June 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

 
Pride Month is over, so it's time to see what the gayest month of the year yielded for TTRPGs (the gayest medium of them all?). One thing it certainly has yielded: a new platform to analyze! Gamefound is not new on the scene, but I wasn't previously aware of how many TTRPGs are on it. I'm curious to see where this goes!

As always, the raw data is free for you to peruse.

• 159 campaigns
• 21 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 7 Gamefound
• 131 Kickstarter
• $8,2275,903.08 raised
• $3,243,137.69 on Backerkit
• $0.00 on Crowdfundr
• $499,147.52 on Gamefound
• $4,533,617.87 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 19 accessories
• 1 Actual Play
• 48 adventures
• 2 advice
• 10 campaign settings
• 41 supplements
• 34 systems
• 2 translations
• 2 zines
• 61 distinct systems used (21 original)
• 65 campaigns (40.88%) used D&D 5E and raised $2,717,489.68 (32.84% of all money raised in June)
• 41 campaigns used AI in some form (25.79% of total) and raised $544,766.14 (6.58% of all money raised in June)
• 29 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 44.62% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 17 different countries
• Top 3: 78 in USA, 21 in UK, 12 in Italy
• Singleton countries: Denmark, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Norway, Turkey

Backerkit's June

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in June were:

1. The World's Largest Dungeon by World's Largest RPGs ($1,021,783 from 2,435 backers)
2. City State of the Invincible Overlord by Goodman Games ($597,530 from 2,478 backers)
3. Outgunned Superheroes by Two Little Mice ($572,395.39 from 3,533 backers)
4. Invisible Sun: Electric and Indigo by Monte Cook Games ($300,613 from 2,014 backers)
5. Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts by Evil Hat ($248,637 from 4,732 backers)

Backerkit's June has some high highs and a low low. A high? The highest-grossing campaign on the platform since the MCDM RPG campaign in December 2023/January 2024. Another high? A very successful Blades in the Dark campaign that saw more backers than any other Backerkit campaign this month!

A low? The City State of the Invincible Overlord campaign, the intellectual property of Robert Bledsaw II, a man who posted (by all accounts, I have not seen them myself) stunningly racist and anti-semitic things on Facebook in 2020 causing longtime collaborators to cut ties with Judge's Guild (his company and the original publisher of the adventure, though it was his father who authored the adventure). On top of that, in 2010, shortly after Bledsaw took over the company in 2008, they ran a Kickstarter campaign for an updated version of this same adventure, raising ~$85K and failing to deliver on that product for over a decade.

This is all relevant because around the time that Bledsaw II showed his whole ass on Facebook, Goodman Games were in talks to create their own adaptation of this classic adventure. Despite all that happened and despite issuing a statement and video about how abhorrent they found the behavior, behind the scenes they proceeded with their adaptation. All of this under the condition that Judge's Guild use any money they receive from it to reimburse the 965 backers they swindled in 2010.

All the information in the previous paragraph came from the first statement Goodman Games put out after announcing the new crowdfunding campaign. And you know it's a good sign when you have to specify "first" there. Because in their second statement they make several clarifications to clear things up.

The money going to the 2010 backer refunds comes from the royalties that Judge's Guild would receive, seemingly 10% of the overall money raised. Therefore, if the campaign had raised more than $850,000 then any excess royalties would simply go to Judge's Guild (aka the Nazis). Speaking from the other side of the campaign, we now know they did not raise this much money. Some $59,753 worth of 2010 backers will see that money (assuming they request the refund, which they have to do manually). So hooray, the Nazis didn't make any money! What a thing to celebrate, considering that they could have guaranteed the Nazis didn't make any money by simply not running the campaign.

There's a lot of talk in the two statements about how good and noble the original adventure designers were, and I have no reason to disbelieve that. There's also a lot of talk about how important the original adventure is to TTRPG history, and I have no reason to disbelieve that either. But neither of those points seem like reason enough to potentially enrich a Nazi and his Nazi company (that have been removed from DriveThru RPG btw, so someone at least knows to not give them money).

Gamefound's June

The top 5 campaigns on Gamefound in June were:

1. Das Schwarze Auge - Das Aventurische Lexikon by Ulisses Spiele ($410,513.78 from 1,214 backers)
2. THE ADVENTURER'S TAROT & COMPENDIUM FOR 5E D&D by Weird Works ($43,060.48 from 556 backers)
3. The Dark Carnival by Storytellers Forge ($14,991 from 121 backers)
4. Liminal Horror by Wydawnictwo Hengal ($10,447.52 from 125 backers)
5. Sirensong: A 5E Supplement & Campaign + Tarot Deck by Kelfecil's Tales ($9,829.08 from 103 backers)

Gamefound is a moderately strange crowdfunding platform for TTRPGs. A brief perusal of its highest grossing projects immediately reveals that it's primarily a platform for board games. Even the structure of its campaign pages reflects this:

Screenshot from "Das Schwarze Auge - Das Aventurische Lexikon" page

It's not that counting the number of players or play time for a TTRPG is a bad thing, they're just not metrics that I usually see front and center in this way. Board games, on the other hand, typically put this kind of information somewhere on the side of the box. I actually think that these are not bad things to track for people potentially interested in a game, whether board or tabletop, it's just surprising for them to be so prominent here.

Another oddity: Gamefound seems to be Poland's favorite TTRPG crowdfunding site. 7 of the 18 TTRPG campaigns either currently funding or that funded in 2025 are from Polish creators, and only 3 of the campaigns are based in the US.

A final oddity (more of a screaming frustration for me personally in the context of this project really): Gamefound is seemingly allergic to telling me when campaigns started and finished. They love to say how long a game took to reach its funding goal! They love to say what date it funded on! But the HATE to give a start or end date!!! I have to work backwards from the funded date and the time it took to fund to figure out when it started (not too big of a deal), and then just CROSS MY FINGERS that the people running a campaign posted an update when the campaign ends! And if it's a Polish campaign, that means I'm bouncing back and forth between the campaign page and Google Translate to copy and paste updates in Polish to figure out which one even IS the campaign end update!!!!

It's fine.

Everything's fine.

NOW.

In all seriousness, now that I'm on the Gamefound train and catching projects as they're funding, it's actually very easy to figure out when they start and end because the information is there on the page. I just wish that that information stuck around for longer than that 😭

Kickstarter's June

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in June were:

1. Arkand & Book of Magic for Free League's Dragonbane RPG by Free League ($706,763.60 from 5,930 backers)
2. Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game—Voyage of the Unity by Beadle & Grimm's Pandemonium Warehouse ($522,832 from 3,198 backers)
3. 2026 ⚔️ Quest Calendar 📅 by Sundial Games llc ($293,054 from 5,137 backers)
4. ASTRA ARCANUM: The Roleplaying Game by Metis Media ($281,974 from 1,987 backers)
5. Player's Guide 2: New Power for 5E and TOV Players by Kobold Press ($242,248 from 3,269 backers)

Compared to everything I had to say about Backerkit and Gamefound, there isn't much to Kickstarter this June. Oh there's a very successful Free League supplement? Oh there's a very successful Avatar Legends adventure?

Something I did want to talk about, though, is the 2026 ⚔️ Quest Calendar 📅, which used AI in about as close to an 'ethical' way as I can see. I went back and forth on whether to mark it as using AI, but ultimately decided to say that yes, they did. Full disclosure, I was going to mark it as not using AI even as I was writing this post, but upon further reflection felt that it wouldn't be an internally consistent metric if I didn't.

The reason for this decision, ultimately, is that using AI tools in image editing software as they described still benefits from the energy-guzzling maxi-theft training of AI tools. It doesn't sound (nor does it look) like they used generative AI to create images whole cloth, but they are using AI tools in some way, shape, or form as part of their workflow.

I think that this is, again, as close to a defensible use of AI as it currently stands, but given the larger context of the technology it still just leaves too much of a bad taste in my mouth. The well is poisoned, so even tiny sips of the water is going to be an ultimately bad thing.

June 2024 vs 2025

• Number of campaigns
• Backerkit: 20 (2024) => 21 (2025)
• Kickstarter: 139 (2024) => 131 (2025)
• Money
• Backerkit: $1,411,365.07 (2024) => $3,243,137.69 (2025)
• Average campaign: $70,586.25 (2024) => $154,435.13 (2025)
• Median campaign: $20,097.50 (2024) => $14,539.00 (2025)
• Kickstarter: $3,786,692.31 (2024) =>  $4,533,617.87 (2025)
• Average campaign: $27,242.39 (2024) => $34,607.77 (2025)
• Median campaign: $3,721.00 (2024) => $2,931.00 (2025)
• AI
• Count: 34 (2024) => 41 (2025)
• Money: $215,853.36 (2024) => $544,766.14 (2025)
• D&D 5E
• Count: 62 (2024) => 59 (2025)
• Money: $1,853,484.49 (2024) => $1,068,273.37 (2025)

The main point of comparison to draw attention to here is that, from 2024 to 2025, average money raised by campaigns has risen for both Backerkit and Kickstarter while median money raised has fallen.

For Backerkit, I believe this is mostly a factor of smaller creators actually using the platform  while bigger players continue to reap the rewards of more eyes on their platform as more people come to use it more regularly.

For Kickstarter, it feels more troubling. When the 'average' campaign raises 10x as much money as the median campaign, it can give a very skewed idea to newer creators of what to expect from Kickstarting their project. Over 50% of successful projects raised less than $3000 USD on Kickstarter in June, and the median value for the year so far is only just above that ($3,017 USD). At some point, crowdfunding begins to feel little different than gambling except stretched out over a much longer (and arguably more stressful) period of time.