Asmodee buys Zombicide IP from struggling CMON as first move in new acquisition spree
Financially-troubled board game publisher CMON has sold its flagship IP Zombicide to Asmodee, stripping the company of a series which has raised more than $40m on Kickstarter since its 2012 launch.
The deal is the opening salvo in Asmodee’s reignited strategy of buying up smaller board game publishers, distributors and IPs – which it hopes will mirror the heavy expansion it undertook in the 2010s that turned it from a specialist French operation to a global board game industry heavyweight.
Zombicide, a miniatures-heavy co-operative zombie battler, helped pioneer the crowdfunded board game boom when it first launched on Kickstarter in 2012 – raising an at-the-time impressive $780,000.
Asmodee said the game has sold more than 2 million copies – putting it in a similar bracket to high-selling games such as the Wingspan series, which has sold about 2.4 million copies.
CMON has run almost a dozen Zombicide crowdfunding campaigns since the game’s debut, raising just shy of $41m in total – with the most successful, Marvel Zombies, pulling in over $9m alone.
But the company has been forced into selling its most famous and profitable title after slumping to a $3m loss last year – almost double its total profits from the previous three years combined – and has halted new game development and campaign launches amid unpredictability around the US tariffs situation.
Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler said, “We are proud the iconic Zombicide IP further strengthens our tabletop games portfolio and allows us to reinforce our presence in key geographies. I can’t wait for the team to get to work at what’s coming next for this fantastic IP.”
Koegler said two weeks ago that Asmodee’s plan to reignite its strategy of buying up smaller board game publishers and distributors remained “completely unchanged” by the tariffs volatility, adding that the uncertain times in fact “present opportunities for strategic acquisitions”.
The company has picked out a pipeline of more than 20 acquisition targets, similar to the decade-long spree which saw it buy up studios including Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight Games, Lookout Games, Catan Studio and Z-Man Games, as well as a string of distribution companies across the globe.
CMON is yet to comment on the Zombicide sale, which comes less than two weeks after the company sold five board game titles to Tabletop Tycoon, including Eric Lang designs Blood Rage, Rising Sun and Ankh: Gods of Egypt, and the co-designs Arcadia Quest and Starcadia Quest he created alongside Thiago Aranha, Guilherme Goulart and Fred Parret.
Its remaining library of titles still includes big hitters such as the Marvel United range and DC Super Heroes United, which have raised more than $18m between them across four crowdfunding campaigns.
The company raised more than $3.9m for Cthulhu: Death May Die – Forbidden Reaches last year, and earlier this year completed a $2.85m crowdfund for Massive Darkness: Dungeons of Shadowreach on Gamefound.
CMON had previously announced a deal to sell $12m of unspecified IP last year – widely believed to be Zombicide – but scrapped that arrangement after being unable to agree terms with the unnamed buyer.
The company said in its annual report in April that it planned to change its development strategy to focus on fewer, higher-impact titles “that align more tightly with our creative strengths and market demand”.
It added that its near-term plan involved reducing development costs by focusing only on the development and fulfilment of games already launched, growing in the European wholesale market and
initiating production of small games in Europe to reduce logistics cost of fulfilment.
Then company has said it also plans to debut several retail games at Spiel Essen this year.
CMON currently has nine undelivered crowdfunding campaigns which raised more than $18m in various stages of production.
Six crowdfunded titles and seven preorders are currently due for delivery by CMON in 2025, including DC Super Heroes United, which raised more than $4.4m on Gamefound, and DCeased: A Zombicide Game, which raised more than $2.5m in a Kickstarter campaign.
CMON blamed rising living costs affecting its customers ability to buy games for its 17% drop in revenue last year, which fell to about $37.4m from $45m in 2023 according to its most recent annual report.
Revenue from its crowdfunding campaigns sank by almost 25% to about $20m in 2024 – its first year of an exclusivity deal with Gamefound, following more than a decade raising $108m of funding through rival platform Kickstarter.
CMON had announced a profit warning in March, initially estimating that its 2024 losses could be between $1.4m and $2.1m – but that figure ultimately soared to more than $3m on publication of its annual report.
The company had its shares suspended from trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for a month earlier this year due to the missing the deadline for publishing its annual financial report, with the company saying its finance department was understaffed.
CMON’s 2025 has also been marred by having to take legal advice after two new shareholders, who were due to invest about $1.39m into the business, failed to hand over the money for their stakes.
The company said when the shareholder deal fell through that it was “now seeking other fundraising means to increase its general working capital” in order to enlarge its capital base, increase the overall liquidity of its shares and strengthen the company’s financial position.
It did not say why the potential shareholders, revealed in the latest financial report as Drum Group Limited and Mana Pool Investments, had decided not to press ahead with investing in CMON.
CMON’s stark 2024 loss brought to an end three years of improving performance at the company, following a disastrous 2020 in which it lost almost $5m due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on its business operations.
The company managed a $420,000 profit in 2021, $510,000 in 2022 and about $750,000 in 2023 – but those slowly rising numbers all fell well short of the its pre-pandemic performance.
It had previously made profits of about $3.5m in 2017, roughly $2m in 2018 and around $1.88m in 2019, once one-off costs related to its transfer to the main board of the Hong Kong stock exchange in the latter year were removed.
CMON’s cash reserves have also been diminishing, going from $3.9m at the end of 2022 to $3.1m at the end of 2023, and falling again to about $2.1m by the end of last year.
Its borrowing stands at about $4m, down from roughly $5.8m last year.
Zombicide’s crowdfunding success by the numbers:
Marvel Zombies – A Zombicide Game: $9,032,583
Zombicide: Green Horde: $5,004,614
Zombicide: Black Plague: $4,079,204
Zombicide: White Death: $3,839,614
Zombicide: 2nd Edition: $3,410,084
Zombicide: Invader: $3,352,208
Zombicide: Undead or Alive: $3,310,872
Zombicide: Season 3: $2,849,064
DCeased – A Zombicide Game: $2,564,789
Zombicide: Season 2: $2,255,018
Zombicide: $781,597
I don’t understand. How did they mismanage the company so badly. They make so much money on their kickstarters. Several million sometimes. Like where does all of that money go? Makes absolutely no sense. Well the zombicide IP is dead now. We all know that asmodee will kill the ip and sit on it.