Kobold Press CEO and Kobold-in-Chief, Wolfgang Baur, is here to give you some insight on the state of the industry!

To wrap things up neatly at the end of the year, here is my publisher-level view of what 2024 looked like. There’s naughty and nice, there’s major good news, and there’s some potentially ominous headwinds for 2025.

Let’s put a bow on the year that was!

Accomplishments

After huge Kickstarters in 2023, this was the Year of Delivering Goods! Here’s a partial list of firsts and major milestones for Kobold Press in 2024.

First Party Publishing

The crowning glory and primo major accomplishment for Kobold Press this year was delivering a 3-book core set for Tales of the Valiant® RPG, the 5E fork that retains 100% compatibility with D&D and offers a compatibility license for anyone who wants to publish for it.

It was a two-part launch, with the Player’s Guide and Monster Vault shipping in May to 10,000 backers. Both have been strong sellers ever since. The Game Master’s Guide shipped in September, and sold out its first print run.

Tales of the Valiant has found an audience, and the more people discover it, the stronger it becomes!

D&D Beyond

Three titles joined the roster at D&D Beyond in 2024: Tome of Beasts 1, Book of Ebon Tides, and Tales from the Shadows! We’re very proud to have those titles live for players and GMs, and look forward to a few more in 2025.

We’re in Canada, Eh?

Kobold Press attended Game Con Canada, our very first convention outside the US! The show featured both organized play and a Kobold Press sales booth, and it was an amazing introduction to gaming in Edmonton. We’ll be back in 2025!

First Annual Kobold Con

The official KoboldCon was the very first convention we ran as the organizers, and it was 100% free to attend. The show also raised money for a game design scholarship, it announced most of the year’s upcoming releases, and it ran a LOT of tables for anyone to play online. It even included the first live streamed staff game! We’ll do this again in 2025 as well—call us convention kobolds! Speaking of which…

Biggest, Best Gen Con Yet

This year was by far the largest number of tables we’ve ever run at Gen Con, and it was a sharp improvement in the play experience. We’re very proud to offer the best in-person games to anyone and everyone we can. Maybe we’ll see you in Indianapolis come July 31!

Massive Adventure Support

The sheer volume of adventures and supplements for support and third-party support is hard to overstate. The Tales of the Valiant game is literally 7 months old, and already there are more than 39 adventures published for it including 10 by Kobold Press. There are supplements from Legendary Games, Lazy Wolf Studios, and Frog God Games. There’s a wealth of support in PDF and an amazing Black Flag Wiki with character optimization content from RPGBot (our first Wiki!).

Ongoing Midgard Coverage

We moved from monthly support for the Midgard setting for a Patreon fee to FREE weekly support on the blog. Kobold Press also shipped a new Midgard adventure (The Great Race of Trombei) and new Midgard character options. Much more to come in this department . . .

New Kobolds Around the Warrens

We made several hires in 2024, including a new staff designer, and we upgraded our customer support and graphics team additions from last year to help deliver those big projects funded in 2023. We’re happy to have more kobolds on the team!

Finances

The team and their accomplishments are great, but what about that old bottom line? Things are not entirely rosy here, though the company is in the black. To break it down a little, let’s look at the Kickstarter numbers first, as that’s our biggest channel.

Total revenue from Kickstarter in 2024 was about $1.1 million, a drop of 52% from 2023 and on par with 2022. Looking back, 2023 was the year of our two largest Kickstarters ever (Tales of the Valiant at $1.15 million and Deep Magic at $860,000). It’s hard to repeat that kind of success every year.

At that same time, Kickstarter revenue is the backbone of the company, and it makes up roughly 45% of yearly revenue. However, it wasn’t just Kickstarter. Revenue from virtual tabletops also declined, as did sales to distribution in hobby stores. Overall, company revenue declined year over year.

The company coffers are still in good shape for all 2025 projects. And note that all funds raised by Kickstarter are held in escrow and paid out to create the project—we never use a new project to fund the prior one. (There’s much more about Kickstarter finances to say in a future State of Play!)

To put it in perspective; 2023 was a banner year, and we’re very happy to have been able to hire staff, experiment with new projects, and fund charitable work and sponsorships in 2024 based on that banner year. Now we’re returning to our long-term trend. The holiday numbers are strong (did I mentioned we SOLD OUT of the Game Master’s Guide?). And we’ve got a 20% off sale on some of our best right here!

Post-Holiday Blues?

The dark clouds on the horizon are not particular to a game or Kickstarter or the like. The dark clouds are tariffs and trade wars.

Kobold Press has printed most of its books in China for years, and our last US hardcover printer left the country in 2023. The incoming administration has promised to raise tariffs by 10% on goods imported from China

As good gamers, we’re looking for alternatives and loopholes. But it looks like current events are going to affect our costs going forward. I don’t like it, but I don’t have any control over it. We’re in touch with printers outside China, but most of those are even more expensive.

There’s other signs of trade wars and economic weirdness ahead, but that doesn’t change our core mission. We’re looking to create the best games for the biggest audience possible.

Kobold Press will continue to support 5th Edition D&D and Tales of the Valiant, and we’re also looking to try something entirely new. More about that in 2025!

Until next time!