Geek & Sundry Loves Their Fans

And with good reason. They turn out in droves to watch the Geek & Sundry twitch channel. Charity drives run by Geek & Sundry will often surpass their donation goals and then be reset to higher amounts. And two years ago the fans made the Tabletop Indiegogo campaign a huge success. The campaign quickly passed it original goal of $500,000 and went on to gather pledges of $1.4 million. This was enough for a longer season and a spinoff, with money to spare.

But Geek & Sundry Doesn't Care About Their Fans

Although G&S won't hesitate to state how much they love their fans. However that's about as far as they are willing to go. It is a different matter when it comes time to show their love.

The Indiegogo campaign had a few problems and a lot of that is probably due to it being their first crowdfunding venture. That is understandable, these things happen. The issue is how they responded to the problems.

Backers with issues could go weeks or months without getting a response from the campaign. A little more than a year after the campaign ended -- after it had been announced for the second or third time that all perks had been delivered -- Wil Wheaton found out that some backers had not received their campaign perks. In response to this he published a video to Youtube stating that backers with issues should contact him, he was going to make certain that the problems were resolved.

There were two digital perks that had not been delivered to any backers. Wil stopped responding after it was pointed out that was personally responsible for the creation of both. It has now been two years since the campaign ended and those two perks still have not been delivered. Neither Wil nor Geek & Sundry has said anything about these perks. As far as I can tell they have no intention of fulfilling this commitment.

About 7,000 backers pledged enough to receive the perk of having their name written on a wall in the episodes of Tabletop. Wil is rather proud of the Backer Wall. Unfortunately, approximately 400 names are missing from the wall. By the time this was discovered the season had been filmed and it was too late to add the names to the wall. Even so, Geek & Sundry never acknowledged the problem and made no attempt to make it up to the affected backers in some way. Geek & Sundry has recently finished filming the fourth season of Tabletop. They could have added those missing names to the wall for this season. They did not.

It is disappointing to see Geek & Sundry treat their fans in this manner. It's not contempt, it's not disdain, it's just a lack of care. They love their fans. They just don't care about their fans.

Tabletop Season 3 Backer Wall / Wall of Names

Tabletop Wall of Names / Tabletop Backer Wall

Wall of Names as Google spreadsheet

Wall of Names published to web

The Backer Wall was created in 2014 before the start of filming of the third season of Tabletop. As far as I know no names have been added to the wall since then.

Every name on the wall is accounted for in this spreadsheet. If your name (or some form of it) does not appear in the spreadsheet then I believe that it does not appear on the wall. By my estimates there were 7,237 backers with this perk. There are 6,771 names on the wall; less than that when you remove duplications. Thus, there could be 400+ names missing from the wall.

This spreadsheet was created using a list of names provided to me by the Tabletop Indiegogo campaign team. I then used a form to go brick by brick, reading the name and selecting the matching entry from the list.

You can also look for your name at the Tabletop Backer Wall Wiki. Created by Nate Sauber and worked on by him and a few others (anonymously, so I can't provide names). They worked on this without the campaign's list of names, reading the names from the wall and recording them in the wiki. That is a lot harder than what I did and deserves some special credit.

The location of your name on the wall (row, brick, sequence) is shaded so that the numbers cannot be read without clicking on the cell. This was done so that you can use the list to confirm if your name is on the wall, or just to get a hint and reduce the amount of searching you would otherwise have to do.

There were some duplications in the list. There were also some duplications on the wall that were not due to duplication in the list.

There were some names in the list that did not appear on the wall. There were some names on the wall that did not appear in the list.

Some names were truncated when written on the wall.

There appears to have been a problem when creating the list and names with characters outside of the ANSI set contained errors. These names contained two-byte characters which were converted into two one-byte characters. (For example, Björn became Björn.) These may have been written on the wall as they appeared in the list or changed slightly but I don't think these were ever written correctly.