Kickstarter’s new director of games will fight the growing lack of trust in the platform
Kickstarter announced Tuesday that it would elevate board game designer and publisher Jon Ritter-Roderick to be its new director of games. Ritter-Roderick has been with the company since 2020, serving as the senior outreach lead for tabletop. He’s best known for Dragoon, the beautifully appointed strategy game. He’ll be joined by Nicole Amato, who will take on the role of games outreach lead in his place.
“Back in 2015 we ran our first game [on Kickstarter],” Ritter-Roderick said in an interview with Polygon. “I said, ‘What the hell, why not do this game thing and see what happens?’ And I made plenty of mistakes, advised people, and then slowly over the years my advice became better. And then a job opportunity happened at Kickstarter. It was the one place where I would probably accept a full time job, and I was like, this seems like the right fit. So let’s do it.”
Ritter-Roderick said he sees his role at Kickstarter as an ambassador, and throughout our conversation he reinforced that his most important duty is to open and direct communication with creators hoping to bring their projects to life.
“My goal at Kickstarter is to pass off the knowledge that I have and, if I don’t have the knowledge, get people in touch with those who do,” he said. “My hope is to kind of make sure that people are as informed as humanly possible, and that will turn help them be as successful as possible.”
Ritter-Roderick enters the position during a turbulent time for the crowdfunding giant. Kickstarter brooked controversy in 2021 when former CEO Aziz Hasan signaled that the company would be moving toward blockchain technology. The company has slowed but not stopped that transition, leading to numerous high-profile departures from the platform
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