A Cape Town marketing agency has played a central role in developing the largest crowdfunding campaign in gaming history, with the Cyberpunk Trading Card Game raising more than US$28-million (R469-million) from over 50 000 backers on Kickstarter.
The Cyberpunk Trading Card Game launched on Kickstarter on 17 March 2026 with a US$100 000 funding goal. It cleared that target in eight minutes. By the time the campaign closed exactly a month later, more than 50 000 backers had pledged $28-million, with late commitments through Kickstarter’s pledge manager continuing to push the total higher.
The game brings the world of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 videogame and the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners animated series to the physical trading card space for the first time. The debut set, “Welcome to Night City”, features characters including V, Johnny Silverhand, Jackie Welles and Judy Alvarez, with two starter decks – “The Heist” and “Embracing Power” – built around opposing factions of mercenaries and the Arasaka corporation. WeirdCo’s design team carries credits across Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana and Marvel Snap.
Pledge tiers ran from $49 for two starter decks up to $999 or more for premium bundles featuring metal cards, custom dice and exclusive promo cards.
Pulling Power Media is an 18-person creative and performance marketing shop based in Cape Town that served as the front-end marketing partner on the campaign, which was developed by US studio WeirdCo under licence from Polish game developer CD Projekt Red.
With late pledges still trickling in, the total has reached $28.4-million, almost double the previous recordholder in the games category.
“We have been involved in the number one, two and three highest-funded Kickstarters of all time in the games category,” Pulling Power Media founder and CEO Kyle Puller told TechCentral in an interview.
Dethroned
“We also have some history in videogames but were very surprised by the performance of tabletop games. I always thought board games are a smaller category until our first campaign did $12.9-million.”
Frosthaven was Pulling Power Media’s first game-specific Kickstarter campaign. The Cosmere campaign ran in 2024, raising $15-million and holding the top spot until it was dethroned by Cyberpunk. Across the past six years, Puller said the firm has worked on roughly 150 campaigns, raising more than $200-million and averaging more than $1-million/campaign.
Pulling Power’s role on Cyberpunk focused on creative production, paid media targeting and audience attribution in the months ahead of launch. Captured leads were funnelled through Launch Oracle, an in-house platform the agency built to track campaign performance more granularly than Kickstarter itself permits.
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The campaign captured 153 000 leads ahead of going live, with about half flowing through to the game’s Discord community. That gave WeirdCo a 63 000-strong audience before backers were asked to spend a cent. Average backer spend was roughly $500/person.
Asked how Pulling Power Media delineates between the success of its platform and strategy vs the brand power of its client, like Cyberpunk, Puller argued that brands with larger brand IP have run Kickstarter campaigns that were less successful.
He gave credit to the power of Launch Oracle as the market intelligence vehicle driving pointed channel spend decisions that maximise return on investment but also acknowledged that the quality of the other specialists involved in the Cyberpunk campaign contributed to its success.
These include CD Projekt Red, WeirdCo’s in-house community managers and a programme of international live-streams and pre-production “alpha kit” sample boxes sent to trading card influencers.
Pulling Power, which turns eight this year, has previously produced creative work for Marvel, DC Comics, Warner Bros and the Lord of the Rings franchise. The team is split between eight creatives, three paid media specialists, a two-person development team, account managers and a social media lead. Despite that international client list, Puller said the firm has almost no profile at home.
“We have quite a reputation in the tabletop space, and people know us as ‘Oh, you’re that South African agency’. But we actually haven’t really done as much here that we would like. I don’t think we’ve ever been up for an award locally,” said Puller.
He attributed the disconnect partly to the agency’s narrow focus on crowdfunding and tabletop gaming but also argued the broader South African creative sector has been “innovating in a bubble”, with overseas clients regularly caught off-guard by the calibre of work coming out of Cape Town.
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“Being South African has never been something to overcome. That’s been like a superpower. There isn’t really even a conversation around who is best. We’re like first, second and third best in this space,” said Puller. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
