Are Modern Games Doomed?

https://www.archivesofnethys.com/agreement.html

Some terrible news for open gaming today, as Paizo ends its partnership with the Archives of Nethys, the free online rules resource for everything Pathfinder and Starfinder.

At this point, if you invest in digital, ot support games that live behind paywalls, you need to ask yourself some hard questions. Many games are guilty too, such as 5E versions, where the SRD is free, but what you actually need to play (subclasses and character options) are locked behind book or PDF purchases.

When the major VTTs shut down and all those digital books are lost, nobody will get anything back. If D&D Beyond ever folds or is sold to a group that shuts it down, all of that is gone.

I also get why Paizo would go this way. Who would ever buy digital copies of Pathfinder 2 rulebooks with Nethys out there providing the more popular and free alternative? Major VTTs don't see any money from supporting Paizo games, nor will most people buy VTT books for something they can get for free, better supported elsewhere.

At this point, why wouldn't I only support games like Basic Fantasy or OSRIC? Kevin Crawford put a few of his core rule sets under a public domain CC license. The excellent 2E clone game For Gold & Glory, you can distribute the PDF for free as long as you aren't selling access to it; you can share it freely and post it on a website. Basic Fantasy's PDF is free, and the books are printed at cost.

We have far better alternatives.

When does modern gaming get to be too much?

If this were the world of open-source software, Pathfinder would be forked and cloned, and the free version would start development. It took far less for OpenOffice to be forked into LibreOffice. This is how the real world works.

But this isn't how the silly world of gaming works.

One group would attack the other for "hurting the game," and nothing that people swear they believe in, open and free gaming for everyone, would ever get done. People who complain that capitalism is ruining gaming will not support games owned and run by the community, and will go out of their way to attack those communities as they keep playing games printed by Wall Street. They won't consider free and open alternatives.

I will miss the old Nethys site.

It is the end of an era.