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).

 

[Staffan]

But if your core RPG memories are closely tied to the game store experience, you don't care about the value proposition, you start with your conclusion. "It is a good thing for game stores to stock RPGs I am not going to buy or play. I might buy and play them, so they should stock them." Great if you're a library. Not a great plan if you're a business.

The customer side of this is that the whole point of an FLGS is that I can walk in and buy something off the shelf, and then go home and read/play it. That's something I, at least, am willing to pay for. But if the FLGS doesn't have the thing I'm looking for on the shelf and have to special order it... well, then I might as well buy it by mail order direct from the creator, or from a store that does have a copy, or even Amazon. Then the store isn't providing the service I'd like them to provide.

So does that mean that I and the store have mutually incompatible needs? Quite possibly. And I don't really know how to solve that, other than the store charging enough for the things they do sell that it covers the things that don't.