Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori Kickstarter Campaign concludes with over 500k € raised

Disclaimer: I work on Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori for Aesir Interactive as a consultant, and I was employed as Creative Producer for the studio between 2021 and 2024. 

After 30 days of campaign and another week of late pledging, the crowdfunding campaign for Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori by Aesir Interactive has officially closed on Friday, April 11th 2025. The total amount raised ended up at €504 798 from 8889 backers, just unlocking the much asked-for stretch goal “Falconers of Mongolia” that promises giving players an option to hunt with an Eagle. 

If this is your first time hearing about this game, go check out my initial announcement, the Kickstarter Campaign, the Steam Page, or the game’s Social Media.

Numbers

The amount of pledged funds is impressive under various considerations: It just managed to be the most successful video game Kickstarter campaign located in Germany (and the entire DACH region), beating Everspace 2 by a bit over one thousand Euro. It’s worth acknowledging though, that Iron Harvest by King Art Games raised over 1 Mio in 2018: a German studio, even though their Kickstarter was officially launched by a subsidiary in the US. Regardless of whether Khiimori is the most or second most successful German games Kickstarter, it definitely is the most wide-reaching horse game crowdfunding campaign ever. Our genre has dipped its toes into crowdfunding on several occasions to varying degrees of success – see Astride, Unbridled, Canter Crossing, Horse Evolutions and Caballus Collecting – but the funds raised by Aesir Interactive are on an unprecedented scale for the horse game niche. 

If you follow game development a bit more closely, you may be aware that even 500k € is actually not a lot of money to make an open world game. That’s about the total budget of the original Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship or of Horse Club Adventures. And since people love to compare any horse game to Red Dead Redemption 2, I’ll once again mention that the estimated budget for that game is about 200-300 Million USD, i.e. about 600 times more. Fortunately, Aesir’s campaign has made it clear that the Kickstarter income is not actually intended to kickstart the development and fund the entire process, but to implement additional features on an already significant development budget. (“significant” by horse game standards that is. It’s still absolutely nowhere near the ballpark of AAA and Red Dead budgets)

I want to add here that this success does not mean that anyone can put a horse game on Kickstarter for a quick buck – just look at the aforementioned failed and moderately successful projects. Running a high quality crowdfunding campaign is a science in itself and easily a full time job or three. To plan and execute a campaign as successful as Khiimori, Aesir Interactive dedicated several people’s entire work time over the course of several months. Crowdfunding is a powerful tool, but one that requires careful planning and skill. 

Reflections

As one of the few people who initially went “hey so what if we did something different for the next Windstorm game”, moving the series away from its modern setting and using established Windstorm lore as a jump-off point to take the series to the Mongolian steppe, I feel immensely proud and vindicated that this concept – which the highly skilled and dedicated team of Aesir Interactive and NightinGames has been working on for almost two years now – resonates so much with people. And that, as hoped, the historical setting is making the game accessible and interesting to a lot of people who would not pick up a Riding Stable Simulator type of game otherwise. 

If the reception of Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch has taught me anything, it’s that I want to be a lot more careful in how I apply my optimism and excitement to projects I work on. I don’t want to tell anyone that Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori will be (or even should be) the one and only horse game everyone’s been waiting for. Like every video game, it’ll have its flaws and its shortcomings. Fortunately, there will be a community-driven Early Access period this time around to give Aesir Interactive the time to react to pressing feedback and adjust the roadmap according to players’ wishes – one of many key differences to Horse Tales. I encourage everyone to keep their expectations reasonable, to hope for something cool and interesting rather than something perfect, and to make use of the newly built-up and rapidly growing Aesir Interactive Discord community to voice your feedback, once the game launches this Summer. 

Impact

But regardless how how W:TLOK will perform and be received, its over 100k wishlists and its over 500k€ crowdfunding pledges speak very loudly for themselves: The time where anyone in the games industry could legitimately claim that horse games don’t have a big enough audience to justify decent development budgets has passed. Khiimori’s numbers prove beyond a doubt that the audience is there, that the player base is ready for different stories and settings than the good old “you inherited a farm…” and that the horse girls (gender neutral) are ready to put their money where their mouths are. This alone is and will remain a huge achievement for our niche, no matter what comes next. 

Perhaps it’ll take some more time until other game studios properly capitalize on this (increasingly obvious) underserved audience. Perhaps we’ll get another announcement of someone who gets it like Equinox: Homecoming sooner rather than later. Perhaps we’ll get another low effort scam (or two) before that. But the message is out there now, very clear for everyone to see. 

And I am incredibly proud to have been a part of that.