Boardgames are quietly one of the most lucrative categories on Kickstarter. Multiple miniature-based boardgames have out earned Oculus Rift and up until the end of 2013 5 of the top 20 projects were board games. There are a couple companies that are approaching $10MM in revenue by running multiple campaigns. There are also lone artists who have raised millions.
It's fascinating on a number of levels, from the individual creator stories (Frustrated designer quits job, raises $2MM) to the way small businesses are evolving the platform (some co's have turned stretch goals into a marketing artform). I've written about a few of these companies in the past if you'd like more details:
I did a little business startup competition over the weekend (aside: won too), and one of the main discussions in the marketing panels provided was on the use of Kickstarter not purely for the money influx, but more as a way of price and feature discrimination. By cleverly arranging your stretch goals, or making them fluid, and then by providing price determined plateaus for models or entry points, Kickstarter actually provides a lot of information that you might have to do some pretty painful market research, survey's, ect... to get.
The Reaper miniatures Kickstarter linked above was a particularly well done form of this, which has continued to experiment with the follow-ons. They were one of the first (maybe the first?) to provide the "buy once, get them all" tier for accessing stretch goals. They also got a lot of good market data and well discussed customer feedback with every post on what types of models people liked, how they liked them made, what they were willing to pay for them, and where the breakpoints in value / model were in the consumer mind. It was a pretty amazing shift from the ways of Games Workshop and the like with $5 / figure, $10-20 / big boy, take it or go home.
It's fascinating on a number of levels, from the individual creator stories (Frustrated designer quits job, raises $2MM) to the way small businesses are evolving the platform (some co's have turned stretch goals into a marketing artform). I've written about a few of these companies in the past if you'd like more details:
http://www.wired.com/design/2012/12/kingdom-death/
http://www.wired.com/design/2012/08/reaper-miniatures-bones-...
http://www.wired.com/design/2012/06/coolminiornot-success-ki...
http://www.wired.com/design/2012/05/zombie-apocalypse-board-...
http://www.wired.com/design/2012/05/game-salute/
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/designers-kickstarter-an...