Thanks for sitting down at the Epic Table! We’re back today with another news post, this one split between two major events–one from last week and one coming up this Saturday. One of them is good and one of them is bad with a small silver lining. Specifically, we’re looking at this year’s Free RPG Day and an announcement from Embracer Group AB about its structure going forward.
Hooray, Free Stuff!
Let’s get to the good news first: this Saturday, June 24th, is Free RPG Day 2023! If you’re not aware of Free RPG Day, it’s an annual event likely inspired by the similar Free Comic Book Day. The idea of the event is to help build the RPG community by providing local gaming stores with unique, limited-edition product to be used as giveaways for gamers everywhere. The “Free” part of the event is taken pretty seriously, by the way: stores are allowed to either give these items away or use them as part of “free with purchase” promos. If you see a store selling items from those kits, you should absolutely contact Gaming Days (the group behind Free RPG Day) and let them know what’s going on. Those items are meant to be given away!
The idea here is to bring gamers together at stores to socialize and build community. In other words, Gaming Days reasons that if you toss free stuff at gamers they’ll probably show up to get it. And, well, for the most part that works pretty well: Free RPG Day is now in its fifth year and still growing strong. Dozens of publishers, gaming accessory manufacturers, and more are providing items for this iteration! And yes, if I’m being cynical, that’s because most of them are in some way advertisements for the brands themselves; giving out a free adventure for your RPG ruleset is a pretty transparent marketing grab. But hey, who says we can’t all be winners here? Free stuff is free stuff, and some of it is pretty good.
The obvious big name missing from the event is Wizards of the Coast, but a ton of other large players in the RPG market space are very much present and participating. Paizo is offering free adventures for both Pathfinder and Starfinder; the Starfinder one is apparently based around aliens crashing into an amusement park. Dungeons and Dragons is represented despite Wizards’ absence through Wizkids, who have some free D&D minis and paint kits included in the pack sent to the stores.
Going further afield in 5E, Edge Games also has an adventure for Adventures in Rokugan, their 5E adaptation of Legend of the Five Rings. (Note that I personally believe that this adaption was absolutely not something that needed to happen and represents them cravenly waving the white flag, but whatever.) Loke Battle Mats also has a 5E adventure present with–wait for it–battle mats, and theirs contains something like a quick-start guide to 5E for newer players. Bring a non-gamer to Free RPG Day and teach them 5E! And then once you’ve done that, teach them Apocalypse World because it’s better! Not that I have an opinion or anything!
You can check out the complete list of products available on the Free RPG Day website linked above. Personally, I’m super excited about the not one but two different adventures offered for heroic roleplaying as dogs, who are the greatest creations on this cruel and terrible planet and deserve all positive accolades. There are also some pretty cool physical gaming accessories on offer–Q Workshop has a couple of neat-looking d6s on offer, and you can score both a dice bag and a rolling tray if those sort of things strike your fancy. All in all, there’s plenty here to tickle the fancy of pretty much any member of the community, or even a newcomer–which is, of course, the entire idea.
The Free RPG Day website has a handy store locator to help you find a participating game shop near you. Happy gaming, and enjoy!
Boo, Corporate Consolidations!
The other big news from the past week is the announcement by Embracer Games AB that they intend to pivot from focusing on investment and acquisitions to a “highly cash-flow generative business” in the immediate future. While Embracer is primarily focused on holding video game properties, they also do own Asmodee, a fairly major publisher of RPGs. As such, I feel it’s relevant to discuss what’s going on with them, as it also signals what I believe to be a trend in the larger market due to the metastasizing nature of capitalism.
Note that this next part is gonna get a little business-y/corporate. Think of it as prep for your next cyberpunk game or something.
What Embracer is doing should come as no surprise to anyone who heard about it missing its earning targets back in May. The tabletop division was profitable and showed growth, but even it was behind average growth for the tabletop market during that period. As such, their stock price got bodyslammed and they’re taking it as a sign that they should move to the next step in their acquisition-based strategy.
What strategy is that? Well, if the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because Embracer has spent the last few years or so buying basically every video game maker that they can. They’ve also branched out a bit into RPGs, tabletop games, and comics (they own Dark Horse), but video games are their main trade. And see, that’s step one in every single corporate plan to make a ton of money through acquisitions: buy all of the “fragmented market space,” or in plain terms “smaller companies that make the thing you want to make.”
The next step, once you start running out of investor money to do that with (and it looks like investor patience at Embracer is wearing thin), is to start the process of consolidation. See, capitalism thinks that if you have two people doing the same job for two similar products one of them needs to go. This is what “redundancy” is. So Embracer has done the “logical” thing and announced that there are going to be a lot of layoffs coming among the 17,000 people they employ for cost-cutting and redundancy reasons.
The problem from where we stand is that this doesn’t really respect the nature of games. What I just said kind of makes sense for something like… I don’t know, breakfast cereal, which is a mass-produced product that more or less works the same way regardless of what specific cereal you’re making. But games aren’t fucking corn flakes, and I’m not sure the investors understand that.
Games are–and I will die on this hill–works of art. They are an inherently creative endeavor in which each product, even if extremely derivative, stands as a unique entity. That means that there actually is an advantage to what capitalism sees as simple market fragmentation: a diversity of artistic expression that bolsters and elevates all artistic endeavors in the community. In other words, the more different people there are making games, the better games are. We all build off and inspire each other, and produce better games for having done so.
But that’s the opposite of what’s about to happen at Embracer–and don’t think that Asmodee is immune, either. I’d be pretty shocked if a lot of “redundancy” didn’t come from publishing, marketing, and licensing divisions–oh, and did I mention that Embracer owns the rights to the entire Middle-Earth universe? So we’re going to start to see more RPGs sold like they sell video games, and as we all know marketing in these places has a strong say into design. I’m wildly speculating here, but Asmodee might be joining Wizards in their push to see RPGs as live-service games in the near future.
The one silver lining here is that if Embracer is really winding down their acquisitions of other properties, this might just be confined to Asmodee on our RPG side. But that feels like a pretty small silver lining, honestly.
Anyway, the broader point here is that we’re now seeing the downside of the type of acquisition-happy mentality that’s prevalent in the creative business world today. The impact on RPGs may be minor for now, but we’ll see about the future.
But enough doom and gloom! Enjoy Free RPG Day. Just like… maybe boo a capitalist while you’re there, I guess.
The contents of this post are © 2024 H. Tucker Cobey. All rights reserved.
