The CRPG Renaissance: How Kickstarter Brought the Genre Back from the Dead

The pitch meetings all ended the same way in 2010: isometric is dead, turn-based is dead, nobody reads. Then in early 2012 Double Fine raised a million dollars on Kickstarter in a single day, and every RPG veteran with a rolodex did the math. Brian Fargo funded Wasteland 2 with the slogan 'they said the genre was dead.' Obsidian's Project Eternity broke records. Larian bet the company on Divinity: Original Sin without asking anyone's permission at all.

What followed was not a nostalgia wave. The renaissance games out-designed and frequently out-wrote their ancestors, built new studios (Larian, Owlcat, ZA/UM) into powers, and rebuilt the audience that made Baldur's Gate 3 the biggest RPG on earth. This guide covers the whole arc, part of our complete CRPG guide.

The class of 2014 to 2017

The first crowdfunded cohort arrived together and each solved a different problem. Wasteland 2 proved the veterans could still ship. Pillars of Eternity rebuilt the Infinity Engine feel with modern craft and Josh Sawyer's ruthless systems sense. Shadowrun: Dragonfall found perfect scale, one Berlin district, one crew, no fat. Underrail, one Serbian developer working for a decade, out-Fallouted Fallout on atmosphere alone. And Tyranny asked the genre's best what-if: what if evil already won and you were middle management?

The second wave

By 2019 the revival no longer needed Kickstarter. Owlcat graduated from Pathfinder to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, the first great CRPG in the grim dark of the far future. ZA/UM's Disco Elysium demonstrated that the form could win literary prizes. And a long tail of stubborn, hand-built games, Encased's Soviet anomaly zone, Gamedec's noir Warsaw of virtual worlds, Weird West's immersive-sim frontier, keeps the deep end stocked between the giants.