From License Woes To Employees Let Go, 2023 Was A Rollercoaster Of A Year For RPGs
2023 shook the tabletop RPG industry to its very core, ushered in the time of the ORC, and ended with the wrong kind of bang.
The last year was truly a rollercoaster for the tabletop industry. Just looking at Wizards of the Coast alone is enough to make you experience the epic highs and lows of high school football. But, the RPG industry is a lot more than one company. And with all that in mind, here’s a look back at the peaks and valleys of the year in RPGs.
And it all started a thousand years ago, in the earliest days of January, 2023, with three simple letters: OGL.
The OGL Saga
If you don’t remember (and I envy you if you don’t), 2023 started out with one of the most explosive stories in the RPG industry to date. Leaked emails from a WotC presentation for potential partners/publishers revealed that they were planning to “de-authorize” the Open Gaming License. And the story, from ex-io9er Lin Codega, broke wide open.
A leaked draft revealed WotC’s plans to bring the competition to heel, with a 20-25% royalty scheme for large projects (anything $750k or more), as well as tamping down on apps, and anything digital, including many popular fan-created character sheets:
“The OGL wasn’t intended to fund major competitors and it wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming. We are updating the OGL in part to make that very clear.”
The community galvanized against this brazen display of naked greed by WotC, cancelling D&D Beyond subscriptions en masse, as well as flooding every WotC social media channel with dissent. And money talks, as it always does. The cancellation of subscriptions took D&D communications from “they won, and so did we” to “okay never mind, the whole SRD is in the Creative Commons now”.
Which shows definitively that collective action works, and works best when it carries immediate monetary consequences.
The ORC License
Before the OGL dust had settled though, the tabletop gaming industry itself decided it wasn’t going to take things lying down. In the face of WotC’s OGL power-grab, an alliance of more than 1500 publishers and creators came together under the banner of the Open RPG Creative (ORC) License, a new open license for people to license their own games.
Heralded by Azora law, the ORC hit its final draft earlier this year, and the first few products have already been released under its auspices, most notably, Pathfinder Remastered, an OGL-free update to Pathfinder 2nd Edition. But other products are soon to come out under its banner. What it means for the industry, we have yet to see. But 2024 will be shaped by its effects.
Everyone Gets Into RPGs, But Not Necessarily D&D
2023 was also the year that everyone got into RPGs. From Welcome to Night Vale to The Magnus Archives and a potential Brandon Sanderson-helmed Stormlight Archive RPG, which are basically RPG-ready thanks to their exhaustive magic systems, to Blade Runner and then some, 2023 was a big year for RPG tie-ins. And while previously, we’d seen folks everywhere from Dr. Who to Lord of the Rings release their games “fully compatible” with 5th Edition D&D, that doesn’t seem to be the default position anymore.
The latest batch of RPGs incorporating big licenses, including Nickolodeon’s Avatar: the Last Airbender, pointedly don’t use D&D, instead opting for their own systems or the more narrative-friendly framework of something like Powered-by-the-Apocalypse.
A Thousand Fantasy Competitors Launch
Another bit of fallout from the OGL saga, but also an inevitability as WotC moves to make their own framework more of a “walled garden”, was the announcement and launch of several D&D competitors. From “classic fantasy” RPGs like Kobold Press’ Tales of the Valiant, to the as-yet-untitled MCDM RPG (currently in the millions on Kickstarter), 2023 also saw the launch of myriad folks angling for the fantasy space on the tabletop.
And while 2024 will be the year we all find out, the headwinds are pretty strong as people leave D&D in the wake of yet another major misstep in the industry, this one at the tail end of 2023.
Hasbro Plucks Its Golden Goose
This is the most recent big thing to happen in the RPG industry in a year of big things. A little over two weeks ago, Hasbro announced they would be laying off 1,100 employees citing flagging toy sales and needing to boost the company’s “health” (aka profits). And while initially, many had hoped that WotC having one of their biggest years and, indeed, being the only profitable arm of Hasbro alongside working with Larian for the release of the absolute masterpiece that is Baldur’s Gate 3, would spare the company from cuts, folks at WotC are gone in droves.
Layoffs include many art directors, designers, and “almost everyone” from the WotC team who helped get Baldur’s Gate 3 made in the first place. With 20% of the workforce gone from across Hasbro, WotC’s future is murkier headed into 2024.
All this loads us into D&D’s 50th anniversary and a year of inflection for the tabletop RPG industry.
