MCDM Joins Million Dollar Crowdfunder Club... For The 5th Time!

Matt Colville's MCDM was the first TTRPG crowdfunder to break $2M back in 2018 with Strongholds & Streaming, a supplement for D&D along with a livestream of a D&D campaign. That wasn't the end of the company's record-breaking run, though!

Draw Steel: Crack the Sun finished its crowdfunding run this week with a funding total of $2,617,323, making it the 5th million-dollar Kickstarter from MCDM. Crack the Sun is an official adventure path for the company's Draw Steel TTRPG, which raised $4.6M in 2024.

• Strongholds & Streaming (March 2018) raised $2,121,465.
• Kingdoms, Warfare & More Minis! (November 2019) raised $1,372,685.
• "Flee, Mortals!" - The MCDM Monster Book for 5e (May 2022) raised $2,084,117.
• The MCDM RPG (January 2024) raised $4,600,539.
• Draw Steel: Crack the Sun (January 2026) raised $2,617,323.

Not only does this make MCDM the most prolific member of the Million Dollar Kickstarter Club with a record-breaking 5 entries (closely followed by Hit Point Press and Free League with 4 entries apiece), it is also the second most successful TTRPG crowdfunding creator ever with a combined total of $12,796,129! This whopping total is surpassed only by Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere RPG which raised an eye-watering $14,557,439 in just one single campaign.

2025 saw a slight decline in million-dollar crowdfunders with 7 in total (compared to a high of 11, mid-pandemic in 2021).

 

[darjr]

This is making me realize that there is a big component to this hobby that I have no real comprehension of. MCDM and their output is a mystery to me, and I wonder why I have never seen any of their products on game shelves....are they online only? I guess I should investigate instead of just demonstrating my ignorance here.

I’ve seen MCDM books in shelves. Partly because the FLGS I frequent has quite a bit of RPGs on thier shelves.

 

[Morrus]

I’ve seen MCDM books in shelves. Partly because the FLGS I frequent has quite a bit of RPGs on thier shelves.

Mine has D&D, Pathfinder, and a smattering of Free League, and that's it. It's very situational. And it's really hard to get distributors to even pick up the phone.

 

[Stormonu]

Well, this seems to put the old adage to rest, "How do you make a million dollars in the RPG Biz? You start with 10 million."

I'm glad to see RPGs being in this kind of healthy state.

 

[Morrus]

Well, this seems to put the old adage to rest, "How do you make a million dollars in the RPG Biz? You start with 10 million."

I'm glad to see RPGs being in this kind of healthy state.

Well, the reason that this is an interesting chart is because it shows the outliers. If million dollar Kickstarters were normal for the business, it wouldn't be here. For each of these projects which made bank, there's a thousand that didn't.

And don't mistake this for profit. While a well-planned crowdfunder will have profit margins, when you have a million dollar campaign, you also have a million dollars of product you have to make and ship. It's an obligation, not a windfall, and hopefully you plan it well enough to pay yourself. But you haven't made a million dollars.

I would still maintain that TTRPGs are a terrible way to make money. The market is tiny, and nobody will pay enough for products to give creators a living wage. There are exceptions, of course, and those are made apparent in this thread, but that is the truth for 99% of the industry.

 

[darjr]

Mine has D&D, Pathfinder, and a smattering of Free League, and that's it. It's very situational. And it's really hard to get distributors to even pick up the phone.

Just one section of a shelf.

 

[Morrus]

Just one section of a shelf.
View attachment 427271

Oh I believe you. I wasn’t trying to say that I didn’t.

 

[darjr]

Oh I believe you. I wasn’t trying to say that I didn’t.

Oh I figured. Just showing the treasure within grasp.

 

[Parmandur]

My old FLGS was pretty well stocked, though mainly a board game and comic book store, but after moving cross-country my new FLGS is astonishingly well stocked. They have D&D and Pathfinder, sure, Call of Cthulu and Traveller, Shadowdark and Daggerjeart...bit also What is Old is New, Free League stuff, all sorts of deep cut games.

 

[Staffan]

This is making me realize that there is a big component to this hobby that I have no real comprehension of. MCDM and their output is a mystery to me, and I wonder why I have never seen any of their products on game shelves....are they online only? I guess I should investigate instead of just demonstrating my ignorance here.

Matt made a post not all that long ago about it over on Discord:

What they probably mean is "The distributors we buy our products from don't carry it."

We have our own attitudes toward the value of retail. RPGs are bad bang-for-buck when it comes to retail for a lot of reasons I'm sure other people can explain.

But the result is, most game stores do not want to stock RPGs. That makes sense to us! RPGs are a terrible value proposition for a hobby store!

But stores don't like it when someone walks in, asks about a product, and then leave without spending any money. So what they tend to do is order RPG books as a hedge against exactly that scenario.

They have no interest in actively selling RPGs, but they don't like it when someone walks in, asks about an RPG, and leaves because it's not in stock. So the store orders...three copies.

"Three copies please" is the "We have no interest in selling your product, we just want to make sure there's one on the shelf in case a rando walks in and asks." Yep, we get it. Makes total sense. But since you're not interested in selling our product (i.e. you do not believe in it), we aren't interested in selling to you! It takes time which is money to manage those accounts and we got better things to do.

Those stores can only get our products by buying from a distributor. But we do not LIKE selling to distributors because they want us to send them our products and then nothing happens for six months and then MAYBE we get paid. So we tell distributors "Sure we'll sell you some books, but you pay for them first, then we ship them."

"What?! But that's not how we do business!" Well, that's fine. How you run your business is...your business. But this is how we run our business. We're not a charity. We need to get paid for our work.

Well that still leaves a handful of distributors, so you sometimes see our books in game stores!

Then there are the retailers who believe. They see Draw Steel and think "I can sell that." Meaning, someone walks in and the guy behind the counter says "Hey have you heard of Draw Steel? I think you'd like it!"

That retailer is going to order a lot more than 3 books and we will sell those books to them, direct, and we pay for shipping. But that means they need to meet a minimum order.

We think there's about 20 retailers in America this is true of.

 

[...m...]

That retailer is going to order a lot more than 3 books and we will sell those books to them, direct, and we pay for shipping. But that means they need to meet a minimum order.

We think there's about 20 retailers in America this is true of.

...not calling-out MCDM in particular, but i've been fortunate to have local access to those rare well-stocked retailers, and i've made a point to buy their stock at retail (even when it's significantly discounted online) because those shops are precious community resources, but after being burned repeatedly on digital content i've learned that i'm vastly better-served buying directly from publishers who include PDFs, maps, and whatever other digital bonuses are thrown in with their direct sales...

...so: i no longer shop local retail for small publishers, which presents a signifiant disincentive to local retailers stocking their books, which in turn presents a signifiant disincentive to small-publisher distribution...i think goodman started bundling PDF codes with their books last year, so at least one publisher has the right idea for brick-and-mortar distribution...