Arcane Library's follow-up ShadowDark Kickstarter, ongoing now, has passed the funding of the original Kickstarter, which by itself is pretty interesting, as that bucks the pattern, and it's done so in only about 5 days. However, it also bucks the pattern in that its done so with just over half the number of backers as before. Granted, most of the rewards tiers are much more expensive than the original Kickstarter, for whatever reason, so maybe it's whale fans of the original game getting premium copies of the same stuff, to some degree. There's a lot of interest, surely, in what she's doing, however (even if looking at the number of backers, there's less interest than in the original game). But it's interesting; people tend to say that follow-up Kickstarter campaigns with additional supplemental material added to an initially successful RPG offering don't do as well. ShadowDark found a way around this; while the interest level (in terms of backers) is lower, the take from the Kickstarter is (so far; it'll continue to grow, although the rate at which it does so will be slow from this point on, I believe) higher. This was done by making premium offerings; a premium reprint of the original books, premium versions of the zines (half of which were part of the original Kickstarter) and premium versions of the new books, as well as other premium add-ons, like a cloth players map, etc.
That's why I say maybe this is the whale Kickstarter, whales being a gaming term referring to gamers who are big spenders. The business model of catering to fewer but bigger spenders rather than more numerous but thriftier spenders is usually seen as a phase in the cycle of a computer game. It can last for a while, but it is the second stage of a computer game business model; the first being "hey, we're popular and lots of people are spending subscriptions or whatever they're spending"; whale's being "we've lost most of those spenders, so we need to milk the ones that remain by offering a premium something or other that they can spend on. The third phase after that is, "we can't get people to spend money anymore at all."
Does this model apply to RPGs, though? That's an interesting question. The problem with the RPG business is that it doesn't encourage long-term spending very well, to be honest with you. That's something that even back when Gygax was still running the show that they struggled with. Once you have a popular product, how do you keep sales up, when it's the kind of thing that people have bought and don't really need anything else? If you're pretty saturated in terms of having met demand, you can't sell much more, because people who want the game already have it now. So, you come up with supplemental material. But how much of that can you continue to do? People don't need supplements, and while many people enjoy them, the take-rate is obviously going to be quite a bit smaller than the original. And at some point, the returns on supplements greatly diminish. Which is why games tend to go through edition revisions; an attempt to juice their sale by getting people on board to a whole new version of the game. But that's a diminishing return too; what does a new revision or edition offer that you don't already have in the original version? Well, probably something if there's a perception that the newer version is better, or that you will struggle to find players for the old one because of the new one just being out there, but again; less than the first time around. Plus, if you do it too many times, people stop caring. I bought the d20 Star Wars game in 2000, and I bought the revised book in 2002 or 2003 (not sure if I bought it when it was brand new.) When they came out with the Saga edition in 2007, I wasn't interested. Everyone said it was quite a bit better. But I wasn't willing to buy a third version of a game that I already had two versions of and honestly still hadn't even used once.
So, to some degree, whatever pattern you're seeing with ShadowDark is inevitable. The game seems to still be fairly healthy; in fact, I wonder if being an indie game, this second Kickstarter will juice its profile in the scene even more, honestly. But eventually you get to the point where mostly everyone who wants it has it. And then what do you sell and who do you sell it to? The answer is; you don't. You pivot to something else. There's no more money to be made here.
This long story is played out in the recent interview Questing Beast did of Mike Mearls, which is one of the best industry discussions I've seen in a really long time, so I'll link the whole thing below.
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