In January 2022, Kickstarter decided to move its popular Zine Quest event from February to August. The move sparked outrage from the tight-knit community of independent RPG developers who depend on the annual event to boost their income during the lean winter months. Now, Kickstarter is telling Polygon that the event will be pushed back to February in 2023, and this time it’s saying the change will be permanent.
“We recognize that many developers prefer to launch Zine Quest projects in February,” said Kate Bernyk, Polygon’s senior director of communications, in an email. “So in 2023 we will be moving this call back to its usual time of year and continue to host it every February.”
The decision to move the event to August was said by Kickstarter’s director of games at the time Anya combs, was supposed to coincide with Gen Con. (Combs is now the Tabletop Account Manager at Kickstarter’s newest competitor, Backerkit.) But the unilateral decision — announced with less than a month’s notice — has rubbed many the wrong way, especially after Kickstarter’s other unilateral decision regarding the launch of the Blockchain Technology. (The company has since slowed, but not stopped, that transition.) So great was the commotion that indie developers banded together to create Zine Month, an alternative event with the goal of moving the entire indie-RPG community away from Kickstarter . The two events will now seemingly go head-to-head in 2023.
Zine Quest has been a hugely successful event in the past. In 2021, Kickstarter’s own data shows that 383 projects were successfully funded and more than $1.7 million was committed.
