One More Multiverse: The Virtual TTRPG Platform is Shutting Down
One More Multiverse, an ambitious virtual tabletop platform with an expansive pixel art style will be shutting down soon.
Last week, One More Multiverse, a virtual tabletop that owes as much to the 16-bit JRPG era as it does to tabletop RPGs, announced it would be shutting down within 90 days. If you never gave it a try, the most distinguishing feature about One More Multiverse was the pixel art and digital world that it offered users.
A few asset packs, some art and animation and you could really get things cooking. But that might be why the vtt is shutting down. It’s a lot of extra things to juggle.
But first, let’s look at the announcement.
One More Multiverse Shutting Down
Per One More Multiverse’s announcement, the platform will be shutting down owing to a lack of financial sustainability:
All tales come to an end, including ours. It pains us to inform you that One More Multiverse as a whole is closing down. Simply put, One More Multiverse isn’t sustainable to run. We’re proud of the team we’ve built and the players we’ve helped while bringing our wild ambitious dreams to life. We spent the past year working very hard to develop a new path forward, but after careful consideration it’s become clear that it’s not enough to support the OMM platform. For that, we are sorry.
As you can see from some of the screenshots, there was a lot going on with the platform. The virtual tabletop partnered with indie RPG titles like Blades in the Dark and Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast to give them a home with some highly polished assets from characters to environments, even animations.
But all of that might be a part of what contributed to the lack of sustainability. While the team clearly had a lot of love for the games, the resources needed to mount a campaign in any of them, were a little more extensive.
And that barrier to entry for GMs may have proven difficult. After all, even in a more GM-supported system like Blades in the Dark, it’s still the work of one person to set the stage for the campaign.
It’s the same kind of barrier that other virtual tabletops might run into. A big part of the perceived problem with WotC’s big vtt is that they’ll focus so much on creating textures and asset packs and miniatures and one of the big signposts in the OGL saga from early 2023 was trying to stop people from making custom spell animations in their virtual tabletops that used D&D. That adds up to video games but with extra steps.
The big draw of roleplaying games is the limitless potential of the imagination. Baldur’s Gate 3 sings because of how much it lets the players get away with it. And even then, people still find the edges.
Still, it was nice to see a home for smaller games in the virtual space. And hopefully, going forward, more games will start appearing on more platforms so everyone can play.
