EGM 'Compendium' Kickstarter Raises $1.8 Million, Has Yet To Actually Deliver The Book

A couple years back a Kickstarter campaign called "The Electronic Gaming Monthly Compendium" launched, offering a printed, hardcover book "combining meticulously curated excerpts from the magazine with new insights and never-before-told stories".

After a lengthy backer window it raised almost $1.8 million from 21,947 supporters, with a planned release window of July 2025. It's now September 2026 and not only have the books not shipped (after multiple delays), but the campaign's organiser hasn't provided any updates since July.

That last update promised the books would finally be shipping out on September 14, following a statement in June that the book was "in the printer’s capable hands". The passing of that date (after previous delays) and more importantly months of silence since have caused backers to start speaking out, creating Reddit posts on communities such as r/shittykickstarters saying stuff like "Whole thing is a disaster", while some in the comments section of the campaign page say they've started filing FTC complaints as well.

While some backers and onlookers are calling this an outright scam, the campaign has at least delivered on digital versions of the EGM archives, spanning the main magazine, spin-off EGM2 and various special issues, which anyone who paid for the printed book can now access. So, as cooler heads are suggesting, this could just be an issue of a team taking on more than they could handle on the printing and delivery side of things, rather than the complete collapse of an entire project (though, of course, the lack of updates keeping people in the loop about this is half the problem here).

We've reached out to the team and will update if we hear back.

[thanks Donnie D!]