Crowdfunding kayfabe is dead

My school years were defined by the No Child Left Behind Act, a Bush-era education reform that purported to improve student outcomes through a system of standards and state-defined measures. Because federal school funding was now gated behind standardized scores, lesson plans and regular curriculum were put on ice every time “test season” rolled around. I remember the tests’ acronymic names were always changing — TAAS became TAKS in the early 2000s, before being replaced by STAAR in 2010. Those names ultimately didn’t matter. What did was the upheaval of learning in favor of training children to be good test takers.

Reading through Melsonia’s fatigue with crowdfunding, expressed first in a company announcement and later in a personal blog from director Daniel Sell, feels like cultural reflux. The tabletop publisher responsible for Troika! recently announced that it would no longer use Kickstarter, Backerkit, or any other crowdfunding platform to finance its RPG books. Instead, Melsonia is picking up its toys and going home — what it calls DIY Crowdfunding. 

Two new books,  The Perilous Pear & Plum Pies of Pudwick, and Witch-War to the Vale of Forbiddiction & Beyond, are now available to pre-purchase directly from the publisher’s website. Despite the existence of a bar gradually filling towards a “funded” status, these projects are already destined for retail. Selling enough copies to pay the company’s bills within the 30-day timeframe will earn nominal extra goodies and “a much appreciated morale boost” for the team, according to Sell.

It’s not exactly a sexy pitch full of stretch goals and first-day bonuses, and that’s the point. “Crowdfunding subtly (and not so subtly in some cases) pushes you to zhuzh up you [sic] campaign, spend more, do more, add bells, add whistles, until the original idea looks like a pig in lipstick,” Sell wrote in the announcement. “Don't give in! The world is noisy enough already.”

Sell is right: crowdfunding sucks. Initially devised as an equalizing measure for comics and game artists unable to access the professional luxuries of industry giants — distribution, publishing deals, built-in audiences — the practice has calcified into a bizarre performance of commercialism dominated by the same companies who enforced those barriers to entry. Sales tactics meant to stand out in the ballooning, clamoring crowd become baseline assumptions from consumers trained to scrutinize an object that isn’t yet real.

The numbers, where they exist, paint a picture of guaranteed success as long as you accept a continually shrinking definition. Charlie Hall, formerly at Polygon, wrote earlier this year that average tabletop campaign earnings on Kickstarter measured $67,350 in 2019 but had dropped to $38,566 in 2024 (after slashing Brotherwise Games’ colossal $15.1 million Cosmere RPG campaign from the equation). Kickstarter’s decline in overall pledge dollars has slowed following the COVID-19 pandemic boom, just in time for the entire crowdfunding market to lurch directly into tariffs. As Web of the Gigantic Spider dutifully notes every month, tabletop crowdfunding’s stable foundation relies on low expectations — median successful campaigns draw in around $3,000 — and embracing a playbook meant to benefit much bigger fish.

“Everyone on crowdfunding, on both sides, are agreeing to maintain a weird kayfabe of cute creatives and benevolent patrons,” Sell wrote on his more trenchant blog, titled Tell Us What You Really Think About Crowdfunding. “It’s bizarre and is only getting weirder as the obvious truth gets harder to hide. Today crowdfunding is a pre-order platform where the consumers buy-now-pay-later on a product that the creators can quite comfortably turn around and just not release.”

"I can’t let the fear of financial ruin keep pushing us to the Kickstarter mines."

Melsonia is breaking kayfabe, originally a wrestling term for willing suspension of disbelief. If selling books through Shopify on their own website is less exciting, less fun for consumers, it is also less bone-grinding work for artists and creatives who have assumed the labor of three separate job titles to maintain “the illusion of… plucky dreams only made possible by generous strangers.” It’s still a pre-order platform, but an honest one.

Sell claims that running crowdfunding campaigns is stressful, time consuming, and demoralizing, even when platforms such as Backerkit pride themselves on suites of specialized tools. Workflow management, like state-mandated teacher qualifications, only make you better at running crowdfunding campaigns, reasserting a version of reality rooted in hype culture, FOMO, and constant availability of artists to consumer demand. “Crowdfunding has been gentrified,” Sell wrote. “It’s for big boys to get bigger.” But like gentrification, its proponents (and its beneficiaries) will still attempt to convince those pushed out that, actually, they directly benefit from platforms making more money. Artists will be told that each million-dollar campaign attracts larger audiences who will also look at their projects! Missing is the inevitable next step: comport to what that audience has been trained to expect, or suffer death by a thousand complaints and cancelled pledges. Or, you know, die in obscurity.

Crowdfunding persists because it is the only scheme in town. Video games use it as a test bed, or last resort, for a project that traditional publishers won’t finance. It’s a novel method of doing business for scrappy teams with a vision beyond their capital. The vast majority of the tabletop industry perches precariously upon crowdfunding’s arms. A charitable read contends that Kickstarter, Backerkit, and Gamefound’s established audience and built-in marketing machine are boons for creators. The lion’s share of money flows through these platforms, and their staff work hard to ease the friction of plugging into their vast discoverability matrix. I’m sympathetic to such an argument on the individual level — we all gotta pay rent. But don’t mistake gravity for patronage. A black hole offers stable orbits, but its nature is to devour every last atom.

Alternatives are beginning to emerge. Cooperative publishers such as Plus One EXP and Possible Worlds Games spread the risk any individual designer would otherwise eat alone — crowdfunding remains a less intensive and critical part of their business equations. Slowfunding, where a project gradually racks up sales until a creator has earned enough to justify the labor, has been kicking around for years. GMT Games’ Project 500 creates a pre-order bounty board out of potential wargames and strategy games. Even Melsonia’s new model mirrors the visual construction of a campaign page, if not its worst predatory instincts.

Kickstarter’s shadow is long, but it’s worth running from underneath it. As Sell explains, the pressure and stress of maintaining a campaign for each book — along with limiting Melsonia’s energy to a single project at one time — kills his creative energies. All of us who professionalize a passion must compromise pure expression with Good Business Decisions, but tabletop designers arguably shoulder too much relative to the meager payoff. Dancing to Kickstarter’s tune paid off a decade ago, perhaps. Now? They earn the privilege of wrestling in the same stadium where Brandon Sanderson headlines.

"Everyone on crowdfunding, on both sides, are agreeing to maintain a weird kayfabe of cute creatives and benevolent patrons."

“This is the main drive behind leaving these platforms if I’m honest. I can’t let the fear of financial ruin keep pushing us to the Kickstarter mines,” Sell wrote. Melsonia’s DIY Crowdfunding looks built from wisdom and best practices. The company promises to completely refund any book that doesn’t ship, and deadlines are preemptively caveated as estimates — smart, given tariffs’ ever-shifting sands. Want to stay looped in? There’s this neat thing called a newsletter, on this neater thing called a website. It’s an intentional unplugging from the big machine we’ve all taken for granted, no doubt trading degrees of financial success for control over the levers of one’s professional life.

Sell remains wide-eyed. “It is certainly unrealistic to believe this will be better than crowdfunding financially, but it can’t be worse creatively,” he wrote. Troika! benefits from several years of relative success within its niche, an admittedly small slice of a tiny luxury hobby. It’s not nothing, but it might be enough leverage to scramble out of “the hungry maws of The Platforms,” as he put it. Both of Melsonia’s projects currently sit around 40% funded, which would be a death knell to any traditional crowdfunding campaign. Limping, sluggish growth on conventional platforms has a stench to it that drives away savvy superbackers. Even I need to unlearn the reflexive “oof” my brain elicited when I saw a bar that wasn’t already hot-thermometer bursting out one side. No “FUNDED IN 7 MINUTES!” sticker? Ouch, good luck.

My teacher friends back in Texas talk about standardized test season like a flu they must tolerate, year after year. It is disruptive, counterproductive, soul-flaying in its tedium, and inextricable from their job. Like crowdfunding, it is the fouled lifeblood of their profession. Like crowdfunding, its parameters and execution are devised by people who increasingly seem divorced from reality. It didn’t use to be like this. Living history saw a different form of institutional education, and it certainly saw methods of selling elf wizard books that didn’t require clown makeup and a rubber nose.

I’m mixing my performance metaphors, but you understand that if crowdfunding kayfabe is dead then we don’t have to pretend this is a normal way to earn a living, much less a healthy one. Imagine literally anything else. Imagine crowdfunding at home. Experiment, try, and fail. Fail together, beyond the shadow, and grow stronger for it.