Industry
· March 14, 2025
Mid-size fantasy studios are quietly winning the year
The story most outlets aren't telling: while attention is fixed on the largest publishers and the smallest solo developers, a cohort of 40-to-120 person fantasy and RPG studios is shipping the most interesting work of the decade. We profile twelve of them, look at how they're funded, and ask what changed between 2020 and now. The short version is that mid-sized publishers learned to give these teams three-year runway and a single seasoned producer, and the results speak for themselves.
Craft
· March 12, 2025
How three studios approached the same dragon design brief
Three independent studios shipped expansions this quarter that each placed a dragon at the centre of the marketing, the cover, and the late-game encounter. By coincidence, all three started their concept process at roughly the same time. We talked to the lead concept artists at each studio about the briefs they were given, the reference they pulled from, and the very different creatures they ended up with. Three answers to the same question, none of them wrong.
Preservation
· March 10, 2025
A fan archive saves another shuttered fantasy MMO
Six years ago, an anonymous group of fans started cataloguing every fantasy MMO whose servers had gone dark. The list now runs to several hundred worlds, some of them legendary, some forgotten the week they shut down. We profile the people behind it, the legal grey area they navigate, the emulator stacks they've built, and the conversations they refuse to have on the record. Preservation, in 2025, is being done by volunteers in their evenings while platform holders take credit for the medium's history.
Live Service
· March 8, 2025
The fantasy expansion has become a release model, not a milestone
Of the twenty most-played fantasy and RPG releases of 2024, fourteen now ship the bulk of their content via paid expansions on a rolling annual cadence. We talk to four developers about why "1.0" is increasingly a marketing event and not a creative one, and what that means for reviews, for community expectations, and for the players who are tired of buying games whose actual shape only becomes visible after two years of patches.
Communities
· March 5, 2025
Regional roleplay servers outlive the official MMO scenes
The major fantasy MMOs have spent five years consolidating their official events into shorter, slicker, more transactional formats. The unofficial regional roleplay scene — Tokyo housing-district meetups, North London tavern nights, Bay Area Wednesday writing circles, Lagos lore-night quarterlies — has spent five years expanding. We map the regional ecosystems, talk to the people running events at a loss because they care, and look at why the format works precisely because nobody is trying to "scale" it.
Tools
· March 3, 2025
The fantasy engine landscape is messier than the headlines
A year and a half after the licensing controversy that nobody has fully forgotten, the indie fantasy engine market has fragmented in ways that surprise even the people who predicted fragmentation. Godot is up but not the way the loudest accounts on social media said it would be. Unreal grew in segments it didn't expect. Bespoke engines are back. We talked to twenty-three small developers about what they're actually using to build fantasy worlds, and why.