Back in February, I wrote about CMON’s financial woes not once, but twice, on the same day. Let’s check in with them a couple of months later, shall we?
CMON has spent the past two years stripping itself down to the studs: selling off the IPs that built its reputation, missing filing deadlines, freezing development, and posting losses so large they erase nearly a decade of profit. Now, with the walls still smouldering, the company has decided the answer is crypto. Not fixing its production pipeline. Not rebuilding staff capacity. Not delivering the campaigns it already owes. Instead, CMON is pouring $2.1 million into a blockchain videogame company with less annual revenue than some mid‑tier Kickstarter add‑ons.
The move is being framed as a “digital transition,” a necessary evolution to stay “relevant” in a changing market. But nothing about the timing suggests strategy. It looks like a company that has run out of conventional options and is now lunging at whatever sector still promises speculative upside. When a publisher starts talking about Web3 as a path to “long‑term commercial value,” it’s not charting a bold new direction. It’s signalling that the old one has collapsed beneath its feet.
The “Investment”
The details of the investment make the pivot look even stranger. CMON is buying a 2.2% stake in Blissful Link, the studio behind Capverse, a blockchain “play‑to‑earn” game where players purchase NFT fighters to battle online. Blissful Link posted just over $408,000 in revenue in 2024 and still managed to lose nearly half that amount. It also carries close to $889,000 in net liabilities. Despite this, CMON’s investment values the company at more than $95 million, a number that only makes sense in the feverish logic of Web3.
This isn’t a strategic partnership with an established digital studio. It’s a speculative punt on a company whose financial footprint is smaller than many of CMON’s own delayed campaigns. And it comes at a moment when CMON can least afford to gamble: after $23 million in losses across 2024 and 2025, after selling Zombicide, Blood Rage, Rising Sun, and Cthulhu: Death May Die just to keep the lights on, and after an independent auditor openly questioned whether the company could continue as a going concern.
The contrast is stark. CMON is spending nearly twice as much on this NFT venture as it raised in its most recent share sale, money it had earmarked for rebuilding its development pipeline. Instead of shoring up the foundations, it’s buying a ticket to a sector whose speculative bubble burst years ago. It’s hard to read that as confidence. It’s much easier to read it as desperation.
Corporate Word Salad as Crisis Camouflage
What makes CMON’s announcement so jarring isn’t just the investment itself, but the language wrapped around it. The company is suddenly talking about Web3 as if it were a natural extension of tabletop design, a seamless evolution from dice and plastic to blockchain ecosystems. The justification leans heavily on buzzwords: “digital transitioning,” “enhanced visual effects,” “automated scoring,” and, most bizarrely, the claim that Web3 projects embody “social responsibility” through “transparency and fairness.”
It’s an argument that collapses under the slightest pressure. Blockchain isn’t known for ethical clarity; it’s known for speculation, volatility, and a boom‑and‑bust cycle that wiped out most of its early hype. Yet CMON is presenting this pivot as if it were a principled step toward a more equitable future rather than a scramble for a new revenue stream. The mismatch between the rhetoric and the reality is stark. When a company starts describing NFTs as a tool for sustainability, it’s not outlining a strategy; it’s trying to distract from the fact that its existing model has stopped generating reliable income.
The language is a smokescreen: a way to make a high‑risk gamble sound like a thoughtful evolution. But no amount of corporate gloss can hide the fact that CMON is in deep water and flailing. The words are polished; the situation underneath is anything but.
Company and Context
To understand why this pivot rings so hollow, you have to look at the ground CMON is standing on. The company has posted $23 million in losses across 2024 and 2025. This represents more than five times the profit it generated over the previous nine years. It has sold off the IPs that defined its identity: Zombicide, Blood Rage, Rising Sun, Cthulhu: Death May Die. These weren’t fringe titles; they were the backbone of CMON’s catalogue and the reason its campaigns once pulled in millions. Now they’re gone, traded away to keep the company solvent.
The operational picture is no better. CMON halted new development in 2025, citing economic uncertainty, and has been carrying a backlog of eight undelivered crowdfunding campaigns worth more than $14 million. Some of these projects are now years behind schedule. An independent auditor has already raised doubts about whether the company can continue as a going concern, pointing to heavy losses, net liabilities, and the sheer scale of its unfulfilled obligations.
Against that backdrop, the NFT investment looks like a company trying to find a shortcut out of a hole it spent years digging. The fundamentals – staff capacity, production reliability, and financial stability – remain unresolved. Instead of repairing the foundation, CMON is reaching for a speculative lifeline in a sector that has already burned through most of its credibility. This is simply not a pivot born of strength. It’s a move made because the alternatives have run out.
NFTs as a Substitute for a Business Model
So, let’s strip away the language about “digital transitioning” and “long‑term commercial value,” and see what we have left, eh? We certainly don’t have a solid business plan; the NFT pivot looks like a poor substitute for one. CMON’s core business is in giant, miniatures‑heavy crowdfunding campaigns. This approach has, perhaps inevitably, collapsed under its own weight. Rising costs, shrinking margins, and years of overextension have turned what was once a reliable engine into a liability. We’ve already discussed the magnitude of financial losses that CMON has had over the past few years.
With that kind of financial crater, the pivot to Web3 reads as an attempt to conjure a new revenue stream without addressing the structural failures that caused the old one to implode. CMON sold off the IPs that once guaranteed long‑tail income because it needed the cash. As we previously discussed in February, those sales bought time, not stability. And now, instead of rebuilding the operational capacity it has lost, CMON is funnelling money into a blockchain venture. They’re gambling. This is the pattern you see when a company runs out of levers to pull and the resources to fix the problems in front of it.
The Dangerous Bit
The most revealing detail in CMON’s recent disclosures isn’t the NFT investment. It’s the announcement that the company plans to relaunch crowdfunding later this year. This is despite carrying eight undelivered campaigns, including DC Super Heroes United and DCeased, both now pushed to late 2026, and several overdue pre‑order projects. These obligations sit on CMON’s books as huge contract liabilities, revenue it cannot recognise until the games actually ship.
Launching new campaigns while years behind on existing ones is not a sign of confidence. It’s a sign of dependence. Crowdfunding has become the only mechanism left that can generate the kind of upfront cash CMON needs to stay afloat. The company halted new development in 2025 because it couldn’t afford to keep going; now, with its finances in worse shape than ever, it is preparing to return to the same model that helped create the backlog in the first place. Worse yet, we’re seeing the company presumably using new crowdfunding to finance previous commitments. As someone who got burned by the collapse of Soda Pop Miniatures, this has a real feeling of deja vu to it…
This is the clearest indication of where CMON truly stands. A publisher with stable operations doesn’t need to reopen the Kickstarter tap before clearing its debts to backers. A publisher with a functioning business model doesn’t need to gamble on NFTs to stay “relevant.” CMON is doing both because the alternatives have evaporated. The house is still on fire, and instead of rebuilding, the company is looking for new rooms to stand in.
Final Thoughts
CMON’s NFT pivot isn’t the beginning of a transformation. It’s the latest move in a long sequence of reactions, each one narrower, riskier, and further removed from the company’s original strengths. The financial picture is already stark. Those losses previously triggered explicit warnings from auditors about whether CMON can continue operating at all.
The company’s response has been to sell off the IPs that once defined its identity, shrink its staff, halt development, and rely on director loans and asset sales to stay afloat. None of these are signs of a publisher in control of its future. They’re signs of a publisher trying to buy time. Even CMON’s insistence that it “should be able to continue as a going concern” rests on temporary measures: the sale of its Singapore office, a modest share raise, and internal financial support. There is no functioning, profitable business model.
Against that backdrop, the decision to invest in a blockchain videogame studio looks less like a plan and more like a diversion. It doesn’t address the backlog of undelivered campaigns. It doesn’t rebuild the operational capacity that collapsed over the past two years. It doesn’t restore the IPs that once guaranteed long‑term revenue. It simply shifts the conversation away from the uncomfortable reality that CMON’s core model no longer works, and that the company has yet to articulate a viable replacement.
The most telling detail is still the plan to return to crowdfunding later this year; a return made not from strength, but from necessity. A publisher with eight overdue campaigns and millions in unfulfilled liabilities doesn’t relaunch crowdfunding because it’s ready. It relaunches because it has no other reliable way to generate cash. That is the real context for the NFT pivot: a company searching for lifelines while the fundamentals continue to erode.
CMON may survive long enough to deliver the projects it owes. Personally, I’m doubtful; I’ve been here before. It may manage to launch new ones. But who is actually going to buy into this? Nothing in its recent behaviour suggests a business turning a corner. The numbers, the asset sales, the auditor warnings, and now the speculative leap into Web3 all point in the same direction. They are stalling.
And when a company starts buying crypto while the sky is falling, it tells you everything you need to know about how much time is really left.
What a great detailed perspective – I haven’t followed it and felt like this lays it out! ~ Rosie