Board game crowdfunding major CMON issues profit warning, says losses could exceed $2m for 2024

Crowdfunded board game heavyweight CMON has warned it could face losses of more than $2m for its business activity last year, saying the rising cost of living had eaten into its revenues from tabletop game sales.

CMON’s board issued a profit warning to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange yesterday, estimating its losses for 2024 at between $1.4m and $2.1m – with the final, audited total expected to be revealed in the company’s annual report by the end of this month.

At the mid-point of that range the 2024 losses would almost completely wipe out CMON’s $1.8m profits across the previous three years combined – bringing to an end several years of improving performance as the company recovered from losses of almost $5m in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

CMON had previously scored profits of about $3.5m in 2017, roughly $2m in 2018 and around $1.88m in 2019, once one-off costs related to its transfer to the main board of the Hong Kong stock exchange in the latter year were removed.

The profit warning continues a tricky start to the year for CMON, which began 2025 with an agreement to sell some its intellectual property in a $12m deal, and with two new shareholders due to invest about $1.39m into the business by picking up a combined 16.66% stake in the company.

CMON had entered a non-binding agreement to sell the unspecified IPs last August, but terminated the arrangement last month after CMON and the unnamed buyer failed to agree terms.

It also revealed just over a week ago that the new shareholders had failed to hand over the money for their stakes, and said it was seeking legal advice on how to cancel the process.

CMON added at the time that it was “now seeking other fundraising means to increase its general working capital” in order to enlarge its capital base, increase the overall liquidity of its shares and strengthen the company’s financial position.

It did not say why the potential shareholders had decided not to press ahead with investing in CMON.

CMON currently has 10 yet-to-deliver crowdfunding projects, which raised more than $22m, in various stages of production, with the $3.8m Zombicide: White Death the next game due to reach backers in Q2 of this year. It also has seven more titles available for pre-order, five of which are currently slated for Q2 delivery.

CMON quickly bounced back from a 17.5% revenue drop to $25.1m due to the pandemic in 2020, reaching $45.3m in 2022 and $45.1m in 2023 thanks to the success of multimillion-dollar Kickstarter campaigns for its long-running Zombicide series and games based on huge IPs such as Marvel and DC.

But last September BoardGameWire reported that CMON‘s mid-year revenue had fallen for the first time since the pandemic, to just over $15.9m, with slumping wholesale earnings putting a dent into the company’s H1 results.

CMON’s wholesale revenue sank 39% to $5.9m in H1 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, while revenue from its crowdfunding campaigns fell by about 9.7% to just over $9.9m.

The company’s cash reserves have also been diminishing, going from $3.9m at the end of 2022 to $3.1m at the end of 2023, and had fallen again to $1.9m at the halfway point of last year.

CMON shook up its crowdfunding strategy significantly in February last year when it ended 12 years of running campaigns on Kickstarter – which had raised more than $108m in total – in favour of signing an exclusivity deal with crowdfunding rival Gamefound.

Its first year on the new platform saw it raise more than $12.1m despite a relatively slow start, with large campaigns such as DC Super Heroes United ($4.47m) and Cthulhu: Death May Die – Forbidden Reaches ($3.9m) in H2 helping CMON beat the roughly $11.8m it raised on Kickstarter during 2023.

So far this year the company has completed a $2.85m crowdfund for Massive Darkness: Dungeons of Shadowreach on Gamefound, picking up support from more than 9,800 backers.

CMON also made two significant acquisitions last year, buying Japon Brand, the Japanese board game collective which introduced the world to Love Letter and Machi Koro, and picking up the intellectual property rights to a pair of stalled Kickstarter projects from troubled crowdfunding specialist Mythic Games in January 2024.

CMON said at the time of that acquisition that the two games, Hel and Anastyr – which raised a combined $3.2m on Kickstarter – were not “currently ready for publication in their current state and will require substantial effort to complete them”.

The company said it would go through “an extensive development and play-testing process” for both games, with their own versions being offered free to original backers from Mythic’s campaigns if they wished to receive it – although backers would have to pay shipping and VAT on these games.

CMON has not offered Kickstarter backers of those games any further updates in the 13 months since the IP acquisition.

BoardGameWire has contacted CMON for comment about the profit warning, its cash reserves, future plans for selling IP and other plans to boost its working capital, and will update this story with the company’s response if it receives one.

In January this year CMON hired the CEO of tabletop gaming YouTube channel Man vs Meeple as its new global director of marketing, as part of a push to continue expanding its player base beyond its traditional core market.

David Waybright will work full-time on promoting upcoming crowdfunding and retail releases from CMON while continuing to run Man vs Meeple, which specialises in sponsored and unsponsored board game preview videos, game overviews and Top 10 lists. The channel has almost 75,000 subscribers.

Waybright told BoardGameWire in January, “It’s important to us that we find new CMON fans all the time. It wasn’t until the original Death May Die that I became a fan myself, and there are obviously countless people out there who just haven’t tried one of our games yet.

“We’ll never turn our backs on our core community, but reaching out in other ways and in other places will be a bigger part of our approach.

“We also definitely recognize that there are areas where we need to get better. The frequency and transparency of our communication with our community will improve – hard stop.

“Our backers in particular put their trust in us up front, which we appreciate. While we will continue to ask them for understanding when we face delays or other challenges, our goal will be to keep them aware of what’s happening and why, in a timely manner.”