RPG Interest Remains High

Late last summer, I threw up a post noting that the recently released Dungeons and Dragons 5E Player's Handbook had shot into the top 10 sellers at amazon.com.  I'm a pretty prolific Kickstarter backer and had been really impressed with the way people were queuing up to throw money at a lot of projects, specifically Legendary Games' Mythic Mania and Kobold Press' Southlands projects.

But, lately I'd noticed the Kickstarter projects are losing steam.  Kobold Press' Advanced Race Compendium didn't raise nearly as much as I'd expected and Legendary Games' current Legendary Planets Kickstarter, though quickly funded, hadn't picked up as many people as I'd thought that they might.

Title	Date Closed	Total Raised	# of Backers	Funding per Backer
Mythic Mania	May 6, 2014	$69,362	461	$150.46
Southlands	October 18, 2014	$97,728	1,044	$93.61
Advanced Races Compendium	May 17, 2015	$51,040	797	$64.04
Legendary Planets (as of 7/14/2015)	Ongoing	$35,938	275	$130.68

Similarly, I've felt a little more gaming fatigue myself lately.  I mainly focus on Pathfinder and 13th Age.  In the Pathfinder world, the RPG line is moving into more and more niche products with this month's Occult Adventures and next spring's Ultimate Intrigue.  I'm enthused about both of those releases, but they don't have the wide appeal of something like an Advanced Race Guide, Ultimate Combat, or Advanced Player's Guide.

13th Age remains something I love, but right now we have only the core book, 13 True Ways, and their Bestiary (which is up for an Ennie--vote for it!)  There's a lot of room to expand in the 13th Age universe, they've got Glorantha and Midgard-related products from Kobold Press, among others.  But, there's not a lot of space to really expand on the 13th Age default setting simply because it's designed to be so free form.  Fire Opal and Pelgrane Press have put together something awesome, but pinning things down in their world means that it loses some of it's freeform power.  That said, my reviews of the their 13th Age Monthly releases this year show that there's endless space to expand, if not necessarily in a large, hardcover release.

I'm considering picking up Eyes of the Stone Thief at GenCon this year (gotta use that discount for GMing 13th Age at GenCon on something fun!)--especially if the group of test gamers I've lined up for this weekend decides that they really like playing 13th Age!  But, it just doesn't seem like there's a lot coming out right now.

So, today's notice from ENWorld that voting for the Ennies is up over 18% this year came as a wonderful surprise!  There's still a whole day left and they've already received 19,000 votes, which is 3,000 more than they received last year.  We could see an increase of up to 25% if heavy voting happens on the last day.

So, it seems like people are interested, but might also just be spending less money.  What does everyone else think?