“Our ambition for 2025 is to be number one in tabletop”: Gamefound closes gap on Kickstarter again as crowdfunding giant’s 2024 dollars raised remains flat

Tabletop game crowdfunding platform Gamefound has moved a step closer to its hugely ambitious goal of overtaking industry giant Kickstarter in the category this year, with new data seeming to show the latter’s tabletop funding total falling for the third year in a row.

Gamefound CEO Marcin 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.

That remains short of the $220m raised in Kickstarter’s tabletop category this year, newly released figures from the public benefit corporation show – 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.

Dollars raised for tabletop games through the veteran crowdfunding portal had risen every year from 2015 until reaching a record $270m in 2021, a year boosted by increased demand from gamers spending more time at home during Covid-19 lockdowns.

But the figure has fallen each year since according to Kickstarter’s own data and research collated by third-party service provider Tabletop Analytics, which filled the gap in 2023 when the crowdfunding site declined to release its own figures for the first time in a decade.

Those figures showed Kickstarter’s dollars raised falling 12.4% in 2022, about 4.3% in 2023 according to Tabletop Analytics data, and 2.7% last year.

And while the number of successfully funded tabletop projects on Kickstarter has continued to grow every year for the last decade, reaching more than 5,300 last year, the average number of dollars raised per project has fallen annually since the pandemic – while last year’s average of $41,400 is at its lowest since 2014.

Kickstarter still managed to score the highest funded tabletop project of last year – and, indeed, of all time – through the $15.1m crowdfund for Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere RPG from Brotherwise Games.

But 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.

Critics of Gamefound have previously pointed out that much of its crowdfunding total comes from multimillion-dollar, miniatures-heavy projects launched by its sister company, Awaken Realms, which Świerkot had founded before creating Gamefound as a Kickstarter pledge manager in 2015.

Awaken Realms games accounted for just shy of $20m in 2023, making up about 35% of Gamefound’s total crowdfunding dollars. But that fell to 20% of the total last year, through $17m-worth of Awaken Realms campaigns including Lands of Evershade, Grimcoven and special editions of Puerto Rico and Castles of Burgundy.

Gamefound also picked up a huge boost to its numbers – and caused a significant hole in Kickstarter’s – by attracting crowdfunding board game major CMON as an exclusive partner at the start of 2024, ending a 12-year run on Kickstarter which had seen it raise more than $108m.

That move caused a significant swing in overall dollars raised towards Gamefound – CMON had pulled in $11.8m across four campaigns in its final year on Kickstarter, and brought in $12.1m through six projects on Gamefound last year.

Other publishers which used Kickstarter that have subsequently run multibillion-dollar campaign on Gamefound include Chip Theory Games, Archon Studios and Go On Board.

Świerkot told BoardGameWire that Gamefound was bringing in unspecified new features and support for RPG and accessories projects in an attempt to increase its share of the tabletop space outside of board games.

He added that Gamefound’s ‘next big thing’ will be AdFound, which it hopes will bring better – and affordable – performance marketing results for large and small creators alike. The automated tool allows creators to set up Facebook marketing indirectly through Gamefound, which will then use an algorithm to attempt to allocate ad funds for the best result.

Kickstarter, meanwhile, is attempting to give Gamefound some of its own medicine, having launched its own late pledge capability last May – a function fulfilled for many years by Gamefound and BackerKit before they transitioned into also providing crowdfunding operations.

Świerkot told BoardGameWire that in terms of trends he was seeing on Gamefound, adventure games with strong solo and co-op game modes were proving big hits, while backers were keen to pledge for extra components such as miniatures or acrylic tokens.

Asked for advice he’d give to creators preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign in 2025, Świerkot said:

• Build your audience early and don’t wait for a miracle on day one of the campaign.
• Show your prices / shipping / core box information early, so you can still change things after feedback. 
• Make sure the offer is good. Why should people buy now and not wait in retail? 10% discount is not enough for more than a year of waiting and risk.
• Iterate! Show your campaign page draft early, gather feedback, and work on it! Crowdfunding magic works only if you are working together with a community.