Geek Native has a weekly RPG news summary called Routinely Itemised, in it there’s a section on Kickstarters that have launched since the previous summary. Some projects get special treatment and get a post of their own.
Since October 2020, I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of these Kickstarters to spot trends. I’ll make more of the data available in time, and in this post, I will introduce “Kickstarter Heat”.
Kickstarter Heat is Geek Native’s attempt to assign a number to how busy the platform has been in any given week with RPG and related projects.
Each Kickstarter launch is worth 3 Heat points with a bonus of 1 point for every £3,500 the campaign asks for. For example, an RPG Zine that will fund if it gets £500 is worth 3 Kickstarter Heat whereas a 5e setting asking for £7,000 is worth 5.
Tracking Kickstarter Heat
Routinely Itemised now includes a live graph generated from this data. The chart shows Kickstarter launches beside the Kickstarter Heat they generated.
As a result, you can see whether it was a popular week for Kickstarters and whether it was a popular week for ambitious Kickstarters.
Why use Kickstarter campaign goals
The campaign goal is a proxy for market confidence. If people are readily backing Kickstarters and publishers feel like they can and should set a high target.
The data is useful if you’re looking to launch a campaign. You might want to avoid a hot week in which backers have either lots of projects or expensive ones, that are competing for their pledges.
Equally, the data is useful if you’re trying to analyze the performance of a campaign. Are backing numbers drying up? Perhaps that’s because the week had been sweltering with many launches.
Creative Common credit: Die in a Fire by NamyGaga.
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Is there a heatmap for tabletop boardgames?
No, I’m afraid I only track RPG products this closely.