We are in a bust phase of role-playing tabletop games, with D&D seriously faltering on that side of the hobby, and many people just turning indifferent to new releases from Wizards and third-party D&D creators. One notable creator who made most of their money from 5E now says their own game is making more, and sales across the board for 2024 D&D have cratered.
People are sticking with what they have and not "upgrading" or "seeking 2024 material" unless they are forced to, and it isn't that many.
Blog hits are way down, too, and I am moving back into programming and software development and taking courses. The hobby is dead, with the air let out of D&D 2024, and people are mostly giving up or filtering into niche games. If D&D 5E survives, it will be through Shadowdark.
People say Shadowdark is far less of a headache to set up and run than a session zero of D&D, with everyone running to D&D Beyond and designing freakish niche classes and characters. We get this in GURPS, too, without some tight control on character design.
I hope the GURPS revision doesn't divide the community, and a part of me wishes the game would be left as-is. I know YouTube will go clickbait on any changes to the core GURPS books; click hunters gotta make rage-bait content to keep their channels afloat. Even if they never covered the game or don't cover it at all, you know it will be a barrage of "GURPS gone woke" one video after another, even with sensible and reasonable changes to update the book for a wider audience range.
I love GURPS, but I know how people are, and the desperation of many of these channels and who they will dump on for clicks. It is a sad state of affairs that we can't have positive, constructive, and game-focused content. YouTube and its "engagement" are a blight on tabletop gaming. It gets so bad that I unsubscribe and tune them out. Even the 5E hype channels are becoming sad, "please watch me," channels that beg for views and comments.
There are times I need to escape it all.
But I am learning Rust and enjoying the language. We finally have a language that puts some thought into data, buffer overflows, variables, and tight memory control. There is a learning curve, but it is not as hard as GURPS once you grasp a few core concepts. Everything is migrating to this language—from AWS to Linux—and it is the future of systems and application development.
While gaming is in a slump, I am working on other skills.
Even games will move over to Rust once the tooling and knowledge expand, since testing is built in, refactoring is easier, and the applications will not compile if they have memory leaks or serious pointer flaws. The cost to maintain a game and the development costs will go down once the engine spreads from system development into the application space.
C and C++ are dying. It is a shocking thing to see. But the demise was foretold long ago by the language's failure to change and its being far too permissive with security and trust. We simply do not live in an age where we can't trust the software that controls the planes we fly in, the banks we put our savings into, the medical devices we rely on, and the cars we drive.
Coding, like gaming, has gotten far too permissive and out of control. Character power, combinations that break the game, and builds that do nothing but exploit one fringe rule are commonplace. Rust shows you can put tight controls on a system and still achieve expressiveness while maintaining control over the development experience. GURPS suffers from this outdated game design paradigm, too, and it feels like C++ in an era where application development requires a tighter rein on memory access and variable scope and lifetimes.
D&D 2024 is 100% loosey-goosey characters who can over-spec into passive perception and be like automatic trap radars in a dungeon, or over-spec into social and walk around saying they own everything in the kingdom, and make themselves the rulers. The era of this sort of massively careless and sloppy design paradigm is on its way out, and the far-too-permissive games of the 2020s will be seen as relics of overdesigned characters, designers who did not care, zero-challenge adventures that are more themed time-wasters, and executives who just needed to sell more books with OP subclass options.
One side of Wizards is shipping cozy game starter sets, while the other is kneeling at the altar of Dragonlance and proclaiming that the old-school is back, and I see a confused hydra with heads that don't know what the other ones are doing. Meanwhile, players are walking away in droves or simply stopping to care.
We are heading into an era of tighter, more secure, tested, less permissive, and proven designs.
Working well, proving the math, and being supportable will soon be seen as highly desirable features in gaming, as this "do anything" culture fades along with many of the systems that cling to the old ways.
