While CMON has made some stellar contributions to the area of the best board games, 2024 was apparently a financial year fraught with difficulty for the company. As reported by BoardGameWire, a profit warning was issued by CMON board to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on March 12. CMON has yet to confirm the exact extent of these losses although they are set to be revealed in the company's full annual report at the end of the month.
In the past, CMON had scored a healthy run of profitable years: $3.5m in 2017, approximately $2m in 2018, and around $1.88m in 2019. However, the publisher was hit with a pretty crushing $5m loss in 2020 – of course, due to the strain of trading through the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the past three years, the company has recouped some of that loss with a combined $1.8m profit. However, if what's been reported for 2024 is accurate, this loss will have entirely (or almost entirely) wiped out this financial uptick.
When it comes to pinpointing exactly why the company has entered such dire straits, there are a number of possible factors one might gravitate to. For one, there's the significant shift CMON made in its crowdfunding strategies: after 12 years of using Kickstarter as its platform of choice, it signed an exclusivity deal with crowdfunding alternative Gamefound. Yet, despite slow initial earnings, CMON has managed to accrue $12.1m worth of crowdfunding revenue on Gamefound in the past year – exceeding the $11.8m raised on Kickstarter the year prior.
According to the BoardGameWire report, CMON identified the real culprit for its poor 2024 performance as the "rising cost of living", which had "eaten into its revenues from tabletop game sales". While global inflation rates hit its peak during 2020, prices haven't dropped to their pre-pandemic average and have been increasing slowly but steadily in territories like the United States and mainland Europe (as reported by Global Finance). With this strange state of slow-burn inflation still singeing a hole in people's disposable income, it's not surprising that folks feel as though they have less room to treat themselves to their favorite board games.
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