FFG to Phase Out RPG Lines
As reported over at d20 Radio, I looks like Fantasy Flight Games will begin phasing out of developing RPGs. This includes their Star Wars line, Legend of the Five Rings, and Genesys.
As far as Star Wars goes, they’ve come out with career books for every line, as well as books meant for every version of the game they have, so I feel like at this point the game is fairly complete. They had only just begun with L5R and Genesys however so that’s disappointing. It seems odd that in a time that RPGs are exploding they’d drop out of the running, but I’m guessing they just weren’t making the money that their parent company wanted.
Now I need to get out there and pick up all the rest of the Star Wars books, as well as the Genesys Core and Android book.
I know it’s not the full story by any measure, but I really suspect some of the toughest things working against them in the current market were: 1) no PDFs for Star Wars RPG, 2) no digital tools (ala D&D Beyond) for such an otherwise option-heavy and high-profile game. Plus the license fees have to be killer, considering they also picked up Marvel for card & mini games, so they had to be really fast with shutting down any line that doesn’t constantly make fat stacks.
I was just about to dive into Genesys a bit more, so I’m sad to see that ending. I wonder how long the Genesys Foundry program will last. It probably doesn’t require a lot of oversight to keep it going, but someday even a little oversight will be too much if there’s no money in that division of the company.