Trash Goblin developer launches crowdfunding campaign to back new merch store

UK indie Spilt Milk Studios has launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund a permanent merch store, starting with a collection of products based on its 2025 release Trash Goblin. The studio is hoping to “both generate revenue for the studio to help us prototype new ideas and to deliver delightful goodies to our fans,” co-owner Nicholas Lovell said.

Lovell has previously described the studio’s community, cultivated through Trash Goblin’s initial Kickstarter and subsequent Early Access release, as foundational to its ongoing success. The game launched as 1.0 in March last year and became the company’s most successful Steam release by revenue, according to GameDiscoverCo data.

Lovell said both the community and the team wanted to do merch but the latter had no experience to deliver it, so it partnered with Mighty Merch, operated by Thomas Bidaux of UK games ICO Partners, for manufacture and fulfillment.

“The plush was always the favourite, but is the most complicated to make. We made an art book for the team as a Christmas gift, and as soon as we had it in our hands we knew we had to offer it to the community too,” said Lovell. “I really wanted mugs, but Thomas convinced us that the shipping of mugs is a total nightmare (breakage, primarily), and it’s this sort of expert advice that comes from experience which makes all the difference.”

Lovell and co-owner Andrew Smith ran the numbers to “figure out if we could curate a Kickstarter that offered good value to our players as well as making financial sense for us”.

“The concept work was around a month of work in design and iteration. We’ve also spent probably another month or so on figuring out the rewards, building the Kickstarter page, generating marketing assets and so on.”

The final campaign is seeking £18,000 to deliver a plush toy of the game character Trashy along with lighter-lift items like posters, T-shirts, pins, artbooks and stickers, and if the goal is reached then Spilt Milk will maintain a permanent merch store. The hope is it will be a new enduring revenue stream for the studio, although “not a huge one,” Lovell says.

“The goal is to have cool stuff for players, while a certain level of success here will enable us to have a permanent merch store… Merch is an important sideline and a lot of fun, but not the main business.”

“This is community interaction we already do, just refocused around the campaign for its duration.”

The hard yards of nurturing and maintaining the Kickstarter will be handled by studio founder Andrew Smith without involving the studio’s developers, although Lovell said the workload should largely fit into existing output. “We already spend a lot of time making social content, interacting with the community. This campaign, while it’s live, will occupy a lot of Andrew’s time in particular, but some of that is community interaction he already spends a decent amount of time doing, just refocused around the campaign for its duration.”

Lovell says that the studio’s following gives the team faith that the approach will work. “We don’t think we could do this without the existing community on Kickstarter, Steam, Discord and so on, that we have been nurturing for years. And the cozy community is a natural fit with the crowdfunding model.” As to whether it’s a sensible approach for other studios looking to diversify their income: “I’ll answer that at the end of the campaign.”

The campaign will run until February 20th and is partnered with the Immune Deficiency Foundation, with sales of a custom pin badge sending $5 to the charity.