CMON’s David Preti steps down as non-executive director, seven months after resigning as Chief Operating Officer

Board game crowdfunding giant CMON’s long-serving senior manager David Preti has resigned as a non-executive director of the company with immediate effect, citing “other work commitments”.

Preti’s decision comes seven months after he announced he was resigning as Chief Operating Officer at the Zombicide and Marvel United publisher, which has endured a rocky start to 2025 thanks to a warning it could face losses of more than $2m for 2024, a scrapped deal to sell $12m of IP, and two new shareholders due to invest about $1.39m into the business failing to hand over the money for their stakes.

Preti joined CMON as creative director in 2016, before being named COO in 2018 and becoming an executive director of CMON in 2022.

He transitioned into a non-executive role in September last year alongside his resignation as COO. Non-executive directors aim to provide advice and oversight for the management team, and ensure the business operates in the best interest of shareholders and other financial backers.

During Preti’s tenure as COO 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 has been 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 was also COO during CMON’s significant switch in its crowdfunding operation early last year, when it ended 12 years of running campaigns on Kickstarter in favour of signing an exclusivity deal with crowdfunding rival Gamefound.

The company had raised more than $108m in total on Kickstarter across almost 60 campaigns, beginning with the first edition of Zombicide in April 2012.

Its first year on Gamefound 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 warned in mid-March, however, that 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.

Two weeks later the company revealed it was likely to miss its stock exchange deadline for publishing its annual financial results, saying its finance department is currently understaffed.

It added that the delay was also partly due to being in the process of taking legal advice, after two new shareholders due to invest about $1.39m into the business had failed to hand over the money for their stakes.

CMON is still yet to publish the annual report, which was due before the end of March, and has had its shares suspended from trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

The company is yet to comment publicly on the US-China tariffs situation, which has thrown the board game industry into disarray in recent weeks.

Businesses across the industry, from publishers and retailers to wholesalers and manufacturers, are bracing for price hikes, job losses and the potential shuttering of their businesses after the tariff on imports from China was hiked from 10% to 145% over the past two months.

Crowdfunded board games face a particularly serious threat given the nature of the model, in which backers pay up front for a game that frequently won’t reach their doorsteps for one or more years.

That model is incredibly susceptible to large cost changes between the crowdfunding campaigns and fulfillment – and companies with products currently in production, or already on their way from China to the US, are bracing for massive extra costs in order to allow their games to come into the country.

Some publishers have already contacted backers of their crowdfunding campaigns to warn them that they face delays or require extra financial contributions to deliver their games, with many similar updates inevitably on the way.

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.

The company’s most recent update for Zombicide: White Death, made on April 11, simply said that containers of the game had been dispatched from China and were “making their way to the hubs”.