RimWorld

This is a rare case where the funding is fully documented and the later revenue is not. The 2013 Kickstarter ran 31 days, sought $20,000 and raised $268,112 from 9,497 backers — 1,340% of goal, an average pledge of about $28. Ludeon's own archived press page gives the total as $268,132, a $20 difference explained by snapshot timing. The only official sales figure Ludeon has ever published is Sylvester's February 2018 announcement of over a million copies, with his own reaction: 'The original Kickstarter only sought 1,000 sales, and that seemed like a lot. This is… crazy.' No newer total has been published in the years since. A widely repeated claim that the game had passed $100 million in revenue by August 2020 was traced back to its source and the source is gone — the cited domain now redirects to unrelated content — so it is not recorded here as fact. What can be verified is the shape of the long tail: the base game sells for $34.99, the Steam Workshop holds over 37,000 mod items, and the all-time concurrent-player record of 96,040 was set on 20 July 2025 — almost seven years after the 1.0 launch, alongside the Odyssey expansion. Time-to-beat figures are soft by design: this is an open-ended sandbox whose 'ending' is a player-chosen goal like launching the ship.