Gamebooks on Kickstarter

Whether you love or loathe it, there’s no denying that Kickstarter is extremely successful. If you wanted to know if your product would be successful before Kickstarter, your main option was to supply all the money, make the product and hope that people would love it. Now you can ask people, “would you buy this thing?”, before you write the check. It’s a great tool both for funding your project, and making sure it’s worth your time in the first place.

Kickstarter often helps fund projects where publishers have lost interest, but an active audience would still love to see more. Which is great news for gamebooks: Kickstarter has bankrolled its fair share of CYOAs and gamebook-like projects. Which means both that people still want to make gamebooks (which is probably no surprise to you if you’re reading this), and that people still want to play them.

Looking through the successfully funded gamebooks on Kickstarter, it’s easy to see what people are interested in.

Reprints or digitizations of well-known names are a big one, making over 400% of the goal on a few occasions. But even new, unknown gamebooks make the cut most of the time. The gamebook community is always hungry for new material!

I went exploring, expecting to find mostly digital gamebooks, or digitizations of print books. But there’s a surprisingly varied grab bag of goodies for any fans on there: hardcover collectors editions of all the Way of the Tiger gamebooks, new print gamebooks like Castle of Blackwood Moors, and even a choose your own adventure card game. And then there are the books that start digital and want to make it to print, like the great Westward Dystopia.

Of course, I probably missed some – tell us on Twitter about your favorite gamebook Kickstarter from over the years.

I’ve backed my share of projects over the past couple of years, almost exclusively games (ok, and one or two artbooks because I knew the artists!). But from looking around the gamebook projects I’ve realized that Kickstarter is a good choice for anyone who wants to enter a niche market. When you can find the interested community, you may suddenly discover the small project you wanted to take on has a bigger audience than you imagined.

Of course all this got me (and Chris) wondering: How would you all feel about us running our own Kickstarter at some point?

Yuliya

Yuliya handles marketing and writing at QuestForge, and is the self-appointed chief of keeping Chris sane (despite Chris's insistence that he is the sane one).