I agree that tragedies are underused in games. Saving the world stories were really never a good idea. I think intensely personal stories that end badly are definitely the way to go.
It doesn't even have to 'end badly' as such - 'tragedy' in its classic sense didn't always do that, and I think the association of tragedy with it's non-literary meaning of 'a bad ending' is part of the reason it fell out of favour after 1930. Ultimately, it means that the story is one where the hero doesn't get to save EVERYTHING and put everything right, but people get their come-uppance in a personal or psychological way. Great Expectations doesn't end with Pip being ruined or psychologically crushed - it ends with his reconcilliation with the love of his life, combined with the realisation that they're both too damaged by now to be anything but close friends. It's a sweet ending, in some ways more romantic than if they had actually got together.
Heart of Darkness ends with Marlowe 'almost' taking the step over the edge into madness, but stepping back at the last minute and realising that there IS a difference between him and Kurtz - that while Kurtz was pure idealism and hence had nothing left to anchor him when his idealism crumbled, Marlowe (once stripped of idealism) is still grounded in the everyday work of running a ship and it saves him. It's a tragedy because of what it says about the human condition, but the 'good guy' still wins.
Hamlet gets his justice. McDuff - as morally ambiguous and dangerous as he is by the end - gets his revenge. The protagonists in the Revenger's Tragedy are happy to wear their death sentences because they killed the assholes who murdered their family and raped their women - they see it as a victory, and they never expected NOT to hang.
Hell, some people list Camus' 'The Plague' as a tragedy, and that's one of the most uplifting books ever written. Unlike Sartre (who I despise both as an academic philosopher - he took all his premises from Nietzche but still wanted to keep HIS morality while shitting on everyone elses - and as an author), Camus saw something beautiful in the fact that we can't justify why we help others, but we do it anyway. The Plague is described as a tragedy because you have a set of characters who set about trying to combat a seemingly unstoppable plague in a town that's been locked off due to quarantine. Some do it for charity (the priest, the doctor), some for selfish reasons (the lover), some for duty. It's a tragedy because of what it says about the human condition - as the plague goes on, they all slowly realise that all of their motivations for helping others and putting themselves in danger are ultimately meaningless. But whereas Sartre shits on that sort of thing and would call them all fools, Camus finds something beautiful in that - the characters KNOW that they can't justify why they are endangering themselves to help others, but they also know that they can't stop - something in them, something that they can't understand or justify, leads them to make that sacrifice. Okay, it's not a crpg plot, but it's a good example of how 'tragedy' in the literary sense is to do with the human condition - you can have an absolutely uplifting book like The Plague, and it can still be a tragedy because of what it says about people (even if what it says is ultimately positive).
In the literary sense, tragedy doesn't have to mean 'everything ends up fucked'.
By the time they are sober enough to put them out they will be at 1,5M$. Noone would believe them that no strech goals were been hit.