Numlock Sunday: Charlie Hall on the state of the tabletop

Photo by Nika Benedictova on Unsplash

This week, I spoke to Charlie Hall, who wrote Kickstarter’s post-pandemic tabletop slump slowed in 2024 and Gamefound finished 2024 with 6 of the top 10 tabletop campaigns for Polygon. Here's what I wrote about it:

Following last week’s release of Kickstarter data on fundraising for tabletop games, a field where crowdsourcing is the name of the game, the two other major companies in the space also dropped their annual reports. Gamefound, which emerged three years ago in an attempt to directly compete with Kickstarter, saw $85 million pledged to successful tabletop campaigns, which is up 52 percent year over year. It is already a substantial competitor to Kickstarter, which brought in $220 million. Backerkit, the other major player, reported a three-fold increase in its games business in its second year of operation but declined to offer a hard year-end total. Either way, it points to a pretty exciting picture for the industry. While Kickstarter’s…