With many video game companies folding and the rumors of the industry collapsing, I have to ask the question: Is the roleplaying game industry next?
The signs are there, and 5E has been replaced among a large portion of the casual players by Baldur's Gate 3 - and the mods will cement that player base into a community of its own, millions large. And the RPG community sits downhill from the video game industry. Hard times there will mean hard times here.
Yes, you always have your games and can have fun with them. What we have will not be affected.
But companies selling new stuff?
If I were one I would be worried about the future.
How can a pen and paper experience equal that? Especially when modders and Patreon teams begin creating fully voice-acted adventures with new art, models, and dungeons? BG3 has killed D&D, at least among the mainstream audience - and the romance options in that game are the dagger in the back.
What will I do, clumsily play-act my tiefling-dragonborn romance with a group of people I don't know? Or worse, people that I do know? Or play it in the privacy of my home where I am free from that social stigma and embarrassment? The romance game in BG3 is the death of D&D. It is something the game can't - and won't - do.
The pandemic release rush of games is over, and the market is not hot anymore. Selling people 'the fixed version of the game that we rushed out for the pandemic' will be hard for any company. Re-releasing 5E or Star Trek Adventures? Or even if they try to fix Shadowrun 6E?
I doubt there is a market.
Sell well, maybe.
But never the numbers we saw before. You see it in the tone shift in Wizards, stating books are 'limited edition collector's items' and implying 'the real, supported game will be the online version.' When a market dies, it goes collector's, and the prices skyrocket.
And with D&D, this is Wall Street; they don't need to sell X million; they will need to show expansion past pandemic levels and never do that. Expectations there are entirely different in that world.
A brand has to keep going up and up, or it is a failure.
And I am seeing a lot of 'who cares' and garbage releases for games I am following. Books filled with AI art and text flooding stores. Some books are put out just to cover bases and put a foot in someone else's market. The mess of full-color books with meaningless neon and pastel full-page art spreads means nothing. Pretty to look at but as disposable as a magazine on a news rack, and the per-page helpful information is at an all-time low.
In some of these books, you will get eight pages of art and two paragraphs of rules you will use in the game. I feel that I have played some of these 'art book RPGs' after I looked through them and saw all the art. They are more 'the RPG experience' in an art book than a game. They are a strange blend of RPG and graphic novels with a rules-light system. I enjoy them, but playing them feels more like cracking open a board game than an RPG with a years-long campaign potential. Maybe this is what they do and what they are, and they do it very well.
Honestly, if Free League did Shadowrun, the game would finally be fixed and make everyone happy.
I am done buying new games. That is it. They can't release another one to get my interest. My last ones are Tales of the Valiant, Dragonslayer (as an OSE replacement), and a few others.
Otherwise, I am returning to what I love and know, which right now is my old trusted friend and standby GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy. I have a lifetime of fun to have with that. Why waste money on new stuff? I am in on the current thing that YouTube is excited about?
I have been burned too many times by hype. Enough is enough.
You see the news everywhere, layoffs and scaling back releases in console and PC gaming.
The tabletop is next.
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