''BackerKit'' is a

crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and Alternative Finance, alternative finance, to fund projects "withou ...

platform focusing on creative projects with an emphasis on

tabletop games Tabletop games or tabletops are games that are normally played on a Table (furniture), table or other flat surface, such as board games, card games, dice games, miniature wargames, Tabletop role-playing game, tabletop role-playing games, or ti ...

and fantasy books. On ethical grounds, BackerKit bans projects containing art produced by

Generative AI Generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models learn the underlying patterns and str ...

History

BackerKit was founded in 2012 by Maxwell Salzberg and Rosanna Yau as a pledge management, payment processing, shipping, audience engagement, and pre-order tool for

Kickstarter Kickstarter, PBC is an American Benefit corporation, public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York City, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative project ...

campaigns. In 2018, Backerkit established The Creative Fund, with the goal of donating one dollar to a wide range of projects on Kickstarter. In 2022, BackerKit announced its own crowdfunding marketplace in response to criticisms within the

tabletop role-playing game A tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG or TRPG), also known as a pen-and-paper role-playing game, is a kind of role-playing game (RPG) in which the participants describe their characters' actions through speech and sometimes movements. Participants d ...

industry against Kickstarter's investment in

Blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

. The first major crowdfunding campaign on BackerKit was for Gloomhaven's Grand Festival, which raised over $5 million. Other early successes included Return to Dark Tower ($2 million) and Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate ($1.2 million). In 2024, the premium edition of

Brandon Sanderson Brandon Winn Sanderson (born December19, 1975) is an American author of high fantasy, science fiction, and young adult books. He is best known for the Cosmere fictional universe, in which most of his fantasy novels, most notably the '' Mistb ...

's novel Words of Radiance raised $16 million on BackerKit, breaking the platform's record.

References

Crowdfunding platforms of the United States {{rpg-stub