Soft Moves and Soft Power

Episode 15 of the Rascal Radio Hour brings some big opinions to the table regarding industry awards, conventions, and (checks notes) Belonging Outside Belonging games? Hoo, boy. And I thought it was spicy when Chase and Rowan were alone on the mic. Instead, Thomas sits opposite our regular host for his first one-on-one podcast full of financial pessimism, stressing out friends, and media recommendations.

The pair reach all the way back to the end of May for impressions from the UK Games Expo show floor before sprinting through more recent news, such as the reincarnation of White Wolf Publishing and tabletop business owners heading to Washington, D.C. on a truth-telling mission. Eventually, the Questing Dungeon spits out some interesting quandries for our hosts to untangle.

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Here's an excerpt:

Chase: Bit of speculation here, but Asmodee has a few RPGs. Most notably, they have the new Arkham Horror RPG and also Edge Studios, although Edge has not really done much of note as of late. But when you take both of those properties, you combine it with bringing Mike Mearls in a sort of directorial position, and then you have the owner and CEO of Asmodee talk about still going through with its mergers and acquisition plan, I begin to wonder if they have some larger moves for their RPG imprint. If we're gonna see a lot of RPG companies maybe get swallowed up by Asmodee.

Thomas: Yeah, Asmodee is also is one of those companies whose financial history is so complicated. They were owned by one company, they were owned by another company. They used to contain these studios. Now, they don't contain these studios. They have debt. They don't have debt. It's really hard to keep track. It's a full-time job to figure out what's happening at Asmodee.

And also with Mike Mearl, I don't think anybody has any kind of resolution on the allegations made about him shielding Zak S. That's the thing hanging over all of this

Chase: Yeah, it's strange. I don't have any sort of personal opinions about Mike Mearls going over to Asmodee. It's a corporate move. I'm sure he got made a good offer, and I don't really have enough information to make an authoritative assumption about what this means for Asmodee as a company. But with tariffs still looming over the industry — we've done a lot of reporting about how frightened and cautious a lot of RPG companies are staring down tariffs and US stuff.

I worry that Asmodee is going to offer a really convenient safe harbor, and some RPG companies that might have otherwise been able to make it on their own will take the easy route and just sell the business over to Asmodee. No judgment to the folks who do! I am just professionally not on the side of conglomeration and ownership in that way. I think it is ultimately a really bad idea for the industry.

Thomas: I love this, I love this. Let's play a game where we run horse racing bets on which studios will get bought by Asmodee. How long Asmodee will respect their agency and ownership of their licenses and, you know, just how quickly those games will get destroyed in the corporate black hole that these companies can easily be.

Like Edge Studios: I'm sure there are people who remember some product from Edge Studios that they really liked, and then were just like, okay, I guess that's gone forever. And then maybe it's not gone. Maybe it comes back, but you have no idea.

Chase: From everything that I can tell, Asmodee is not a dismal company to work for. Luckily, they un-Embraced, they are not part of Embracer Group, which has miles of print copy reporting on how terrible Embracer Group is as a company. From all I can tell, Asmodee is fairly benign. Listeners should read up on Plaid Hat Games, which was a company that was sold to Asmodee when they ran into financial troubles and then bought their independence back. Critically, a lot of their original games did not come with them. Those stayed the intellectual property of Asmodee, but the owner of Plat Hat Games got out with as many workers as he could. And while the owner has edged around the reasons why, there's enough to intimate that being owned by a corporate entity like Asmodee was, at best, creatively stifling. And at worst, use your imagination. They are a corporation, they they they're going to prize profitability as much as possible.

Put me down as cautiously pessimistic regarding whoever takes that bet. It feels like a poisoned chalice, but these are dire times and people wanna keep their jobs, which is exactly the sort of like environment that creates monopolistic conglomerations within a corporate structure. Womp, womp.