Creators looking to raise funds for tabletop projects have more options than ever before, including Gamefound which recently completed its third full year as a direct competitor to the industry leader, Kickstarter. The company tells Polygon that it increased both its revenue and the number of campaigns that succeeded on its platform, but it still trails the Brooklyn-based titan in overall initial funds from backers. Nevertheless, it’s currently home to a majority of the top-10 most-funded campaigns of 2024 across all three major platforms, including Backerkit.
Gamefound finished 2024 with $85 million earned from initial funding, which is less than half of Kickstarter’s reported $220 million. But it’s a huge improvement — a nearly 52% increase — over the year previous. The Poland-based company’s secret sauce? A steady stream of high-profile, seven-figure campaigns. While Kickstarter can claim the year’s highest-grossing campaign, Brandon Sanderson and Brotherwise Games’ massive $15.1 million effort for tabletop role-playing games based on the author’s work, Gamefound hosted six of the top 10 overall.
“From my perspective it was a good step and it comes down to one of the key reasons for Gamefound’s creation,” said Marcin Świerkot, founder of Gamefound, in an email to Polygon in December. “Today, there are a lot of big, serious companies using crowdfunding — and if you are running a big business and hiring a lot of people, you need stability and reliable partnerships. This was one of the reasons we started Gamefound — to have a very high level professional approach to crowdfunding.”
While both Kickstarter and Backerkit are open to all tabletop creators, it’s clear that Gamefound clients appear more likely to be well-established board game publishers rather than individual creators. While Gamefound had far fewer successful campaigns for initial funding compared to Kickstarter — just 215 compared to 5,320 — the average earned per campaign was orders of magnitude larger. The average successful tabletop Kickstarter earned just $41,400 in 2024, while Gamefound campaigns earned on average a whopping $395,349. Even if you remove the top 10 highest earning campaigns from each platform, that contrast remains clear: $33,729 on average for Kickstarter, and $209,268 for Gamefound.
As of mid-2024, Kickstarter, Gamefound, and Backerkit also compete on relatively equal footing for so-called “late pledge” funding — that is, funds pledged to campaigns after the initial time-limited campaign window closes. Polygon did not include that data in its analysis this year.
