December 2025 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

 

Another year gone, and a rather strange December for TTRPG crowdfunding closes it out. Here's the raw data; let's dive in.

• 178 campaigns
• 63 Backerkit
• 0 Crowdfundr
• 2 Gamefound
• 113 Kickstarter
• $4,021,004.70 raised
• $1,712,583.76 on Backerkit
• $0.00 on Crowdfundr
• $20,154.16 on Gamefound
• $2,288,266.78 on Kickstarter
• Types of campaigns
• 11 accessories
• 43 adventures
• 9 campaign settings
• 28 Holiday Markets
• 1 magazine
• 1 platform
• 1 podcast
• 3 reprints
• 50 supplements
• 29 systems
• 1 translation
• 1 zine
• 60 distinct systems used (14 original)
• 68 campaigns (38.20%) used D&D 5E and raised $795,500.44 (19.78% of all money raised in December)
• 38 campaigns used AI in some form (21.35% of total) and raised $125,773.25 (3.13% of all money raised in December)
• 25 of these were D&D 5E campaigns, accounting for 36.76% of all 5E crowdfunding campaigns
• Campaigns were based in 17 different countries
• Top 3: 89 in USA, 30 in UK, 11 in Canada
• Singleton countries: Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore
  

Backerkit's December

The top 5 campaigns on Backerkit in December were:

1. Twilight Sword by Two Little Mice ($822,492.30 from 5,189 backers)
2. Infernals: Crowned by Hellfire for the Exalted 3E RPG by Onyx Path ($191,285 from 2,126 backers)
3. Mausritter Junk City by Exalted Funeral Press, Games Omnivorous, and Losing Games ($168,735 from 1,956 backers)
4. DCC+5E Crowdfunding Exclusives & Mystery Gifts! by Goodman Games ($66,155 from 570 backers)
5. Loot Tavern Lighting Sale by Loot Tavern Publishing ($46,756 from 355 backers)

Gamefound's December

The 2 campaigns on Gamefound in December were:

1. Vileborn - Das düster-heroische Rollenspiel by Ulisses Spiele ($19,874.72 from 208 backers)
2. 1130+ Fantasy Battle maps for TTRPG and VTTRPG by Agnesagraphic ($279.44 from 7 backers)

Kickstarter's December

The top 5 campaigns on Kickstarter in December were:

1. Life After Everything: Astro Oceans 🌊 Tarot Tabletop RPG by Gifted Ocean ($363,871 from 2,418 backers)
2. Fighting Fantasy - Solo Adventure Gamebooks - Set 2 by Steve Jackson Games ($278,223 from 3,977 backers)
3. Apocalypse World: Burned Over by Vincent Baker ($215,104 from 3,763 backers)
4. The Dungeon Reignited. Set of 2 Book of Battle Mats for RPG by Loke Battle Maps ($168,212 from 1,569 backers)
5. Tome of Mystical Tattoos III for D&D 5e by Karl Nicolas ($152,837.86 from 1,810 backers)

December 2023 vs 2024 vs 2025

	2023	2024	2025
Campaign count
Backerkit	7	35	63
Kickstarter	112	130	113
Money pledged
Backerkit total	$116,631.00	$1,898,104.11	$1,712,583.76
Backerkit average	$16,661.57	$54,231.55	$27,183.87
Backerkit median	$8,599.00	$13,703.65	$5,091.89
Kickstarter total	$3,062,243.35	$2,213,471.01	$2,288,266.78
Kickstarter average	$27,341.46	$17,026.70	$20,250.15
Kickstarter median	$4,507.04	$3,266.92	$3,602.00
AI
Campaign count	32	37	38
Money pledged	$150,217.33	$145,101.71	$125,773.25
D&D 5E
Campaign count	48	73	68
Money pledged	$999,475.20	$917,977.49	$795,500.44

Backerkit has come a long way since December 2023, but it's really interesting to compare its Dec 2024 vs Dec 2025 considering that both Mausritter Month and their Holiday Market happened in 2025. Let's break down the stats of both:

• Mausritter Month
• $323,197.86 pledged (18.87% of money pledged on Backerkit in December)
• 16 projects (all successfully funded)
• $20,199.87 average
• $9,570.55 median
• Holiday Market (TTRPGs only and limited to projects actually providing something gameable and not just merch)
• $261,890.54 pledged (15.29% of money pledged on Backerkit in December)
• 28 projects (no funding goals)
• $9,353.23 average
• $3,255.65 median

Mausritter Month was clearly a success by any metric (all projects funded, pretty good average, really high median), but it notably raised less money from fewer projects than either Mothership Month. Not only that, but you would think that these kinds of initiatives would boost the overall money pledged on Backerkit, but instead there was a slight decrease from 2024 to 2025. It is definitely too early to say that backers are experiencing Month fatigue the same way I am, but these numbers might explain why Backerkit is ramping up their promotional events: they need them to boost otherwise flagging traffic.

I'm going to be getting into it in a 2025 wrap-up post, but this year was not great money-wise for TTRPG crowdfunding. There are more projects than ever and less money to go around, and nothing from the past 6 months suggests that's going to change anytime soon. These promotional events from Backerkit are relatively easy ways to get users on their platform, entice creators to put their campaigns there, and the money that comes from it will keep the floor from falling out of their bottom line. Obviously I can't speak to how healthy their other types of campaigns look, but I can't imagine they're looking all that much better than TTRPGs right now. A combination of US economic uncertainty and tariffs playing havoc with both international shipping and component production is going to make everyone just feel less than great about putting money down on something that isn't a sure bet.

Which brings me to the Holiday Market. I personally don't like it. It makes complete sense for Backerkit and the creators involved, but any move by a crowdfunding platform towards becoming a sales platform just doesn't make me feel good. Especially because the whole premise was that anything you 'back' will ship within just a few weeks and (theoretically) arrive in time for Christmas. So these aren't even campaigns for reprints! It's just a promotional 'preorder' event, even more so than many 'crowdfunding' campaigns are these days! Again, makes complete sense for creators to participate since it's an easy way to sell some extra inventory you might have lying around, but that just seems like something that doesn't belong on a crowdfunding platform.

There's not really a bigger conclusion to draw from this in the end, at least not yet. My brain is pretty goopy just from general post-holiday post-New-Year post-travel stuff, so I'm really saving up anything particularly relevant for the full year review coming sometime soon.

The Awards 2026 Design Diary #4: Gaming Like It's 2024-2025

 As I mentioned in the previous Design Diary, The Awards 2026 will be picking up where we left off: in June 2024.

 

Despite this announcement appearing in the fourth installment of this series, it was actually one of the first decisions I made when I set out to bring back The Awards and was based on three rationale.

Rationale #1: Fighting the Hype Cycle

As someone who has made a hobby out of tracking TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns, I suspect few people are as aware of the hype cycles that this field runs on. There are nigh uncountable numbers of hugely successful, $100,000+ projects that seem to essentially disappear once their campaigns end. Not in the sense of them being scams and not delivering on the promised material, but in the sense that the hobby's collective attention just kind of moves off of them. And this makes sense given that any crowdfunding campaign is going to have a lag time between collecting the money and actually making the thing they want to make. Hell, there's even a lag time between the campaign ending and collecting the money that was pledged. So what tends to happen is that buzzy games generate a lot of hype, possibly a lot of money, and then 6-18 months later (if backers are lucky) the product actually arrives. But what's happened in the interim? Why, 20-50 equally buzzy games have shown up, gotten a lot of attention, and raised a whole bunch of money themselves. By the time your big crowdfunded game actually shows up, it's quite possible you've completely forgotten about it between other projects you've backed and the games that you're actually playing. I know that this happens to me with some frequency, at least.

So how do The Awards propose to combat this? Well, since we took 2025 off, it seems only good and right to pick up where we left off and see what great stuff was made from June 2024-May 2025. By focusing on games that have been out for nearly 1-2 years, we're hopefully getting some more mature and field-tested games, things that have been in people's hands that the judges might have even played already. We're also pushing back against the hype cycle by bringing these """""older""""" games back into the public eye when we announce the winners, hopefully giving them another boost of attention beyond what they might have received when first released.

Rationale #2: Fairness

This is a fairly minor reason, but the eligibility window for The Awards in the past has unfairly impacted any games released in May (and also April a little). I don't know how many games were released on, say, May 31, 2024, but those games would only have been eligible for The Awards 2024 and would have required their designers to already know of this whole endeavor (a tall order to be sure). By giving The Awards a year's lag time, designers get a lot more time to even hear about The Awards, let alone submit their games for consideration.

On top of this, and this ties into Rationale #1 a bit, the distance of a year also gives designers some needed perspective to figure out what games they want to submit. Recency bias is a hell of a thing, and newly released games could easily be seen as far better or far worse than they actually are. Anyone interested in submitting to The Awards can now really take a hard look at their catalog from June 2024-May 2025 and figure out how to put their best foot forward.

Rationale #3: The Bit

This comes last because it's the weakest rationale, but commitment to the bit is absolutely central to The Awards. Just look at our name, for God's sake. Now the bit here isn't specifically that we're behind the times or anything, it's that we're different from those other award shows.

 

Yes, we're straying hard into "not like other girls" territory (explicitly so just a sentence ago!) but it feels relevant and important here. I'm not trying to say that we're better than other award shows, but it behooves us to set ourselves apart from them. I covered this to some degree back in Design Diary #1, but I'm looking for The Awards to have a coherent and distinct identity, and having a more retrospective approach to our submissions just makes The Awards stand out from our peers and be that much more memorable.

Closing Thoughts 

Now all that said, The Awards is nothing if not ever-changing. This year's experiment could prove disastrous: designers might have no desire to submit their """"""older"""""" stuff, the general TTRPG public might have no interest in what was the best of 2024-2025, the sun could collapse in on itself ~4-5 billion years early...

All things that are equally likely to happen as a result of these decisions I'm making right now!

But barring that last item in that list, The Awards can always change and adapt. It could be that The Awards 2027 will bring us back up to speed and current events! Either way, I'm excited about the retrospective focus of The Awards 2026, and I hope you all are too!