“It’s important to us that we find new CMON fans all the time”: CMON hires board game YouTube channel Man vs Meeple’s CEO to run its global marketing campaigns

Crowdfunded board game major CMON has hired the CEO of tabletop gaming YouTube channel Man vs Meeple as its new global director of marketing, as it looks 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.

The hire comes at a key moment for CMON, which is attempting to draw in new players while also keeping hold of fans of its long-running Zombicide series and other miniatures-focused crowdfunding projects.

Last year 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.

That crowdfunding figure was still well above the roughly $6m and $6.4m it recorded in H1 of 2021 and 2022 respectively, however, and the proportion of CMON’s H1 revenue brought in by crowdfunding campaigns has been steadily rising in recent years, growing from 40% in H1 2021 to 62.6% in the first six months of 2024.

CMON’s overall revenue, meanwhile, remains a significant amount in board game industry terms despite the drop. Last year Stonemaier Games, the publisher of popular titles including Wingspan and Scythe, revealed it had total revenues of $16.7m for the entirety of 2023.

CMON shook up its crowdfunding strategy significantly in February last year by revealing it had 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.

Last year the company bought Japon Brand, the Japanese board game collective which introduced the world to Love Letter and Machi Koro, and also picked up the intellectual property rights to a pair of stalled Kickstarter projects from troubled crowdfunding specialist Mythic Games.

Waybright told BoardGameWire, “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.”

Waybright joins CMON two months after its former global marketing director Renato Franchi left to run Abu Dhabi-based comic book studio Sandstorm Comics, following a two-year stint in the role, and less than six months after CMON marketing manager Silvio Martins also left the company.

Waybright launched Man vs Meeple in 2016 alongside Jeremy Salinas, one of the industry’s first regular video content creators through his Components Breakdown Video Review in HD videos, which he began putting out under the name Drakkenstrike in 2010. Salinas left Man vs Meeple in 2021.

The site draws in between 100,000 and 200,000 views each month according to social media data tracker Social Blade. Its most watched video last year was a two-player playthrough of Stonemaier Games’ Wyrmspan, which has more than 33,000 views to date.

Man vs Meeple’s last CMON-focused content on the channel was two months ago, when Waybright shared promotional trailers for a trio of its upcoming games while visiting the CMON Expo in Bangkok.

Waybright was a special guest of CMON at the event, with the company describing him as a key figure in elevating the conversation around board games.

Last summer Man vs Meeple ran a sponsored promotional video for CMON’s DC Super Heroes United presented by Waybright and his wife Elisha, as well as an unsponsored preview video co-presented by Waybright showing off a prototype version of the game’s contents.

When BoardGameWire asked Waybright how he planned to balance his CMON role with his Man vs Meeple responsibilities – and how the channel will approach coverage of CMON releases now that he is employed by the business – he said, “The balance with continuing to grow MvM will be an adjustment for sure.

“My role at CMON is a full-time commitment, but with the help of the rest of the MvM team, we’re continuing to put the kind of content we want on the channel.

“Our approach to content has always been an evolving thing, so that will continue, but I don’t see things ‘wildly’ changing. Viewers might see slightly less paid previews, and maybe slightly more original content, and I’ll mostly try to limit my involvement on the post-production side of things.

“When it comes to CMON products, I don’t think we need to adjust much at all. Like I said, I’ve been a fan of many CMON games since [Death May Die], and I don’t see any reason to mask my feelings on that front.

“But in the spirit of transparency, I’ll be sure to remind viewers of my connection any time we cover them. Longtime fans of the channel know they can trust us, but we’ll make the effort to put others’ minds at ease.”

CMON co-CEO David Doust said, “We are thrilled to have David joining the team in this role, and look forward to the impact of the experience he brings. He’ll bring a welcome perspective to all aspects of our operations, and lead marketing for everything we do.”

CMON is still yet to follow-up on an announcement last July that it had entered a non-binding agreement to sell some of its intellectual properties in a $12m deal.

That agreement was expected to be made definitive by the end of October, the firm said at the time, but no further details of the deal have emerged to date.

CMON is set to publish its next annual report in April.

Other big changes at CMON in recent months have included the company losing chief operating officer David Preti, who handed in his resignation in September citing unnamed “other work commitments”.

Preti currently oversees game development and production at CMON, the miniatures-focused board game studio which has seen huge success over the last decade with multimillion-dollar Kickstarters for titles such as Marvel Zombies, Rising Sun, Bloodborne: The Board Game and several editions of its Zombicide franchise.

He has now shifted to a non-executive director role, and his resignation as COO will be effective from March 9 this year.

Last month Man vs Meeple raised almost $16,000 from about 380 backers for its fifth crowdfunding campaign, which provides supporters with promos and games supplied by publishers.

Nine publishers partnered with the channel for the ‘Season 5’ crowdfund – its first on Gamefound rather than Kickstarter – compared to the more than 50 for their Season 4 crowdfund, which raised $66,560 from over 1,100 backers at the end of 2021.

The latest crowdfund was the lowest total raised by the channel to date, with it having pulled in about $56,600 in 2016, roughly $64,700 in 2018 and over $110,000 in 2019.