"Exploding Kittens" Blows Up Kickstarter Records

The Register reports that the crowdfunded Exploding Kittens card game from Oatmeal (and Tesla museum fund-raiser) Matthew Inman, along with X-box veterans Elan Lee and Shane Small, has become the highest-grossing game project yet on Kickstarter. After an intensive fundraising campaign, the trio collected $8.78m from 219,382 backers to launch the game. This breaks the record for the largest ever Kickstarter game project, previously held by hackable Android gaming console Ouya. According to the blurb on Exploding Kittens' (now closed) Kickstarter page, players "take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game."

Comments

Even more Incredible

[Racemaniac]

Even more incredible is how the summary is written to make it sound a lot worse than it is.
looking at the kickstarter page, the game reminds me a bit of aye evil overlord, passing the buck around, trying to get other people to explode. Sounds like fun. It's nothing like "take turns drawing cards until someone draws an exploding kitten and loses the game.". You can make anything sound bad by taking a single sentence out of context. There are cards to prevent exploding, to pass exploding cards to other players, etc...

Sounds like fun :).

I'm really starting to wonder why i'm still on this site. Even more than it used to be, it's just a stream of clickbait and articles containing half truths just to make it sound controversial...

Re: What's not to like

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I like Matt's work. But I don't find it particularly surprising that he raised a ton of money. He already has an audience that already wants to buy his products.

I actually dislike when known and established creators use Kickstarter. Why do they need it? It's not like Inman couldn't have gotten a loan if he'd wanted one. Instead everyone says how amazing it is he funded so much. How is it amazing? If Beyonce went on Kickstarter would it be any surprise if she raised $10 million? If course not. In the Internet community it's no surprise that Inman could throw a successful Kickstarter no matter what the game content was.

Re: What's not to like

[SuperKendall]

I actually dislike when known and established creators use Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is not a zero sum gain. Exploding Kittens getting $8 million does not mean that any of that $8m would have gone to any other Kickstarter campaign. I contribute to Kickstarter stuff off and on, my contributions are not limited by finances but by interest in the project.

Why do they need it?

They need it for the same reason as anyone else - to be sure there's a market before they spend money on production. That's the awesome thing about Kickstarter, is that it takes the risk out of going beyond a prototype stage. Even a well known and creative guy like Matt could easily produce a card game that went no-where at all and no-one would buy - a terrible waste not only of his time but the resources used to print the cards and produce packaging.

With Kickstarter you eliminate a ton of waste because you are producing what people want instead of what they might want... it's the ultimate definition of win/win.

I think people who don't understand Kickstarter should go back to the Muppet movie and watch Kermit's speech on dreams (jump to 45 seconds in) and listen carefully to Rainbow Connection... Kickstarter allows any of us to be muppets on the bus to an uncertain but interesting future. I for one don't care who is driving.