The crowdfunding campaign for Frosthaven, the sequel to bestseller and reviewer favourite Gloomhaven, just ended, with a final tally of pledges smashing the previous Kickstarter record of almost $12.4M set by survival horror game Kingdom, Death: Monster 1.5 in January 2017.
Considering the popularity of Gloomhaven itself, which raked in just shy of $4.4M over two Kickstarter campaigns, one might have thought this would be not such a huge surprise to the game’s designer, Isaac Childres.
But given the campaign commenced just as the world was shutting down for COVID-19, combined with a looming economic downturn not seen since the 1930s, the fact that almost almost 85,000 gamers have forked out around $150 each (excluding shipping) is somewhat of an eyebrow-raiser to say the least.
“This is an absurd amount of money!” said Isaac “When we were planning this out, I may have wistfully mentioned that it would be nice to hit $10 million, but it was a pipe dream. And then once the pandemic hit, I thought it for sure wouldn’t happen. But we threw the party anyway, and now look where we are!”
It’s certainly a business triumph in generally dark times for an industry that relies heavily on face-to-face contact, but such has been the excitement for this title, combined no doubt with a certain amount of FOMO-backing from those that missed out on Gloomhaven the first time around, that Frosthaven has exceeded all expectations and records.
This is all made even more remarkable by the fact that this is only the fifth project that Childres has created using the Kickstarter platform, with only a single game, Forge War, coming before the Gloomhaven saga began.
That debut title garnered a very respectable $105,965 in July 2014. But few, least of all the designer himself, would have guessed at how high and bright the Childres star would rise and shine within six whirlwind years.
There now just remains the task for Isaac and his company Cephalofair Games, to fulfil the 83,187 Frosthaven pledges by March 2021.
Good luck, sir, and congratulations!
