The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR Is Dead

“How do you make a small fortune in tabletop gaming?” runs an old joke. The punchline, of course, is that you come to that market with a large one. The tabletop truly is a brutally challenging place to try to earn money, one which you have to be either wildly deluded or unbelievably passionate to even contemplate entering. Nevertheless, people have been making a go of it there for quite some decades by now. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that love rather than mental illness is the motivating force. For, whatever else you can say about these folks, nobody is more passionate about their hobby than old-school tabletoppers. If you do dare to dream of making real money on the tabletop, there are two ways you might envision doing so. One is to strike gold with a once-in-a-blue-moon mass-market perennial of the sort that eventually winds up in every other family’s closet: a Monopoly, a Scrabble, a Clue, a Trivial Pursuit. Under this model, you sell that one game to ten ... Read full article.