Moving From Planned Obsolescence To Constant Discovery

I admit it – I forgot to go to Gamegrene for a while. So I only just found this article. It certainly looks like a catch-22: too many revised editions and supplements and people complain about being bled dry, too few and they’ll say it’s a “dead game.” However, there’s Sorceror, a game that announces at the start the finite and very small number of supplements it intends to have, ever. Sorceror seems to be testing the model that Satyre encourages in his rant. So, if Sorceror is in fact interpreted as “dead” by the buying public a year from now, where does that leave Ron Edwards? The same place that, say, Blizzard is after they put out one or two expansion packs for their last game: at the beginning of the design process for the next one. What if game publishers kept creating and taking risks, instead of flogging the old workhorses? In the wake of D20, there’s room for many smaller games, that play to niches and encourage creativity on the part of players, not codependence. Maybe it won’t be possible to make a non-D20 game huge in the future, but maybe hugeness won’t be the only option.