.25

Highest Value ($)	All Other	5E	OSR Scene	OSR Original
2023	1277356	4020234	1389313	146616
2022	2097526	2692698	481023	772956
2021	9535022	2479078	1405668	136247.28
2020	620159	1310509	223464	291550
2019	3409944	1372683	75917.9	160390
2018	581672	2610887	125614	21835.7
2017	844978	248674	192036	18410.15
2016	1316813	85161	67856	115112
2015	534734	191431	215369	12408.95
2014	672764	63937	83573	8152