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

The second most successful TTRPG crowdfunding creator ever.
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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.
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).

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Morrus

Morrus is the owner of EN World and EN Publishing, creator of the ENnies, creator of the What's OLD is NEW (WOIN), Simply6, and Awfully Cheerful Engine game systems, publisher of Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition, and co-host of the weekly Morrus' Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk podcast. He has been a game publisher and RPG community administrator for over 20 years, and has been reporting on TTRPG and D&D news for over two decades.
Doctor Futurity said:
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.
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I’ve seen MCDM books in shelves. Partly because the FLGS I frequent has quite a bit of RPGs on thier shelves.
 

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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.
 

Stormonu said:
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.
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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.
 




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.
 

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