Designers Support Backerkit's Collab-funding, Say There's No Crowdfunding Fatigue

Since the inception of Zine Quest by Kickstarter in 2019, the tabletop RPG landscape has been inundated with themed crowdfunding festivals across platforms — a reality that Chase has written about extensively. Take this year alone, which had been flushed with themed crowdfunding months; Zine Quest and BackerKit’s Zinetopia took place in February, whereas BackerKit had another crowdfunding event in the form of Pocketopia in May. Within the same month, BackerKit had also designated May to be Old-School Essentials month, a group-collaboration campaign spearheaded by Exalted Funeral and Necrotic Gnome. That’s not to mention other smaller-scale crowdfunding months, such as Orbital Blues month in April at BackerKit. With so many themed months centered on tabletop games, crowdfunding watcher Nico MacDougall has expressed concerns about fatigue, from sheer weariness around the frequency of these months to concerns about hegemony — that a certain mould of tabletop games will be prioritized and preferred over others.

But as one of the most well-known crowdfunding platforms for tabletop games, BackerKit begs to differ. “[If there’s fatigue] we haven't seen it. If anything, backers keep coming back hungry for more,” said BackerKit co-founder and chief creative officer Rossana Yau in an email to Rascal. “Collab-funding grew 2.5 times in project volume and nearly 2 times in funding year-over-year (YoY). That’s fandom with no signs of fatigue.”

BackerKit’s stakes in themed crowdfunding initiatives is evident in how the platform has ramped up its collaborative crowdfunding efforts in recent years, from cross-collaboration campaigns such as Mothership Month and the aforementioned Orbital Blues Month, to Topias where creators launch projects under a specific, unified theme. They’ve even coined a term for it: collab-funding. This interest, however, can be interpreted in a few ways. Firstly, the site claims a lofty vision for crowdfunding that Yau told us is centered around tight-knit collaboration and community for creators — a deliberate effort to distinguish themselves from other platforms. In particular, she pointed out that collab-funding has driven higher success rates than traditional crowdfunding for creators using BackerKit.

“In 2025, all 289 Topia projects achieved a 100% success rate — higher than our industry-leading 91% campaign success rate on BackerKit,” she said. “But our goal for collab-funding was much bigger than that. We wanted to introduce a whole new way of crowdfunding by reimagining the very thing that makes crowdfunding possible: community.” Essential to this is having a platform that is designed around making collaboration profitable while driving growth — one that BackerKit already see themselves fulfilling. According to Yau, the collab-funding model is the fastest growing offering for the platform, with BackerKit seeing an increase in projects, from 268 in 2024 to 665 in 2025, as well as 85% in total funding growth YOY. In other words, BackerKit is incentivized to ensure that crowdfunding remains a success for tabletop creators.

“Other platforms can only cast creators as competitors on what is essentially an e-commerce site, and wish them luck as they hope for site traffic, better platform placement, and all the other things they have no control over,” said Yau. “At BackerKit, we give creators more control and agency to choose their next adventure. Traditional, solo-player crowdfunding and multi-player, collaborative crowdfunding are available.” 

Yau also suggested that other crowdfunding platforms offer minimal support. To BackerKit, their peers are merely providing an opportunity for a themed, month-long funding window with “no real collaboration”, with these having little distinction from launching a solo campaign. “In Zinetopia 2026, cross-collab incentives drove between 16 to 34% shared backers across projects,” she said. “And when we introduced an incentive to back [at least] five projects, participation jumped 439% over those who backed just four. The collaborative structure does the heavy lifting.” At the same time, BackerKit is offering creators access to collaboration tools, including access to creators-exclusive Discord channels, and automated emails sent to backers that have funded games from these events.

One example can be seen during Zinetopia, according to a designer who participated in the event. “Each creator made one unique Zine page of anything they wanted, and then a community manager stitched it all into a pdf that was offered to Backers who backed at least 3 projects,” said game designer Michael “Wrel” Henderson, who created the fantasy RPG Distal. “Separately, while a Topia is ongoing, creators are encouraged to back each others' projects over the course of the campaign.”

This approach seemed to have generated some goodwill among creators Rascal has spoken to. Most of them shared that BackerKit did provide both the tools and support needed to make these events a success — features that some of them say that Kickstarter was lacking in. “[The Discord access] was hugely helpful for me as a creator doing my first ever crowdfunding campaign, as fellow creators were able to discuss how their campaigns were going, give advice and feedback on each others' campaign pages, and help newbies figure out the quirks of the crowdfunding platform on the back end,” said Michelle Kelly, creator of Lie To Him. She shared that although the site can be difficult to use in some ways, BackerKit staff has been “extremely quick to respond and extremely helpful”. “[This] makes me likely to strongly consider Backerkit again if I decide to crowdfund another project in the future,” she said.

Henderson, who has participated in two BackerKit Topias, said that these events have been helpful in getting his games funded. “BackerKit has been very community focused thus far, so I can only hope they don't lose sight of that,” he said. “You get to talk to real people, helpful people [who are] knowledgeable in their industry, [and] who genuinely seem to care about their community. Kickstarter felt like a corporate money machine.”

 For Richard Oxenhem, director of Hatchlings Games, these have been particularly useful not only for their focus on collaboration, but they also promote a sense of unity among creators who work together to get their projects funded. “I feel the more options the better,” said Oxenhem. “These events can be a good way to explore systems you’re passionate about and even expand your own titles, such as SoulMuppet have recently done [with Orbital Blues Month], and Mausritter [Month] previously.” However, Oxemham did believe that participating in Pocketopia 2025, which took place a month after ZineQuest in February, felt like a poor choice in retrospect, with the Pocketopia losing “momentum and media coverage”.

Similarly, game designer Côme Martin, who funded his game, A Week with Frog and Rabbit, on BackerKit, saw the myriad themed months as more opportunities to crowdfund his works. “In fact, so far I've only been running crowdfunding campaigns around themed months because of the sense of community it creates, but also because of the interest it attracts, both from press and from the general public,” he said. He felt that there’s also more visibility and enthusiasm being drummed up by BackerKit and among the creators themselves. In fact, Henderson had characterized these events as “high-stakes game jams”; Pocketopia has, for instance, inspired him to create a card-based tabletop RPG, one that he said he wouldn’t have put more effort into if the event didn’t happen. A similar sentiment was echoed by game designer snow, who crowdfunded her game, Screaming Metal: Vector Soul, during Zinetopia 2026. “Despite its nature and the nature of crowdfunding, [themed months are] more akin to early Kickstarters or 2019 game jams,” she said. “[They] also allow space for lone creators, small teams, or complete newbies.” 

Any initial concerns about the frequency of these events was quelled by successfully funded games, at least for Henderson, even though there is some trepidation about how these events will evolve in the future. “I have the same concerns about this all eventually becoming noise as I voiced earlier, but the numbers don't bear it out at the moment,” he explained.

That said, creators need to fulfill some requirements to join BackerKit’s collab-funding events. For instance, projects need to feature brand new products (which excludes reprints), and these works should fit the events’ themes. In particular, creators with previous experiences on Topias or group collaboration crowdfunding projects, as well as a history of crowdfunding successes, will be prioritized. There’s a chance that this may see more experienced creators dominating the crowdfunding platform, which may inch out more unorthodox or untested systems, but several designers have told Rascal that they were still able to launch their first projects, despite being new to crowdfunding. BackerKit, too, has emphasized that an openness to collaborating with one another is predominantly what they want to see in the creators they screen. “While previous collab-funding experience added weight to an application, creators without that experience were absolutely included in Zinetopia,” said Yau. “What we look for, regardless of crowdfunding experience, is a sense that they are proactively putting in the effort to grow their audience and creative pursuits and can be a collaborative partner.”

There’s also another benefit that creators see with the rise of themed months: increased visibility. For many, the inability to stand out from a saturated market, as well as a lack of exposure, have been a persistent obstacle in their crowdfunding efforts. They spoke of how BackerKit’s heavy promotion of the themed months, coupled with the focus on collaboration, have given them a bigger audience — one that they believe they would not have achieved on their own. At the same time, this lets up-and-coming creators discover tips from more experienced designers, who would share tips on optimizing their crowdfunding efforts in BackerKit’s Discord servers. “As an emergent game designer who was crowdfunding a game for the first time ever, being part of Zinetopia definitely helped make my project visible to people who otherwise would not have found it as they weren't familiar with me,” said Kelly. Martin, too, has shared that as a solo indie creator who’s not well-known among English-speaking players, discoverability felt like a constant struggle. “Plus I've chosen not to sell my soul and advertise on Meta or wherever, which is a good ethical choice but a poor economical one,” he said. “That's why a themed month is a bonus for me, rather than something bad!”

Creators are also investing less resources in these themed events, as compared to solo crowdfunding efforts. Jo Sevigny, co-founder of Wendigo Workshop, told Rascal that BackerKit’s focus on themed months has allowed the studio to save money on running ads, while still having their projects funded quickly — such as in 12 hours. “I feel like regular campaigns get lost in the algorithm faster, while theme months are visibly shown and marketed by the BackerKit staff,” said Sevigny. “As a three-person team, spending time marketing is time we don't spend making a game, but not marketing at all is not good for business. You still have to prepare — and act — as if it was a regular campaign, don't get me wrong, and people shouldn't just assume that their project will fund because they're a part of a themed month, but I do believe that it helps, especially due to the collaborative aspect of it.” This is also why the studio has decided to time the launch of future projects with a theme month, as Wendigo Workshop sees themselves gaining more followers from the events. “It helps us gather more funds, and we can spend the money on something else than hundreds of dollars in advertising,” she added. 

And for Henderson, participating in these events has seen him spend “next to nothing” on ads, because an audience for BackerKit’s Topias already exists. As such, he didn’t have to create promotional videos or gather leads. “More time spent being creative, less time with all the fuss that surrounds it. I can live with that.”