Gamefound accelerates challenge to Kickstarter by buying veteran crowdfunding pioneer Indiegogo

Tabletop gaming crowdfunding platform Gamefound has bought veteran Kickstarter rival Indiegogo, adding a potentially massive new source of backers for its creators’ campaigns.

The surprise acquisition increases the heat on Kickstarter from its upstart competitor Gamefound, which has been rapidly whittling down the crowdfunding giant’s lead in the tabletop gaming space over the past three years.

Gamefound began life as a Kickstarter pledge manager in 2015, before Marcin Świerkot, the founder of board game publisher Awaken Realms, set his sights on beating the crowdfunding giant at its own game in the tabletop sector in 2022.

Gamefound scored six of the top ten most-funded campaigns in 2024, including $7.6m for the second placed Cyberpunk 2077 board game and $7.4m for Lands of Evershade. Kickstarter only filled three of the top 10 spots, with Cosmere, the fourth-placed Altered TCG and tenth-placed Trench Crusade, while BackerKit claimed the fifth-largest campaign with about $5m for the MCDM RPG.

Earlier this year Gamefound CEO Świerkot told BoardGameWire he had set an “extremely ambitious and yet achievable goal” to outperform Kickstarter in tabletop game funding in 2025, after his company saw project funding on the site soar 49% in 2024 to more than $85m.

Coupled with dollars raised through Gamefound’s late pledge and pledge manager operations, the site’s total dollars raised from backers last year reached about $156m, compared to $220m raised on Kickstarter’s tabletop category in 2024.

But while Gamefound has been growing at a significant rate since the Covid-19 pandemic, Kickstarter’s tabletop crowdfunding totals have been headed in the other direction – with dollars raised falling 12.4% in 2022, about 4.3% in 2023 [according to Tabletop Analytics data], and 2.7% last year.

Indiegogo has raised close to $3bn since it was launched – a year before Kickstarter – in 2008, and boasts about 14 million user accounts for people who have backed at least one campaign.

While Gamefound has been laser focused on tabletop gaming to date, the Indiegogo acquisition adds a company with a vast range of experience hosting crowdfunding projects across areas including music, consumer tech, holiday trips and outdoor furniture – as well as singular campaigns such as raising over $700,000 to give a school bus monitor a holiday after a video of her being bullied by children went viral.

The site’s most successful fundraises have included almost $15m for bee hive developer Flow Hive, over $6m for Sondor electric bikes and about $4.6m for film sequel Super Troopers 2.

Indiegogo does feature its own tabletop gaming category, but none of its campaigns over the years have come anywhere near the multimillion-dollar successes found on Kickstarter, Gamefound and BackerKit.

The most successful monetarily to date was Beware of Bears, which raised about $160,000 four years ago. Older campaigns through the site have included Phil Walker-Harding’s Sushi Go!, which raised about $7,200 in 2012, and Artipia Games’ Among the Stars, which collected about $43,000 the same year.

Speaking to BoardGameWire about the Indiegogo buyout, Świerkot said the deal would boost exposure to its Gamefound campaigns by making them discoverable through the Indiegogo platform.

He said Gamefound campaigns would begin appearing on Indiegogo after “a short transition period of putting Indiegogo on our tech”, but said he was not yet ready to commit to an exact timeline.

When asked if there was a danger of the acquisition causing Gamefound to lose focus on its tabletop success, Świerkot said, “No, just the opposite – I think it is an amazing opportunity. It will be the same platform, so it’s not like we need to suddenly develop two different services.

“But we will be able to increase our team, so I expect the opposite – faster development of the platform with great features that will work in all categories.

“On top of that, we are extremely committed to keeping high standards in regards to helping and communicating with creators and backers.”

Świerkot added, “Our success comes from a simple philosophy: build a platform at least twice as good as the next competitor, and then dedication, hard work and focus from our team to make it happen.

“Now, we’re bringing this philosophy to Indiegogo, combining Gamefound’s technology with Indiegogo’s incredible reach to revolutionize crowdfunding for every category.”

When asked if the move heralded Gamefound attempting to overtake Kickstarter in other, non-tabletop categories through Indiegogo, he said, “As always the goal is to have an amazing platform for backers and creators – so this is a central line on top of our minds.

“As a direct result of that (and measurable rate of progress) it was becoming the biggest platform in tabletop space.

“Now, this is very similar to Indiegogo – we feel we have a lot to offer with our platform already and even more is on the way. So our focus will be to create great value in other categories for creators and backers, same as we did in tabletop.

“Will we overtake other categories as a result of that? Hard to tell. But I really believe in our technology and the team behind it.”