The CarlRPG effect: How BackerKit is rewriting the roleplaying games rulebook

Renegade Game Studios’ Dungeon Crawler Carl TTRPG didn’t just break records this week; it effectively demolished the long-standing assumption that a top-tier IP requires Kickstarter’s general marketplace to find its audience. Raising a massive $4.9 million within its first 24 hours, the tabletop roleplaying games adaptation of Matt Dinniman’s “LitRPG” juggernaut has turned BackerKit from a backend utility into a primary destination for the industry’s heavy hitters.

Securing over 19,800 backers and obliterating its $250,000 goal, the CarlRPG campaign represents more than just a successful fundraise. It serves as an aggressive proof of concept for BackerKit’s “Fandom Engine” model. By moving away from a single, transactional purchase and toward a “Season Pass” of digital drops scheduled through late 2027, the project is treating crowdfunding as a year-long community event rather than a traditional shopfront.

From “Pledge Manager” to Powerhouse

For over a decade, BackerKit was essentially the plumbing of the tabletop world, a “corpse flower” growth path, as CEO Maxwell Salzberg once called it. Founded in 2012 following the success of the Diaspora campaign, the company operated as a post-campaign tool for years. In 2026, however, it is a “Pro Platform” that now handles between 30% and 40% of all reward-based crowdfunding dollars.

While BackerKit’s total funding volume in 2024 looks modest compared to Kickstarter’s dominance, the company’s internal growth is surging. BackerKit tripled its revenue in the last year, generating over $20 million annually, according to public financial data on Wefunder. While Gamefound has carved out a lead in board games by catering to “whales,” BackerKit is doubling down on roleplaying games and community-driven merchandise through “Artificial Density” events like Printopia.

The 2024 Tabletop Landscape

Source: LaunchBoom 2026 Industry Analysis

The Discovery Divide: Marketplace vs. Ecosystem

Despite BackerKit’s technological lead, a fundamental divide remains regarding how backers actually find projects. While BackerKit excels at deepening the relationship with existing fans, it lacks the massive, passive browsing audience that has defined Kickstarter for over fifteen years.

Jason Duff, lead designer at Earl of Fife Games, a publisher with eight successful Kickstarter campaigns, including Heroes and Hardships, notes that the choice between platforms often depends on the size of a creator’s existing “crowd.”

Kickstarter remains the undisputed leader in discovery. For indie publishers without an established audience, Kickstarter’s algorithm provides an organic reach that is still second to none. While BackerKit offers an incredible ecosystem for managing and upselling to existing fans, it isn’t a discovery engine; you have to bring your own crowd. On Kickstarter, the crowd is already there

The “Humans First” Fortress

Part of BackerKit’s appeal to the “pro” tier of creators is its defensive stance against the “algorithmic decay” and bot-driven traffic plaguing the wider web. Following the Terraforming Mars AI art controversy, the platform enacted a strict policy in October 2023 that banned projects generated solely by AI. As reported by Dicebreaker, the platform also masks creator content from AI scrapers; a move designed to protect the intellectual property of its user base.

The Hidden Costs of Rapid Growth

However, the rapid ascent has exposed significant structural cracks. As BackerKit moves upstream to handle the actual flow of funds, its exposure to creator abandonment has increased. The industry was recently rattled by the dual abandonment crisis involving creator J.D. Maxwell, which left both Grimwild and The Wild Frontier of Venture in limbo. As the official project page for Wild Frontier confirms, the platform currently lacks a central safety net to reimburse backers when a vetted creator vanishes.

Technical friction is also mounting. Many backers have reported their banks’ “blacklisting” of BackerKit transactions during high-velocity launches. This appears to be a clash between banking security and the way creators configure their Stripe accounts, causing legitimate transactions to be flagged as potential fraud. When combined with the security breach involving the ThunderCats project earlier this year, it is clear that the platform’s reliability is struggling to keep pace with its ambition.

BackerKit is no longer just a Kickstarter rival; it is a specialised infrastructure play. It is gambling that the future of the tabletop economy belongs to those who own their audience intelligence. To win that bet, it needs to prove it can police its “pro” creators as effectively as it empowers them.