The golden age of Kickstarter-funded game development seems to be in decline.According to a study by CO Partners, video games as a category have raised less money in 2016 than in previous years, in large part because of a lack of high-profile projects. The Kickstarter gold rush of 2013 generated plenty of games that were “good for a Kickstarter,” but many of them lacked the polish needed to compete with other indie games and AAA titles.
There have been, however, a handful of campaigns that have gone on to finance some of the best indie games of the last few years. Though they may not have featured the massive size and scope of today’s blockbuster titles, their polish and thoughtful design matched even the most well-funded projects. That said, if you didn’t fund them yourself, you might not even know they came from such humble beginnings.
FTLis the best Star Trek video game ever made. Created by two-man developer Subset Games,FTL(short for “Faster than Light”) puts players in control of the crew of a small spacecraft, and tasks them with hopping from planet to planet in an effort to evade an evil empire pursuing them. With each stop, you engage in chance encounters and various exploration opportunities. Sometimes, those encounters will force you into ship-on-ship combat. Like on theStarship Enterprise, players can adjust the amount of power going to different systems, which allows for strategic maneuvers and forces enemy ships to make hard choices by targeting specific enemy systems.
Despite the game’s no-frills visuals — the game looks more likeThe Oregon TrailthanNo Man’s Sky—FTLuses procedurally-generated scenarios and ships to make every run feel new and exciting.
Kickstarter Campaign: June 04, 2025 — April 1, 2012Funding requested: $10,000Funding received: $200,542Release Date: June 10, 2025
The Banner Saga
Developer Stoic proudly boasted that everything aboutThe Banner Saga, from its narrative setting to its defining mechanics, would reflect a type of game that would struggle to earn traditional funding. It’s a turn-based strategy game [check], based around Norse mythology [check], with challenging and unforgiving systems [check].
Though its gameplay takes a cue from classic, turn-based RPGs, Stoic managed to cultivate a fresh take on the form. The aforementioned systems mesh well with the game’s heavy narrative, which puts players in situations that require tough choices, both in and out of combat. While the title may have appealed to a specific niche on paper, the game’s distinct artwork and underrepresented concept raised more than 700 times what the developers initally asked for. The game was so successful it spawned a sequel,The Banner Saga 2, which launched in April, 2016.
Kickstarter Campaign: July 08, 2025 — April 20, 2012Funding Requested: $100,000Funding Received: $723,886Release Date: June 27, 2025
Shovel Knight
As an ode to 8-bit platformers,Shovel Knightshould be the model for the retro-inspired games that so many Kickstarter backers seem eager to chase every time a classic designer tries to draw from the crowdfunding well.
Players control the eponymous knight, who uses his trusty shovel to dig, bounce, and bonk his way through the armies of the Order of No Quarter, a group of knights with Mega Man-esque themes. Though the game clearly takes cues from a few NES-era classics — namely Mega Man, whose art and structure the game mimics — it also manages to play with a genre that many developers would consider set in stone. Rather than aiming to merely replicate an outdated style of play, developer Yacht Club Games took classic gameplay and made it its own, and in doing so created a game that more closely mirrored the rose-tinted memories of NES-era players than the originals.
Kickstarter Campaign: Jun 17, 2025 — April 13, 2013Funding Requested: $75,000Funding Received: $311,502Release Date: August 15, 2025
Realistically,Hyper Light Drifterdidn’t even need to be a good game to become an overwhelming success. Creating a working game inside its unique, faux 8-bit aesthetic would have been enough to satisfy backers. Luckily, it turns out the game is actually a very interesting action-adventure title in the vein ofBastionand early entries in The Legend of Zelda franchise. Though reviews bore out that the game features some very challenging difficulty spikes,Hyper Light Drifteris a well-made wonder, one that offers views into a unique world that’s worth fighting to see.
Kickstarter Campaign: July 04, 2025 — October 12, 2013Funding Requested: $27,000Funding Received: $645,158Release Date: June 24, 2025
Divinity: Original Sin
LikeThe Banner Saga,Original Sinfound success on Kickstarter by catering to fans of a neglected game type — i.e. fans of old-school RPGs likeBaldur’s Gate. The game built on the ideas behind the PC RPGs that inspired it, which shared a more direct lineage with tabletop role-playing adventures than traditional video games. To that point, players can interact with the world ofDivinity: Original Sinin any way at any time. As you might expect, this makes the game infinitely more complex than your average mainstream RPG, but some players prefer complexity over intuitive design, and this game offers players a lot of freedom if they’re willing to learn on the fly.
Developer Larian Studios also went back to Kickstarter and successfully raised money for the sequel,Divinity: Original Sin II, which is expected to launch by the end of 2016.
Kickstarter Campaign: August 08, 2025 — April 26, 2013Funding Requested: $400,000Funding Received: $944,282Release Date: August 21, 2025
Darkest Dungeon
Literary adaptations, direct or otherwise, are surprisingly rare in video games. So it’s no surprise that developer Red Hook games had to draw funding from the internet to raise money for an RPG inspired by the works of cosmic horror author H.P. Lovecraft.
Though Lovecraft’s ideas, particularly his tentacle-clad creation Cthulhu, have inspired many games,Darkest Dungeonmanages to engineer an entire game around the central theme of Lovecraft’s work — that knowledge of evil and the occult will inevitably drive you insane. With every mission, characters grow crazier and crazier, which confers negative status effects until they eventually become unusable. Managing your characters’ sanity between missions becomes a resource management sim a laXCOM: Enemy Unknown, effectively passing your characters’ stress on to you and bringing you closer to Lovecraft’s own madness.
Kickstarter Campaign: July 07, 2025 — March 14, 2014Funding Requested: $75,000Funding Received: $313,337Release Date: June 16, 2025
The team behindSuperhot, a gunplay-intensive puzzle game, figured out their main idea in a week. In the game, players have to clear a room full of vector-style gunmen. The twist is that time freezes whenever the player stops moving. Nothing in the room, including the people and bullets, move until you do. The founding members of the developer, a Polish group called “The Superhot Team,” even created a working version of the concept with a seven-day period.
In the final, Kickstarter-funded version — which launched on PC and consoles in 2016 — players can fight their way through nicer-looking gunfights, predict enemy movements, and dodge bullets that stop in mid-air. When you do figure out how to get through a room, you feel like Neo fromThe Matrix.I guess that’s what happens when you dodge bullets and make seemingly impossible shots without a scratch.
Kickstarter Campaign: June 21, 2025 — June 14, 2014Funding Requested: $75,000Funding Received: $250,798Release Date: August 22, 2025
Broken Age
Broken Age, the game formerly known as “Double Fine Adventure,” started gaming’s infatuation with Kickstarter. The title provided fans with the opportunity to advance developer Double Fine the money to make a new game in the style of beloved adventure games such asDay of the TentacleandLegend of Monkey Island, which were co-created by the studio’s founder Tim Schafer.
InBroken Age, players must switch between two children in separate worlds, one from the future and one from the past, to solve puzzles and find a way to shirk their social constraints. The interplay between the game’s narrative and mechanical conceit is clever and funny, too. Though the studio had trouble scaling its extremely successful campaign — it had to release the game in two parts and launched a second campaign to raise more money to finish it — the end result ultimately delivered exactly what fans were looking for.
Kickstarter Campaign: July 17, 2025 — March 13, 2012Funding Requested: $400,000Funding Received: $3,336,371Release Date: Part 1 (Aug 23, 2025), Part 2 (June 09, 2025)
Wasteland 2
What if Bethesda hadn’t remadeFallout 3as a first-person RPG? It would probably a look a lot likeWasteland 2, the crowdfunded sequel to a long-dormant franchise that was very similar in both style and mechanics to the original entries of everyone’s favorite, post-apocalyptic RPG series.
Controlling a four-person team, players must roam a post-apocalyptic version of the American southwest, hunting outlaws and saving settlers when they can. Like Fallout, the game manages to cultivate a lived-in world, allowing you to stumble across and jump into other people’s lives. Unlike recent Fallout games, however, it plays out in a turn-based strategy setting, which makes for more complex challenges and combat.
Kickstarter Campaign: June 03, 2025 — April 17, 2012Funding Requested: $900,000Funding Received: $2,933,252Release Date: June 15, 2025
Kentucky Route Zero
This five-part, episodic “magical realist adventure game” is technically still in development. However, even with only four of five parts available,Kentucky Route Zerohas already won a slew of awards and changed the way we think about narrative in video games.
Though the episodes follow a single narrative, one that sees antiques salesman Conway meeting people and hearing stories as he travels down a fictional highway, the series benefits from an experimental design that plays with both story form and structure. “The Entertainment,” one of the three side stories called “interludes,” is actually a play that’s taking place within the game.
While many of Kickstarter’s successes have played on nostalgia,Kentucky Route Zerois one of the few that dared to ask permission to try something different.
Kickstarter Campaign: July 19, 2025 — February 6, 2011Funding Requested: $6,500Funding Received: $8,583Release Date: Ongoing since June 17, 2025
Updated on 13-06-2025 by Mike Epstein:The original version of this article said Divinity: Original Sin was released in 2016. The original version of the game was released on July 31, 2025.
