Asmodee brings in David Preti, one of the architects of CMON’s Kickstarter strategy, to head up its own crowdfunding and miniatures operations

Asmodee has hired David Preti, the recently-resigned COO of financially-troubled board game publisher CMON, to head up the tabletop gaming giant’s own crowdfunding and miniatures strategy.

Preti spent eight years at CMON from 2016 as creative director and COO, and was an architect of its growth into one of board gaming’s biggest crowdfunding-focused publishers, raising tens of millions of dollars across campaigns for miniatures-focused titles such as its flagship Zombicide series and its Massive Darkness and Marvel and DC United titles.

But the company’s fortunes have plummeted in recent months, with the business slumping to a $3m loss last year,  halting new game development and campaign launches amid unpredictability around US tariffs, and selling multiple board game IPs including Zombicide in an attempt to turn its financial situation around.

Preti handed in his resignation to CMON in September last year, citing unnamed “other work commitments”, with his final day at the business pegged for March 9 this year.

His hire by Asmodee in the newly-created role – head of crowdfunding strategy and miniature lines – is a notable one for the industry giant, which until now has barely touched the crowdfunding space through any of its myriad studios.

The only crowdfunding campaign from an Asmodee-owned company to date is believed to be Lookout Games’ Kickstarter for the Grand Austria Hotel: Let’s Waltz! Expansion & Deluxe Upgrade, which raised about €383,000 during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

Asmodee’s only other exposure to crowdfunding is thought to be via the company Exploding Kittens, in which it made a strategic investment short of a buyout in 2021. That business has since raised more than $977,000 in a Kickstarter campaign for Hand to Hand Wombat.

More tenuously, YouTube reviewer The Professor raised about $4m for his Academic 133+ XL deckbox in 2022, which was designed ‘in collaboration’ with Asmodee’s game supplies and accessories unit Gamegenic.

An Asmodee spokesperson would not confirm that Preti’s hire in the role indicated a forthcoming push by the company into the crowdfunding space.

That strategy seems especially plausible in the light of Asmodee buying up the Zombicide IP – a series which has raised more than $40m on Kickstarter since its initial 2012 launch.

The Asmodee spokesperson would only say, “We’re happy to have [David Preti] onboard and we’ll be providing more information on his role at a later date.”

Preti spent three years as creative director at CMON from 2016, during which time he established the company’s creative and production department and helped build up Kickstarter as one of its main sources of income.

He was named COO in 2019, and during his tenure the company restructured its distribution model, with Asmodee become its worldwide English language distributor – a move he said on his LinkedIn page “generated a great influx of cash for the company and greatly streamlined our operations and costs”.

He was also involved in striking new licensing deals with companies including Mattel, Netflix, CD Projekt Red and Marvel, via Spin Master, to create games using those companies’ IPs.

The latter agreement was particularly lucrative for CMON, with Kickstarters for several Marvel United games and a Marvel version of Zombicide raising a combined $22.6m since 2020.

Preti also oversaw CMON’s switch from Kickstarter to Gamefound early last year, ending 12 years of running almost 60 campaigns on the platform worth a combined $108m.

CMON’s shift to Gamefound had a relatively slow start, with its H1 campaigns for Masters of the Universe: The Board Game – Clash For Eternia, Degenesis: Clan Wars and God of War: The Board Game marking the first time since late 2018 that the company had three sub-$1m crowdfunding campaigns in a row.

The company had a far more successful second half of the year, pulling in about $1.8m for A Song of Ice & Fire: Tactics – A Tabletop Miniatures Skirmish Game, over $4.4m for DC Super Heroes United, and about $3.9m for Cthulhu: Death May Die – Forbidden Reaches.

CMON’s only crowdfunding campaign this year saw it raise about $2.85m for Massive Darkness: Dungeons of Shadowreach, before the company battened down the hatches to try to get through its financial troubles.

Other notable developments for CMON last year included 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.