Gen Con 2025: The Gamer Diaspora

When we first began attending Gen Con, some of the biggest booths were from companies such as Days of Wonder, Catan, Fantasy Flight, and Z-Man. Then, in the mid-2010s, that began to change as Asmodee went and bought up all of the companies listed above using investment firm money, and now all of said firms are but a subsidiary of the Embracer Group.

Yes, the same Embracer Group that has been taking a sledgehammer to the video game industry in its quest to make the quickest dollar. I've discussed this before, but one of the side effects of the Embracer Group ruining the quality of a bunch of popular board game companies is that all of those game designers dispersed into the gaming ecosphere and began putting out their own games under new companies. And other people looked at that vacuum created by Embracer and said "Hey, you know what, I bet I could design something new and cool!"

The net effect is that 2025's Gen Con looked far more diverse than what I'd seen in years.

Of course, you couldn't escape the gravitational pull of
Magic: the Gathering collectors, but that aside...

***

This was also the first Gen Con where most of the family got together to attend since 2015. Our youngest took a pass this year (she is also waist deep in her internship, so life, you know) but everybody else managed to make it to Indianapolis. Our oldest and her partner came down from Milwaukee on Saturday to meet up with friends, visit the Con, and go to Critical Role's live show, while the rest of us assembled early on Sunday and drove up from Cincinnati.

We got in early enough that we beat the crowds.

For the first time in forever, we got in early enough that we had no issues parking. If anything, the cars in front of us had more trouble navigating the digital parking lot system than actually fighting traffic itself. (Yes, we slew the Parking Lot Monster without much trouble.)

I realize that the Indianapolis Convention Center has big screens around by design, but I still am surprised by them when I see them in the main entrance:

Even if they're owned by Gen Con LLC, they're still quite impressive. They cycle with different games and other information every 10-15 seconds or so.

Once everybody arrived and the Exhibit Hall opened, we dispersed into the crowd. The idea was to loop back at noon and head out for lunch, so we had a bit less than 2 hours to wander the hall.

A few things stood out to me the moment I walked inside. The crowd was denser on this Sunday than they had been in the recent past --it felt more like a Saturday's crowd-- and that while some stalwarts still held court...

It was likely my son was in there somewhere.

There were a lot of newer booths in the crowd. Such as the invasion of the V-tubers:

And Brandon Sanderson made his presence felt:

One of the many displays around.

I've no idea if Brandon was here --and I just checked and it doesn't appear that he was-- but the Author Guest of Honor was Ohioan and frequenter of my local bookstore, John Scalzi, so if I'd have actually attended on Saturday I might have seen him out and about.

Okay, that's a very cagey "might" there, because I was aware of some RPG content creators who were there*, but damned if I ran into any of them while I fought my way through the crowds. Now, that's not quite fair, since Margaret Weis held court in her usual location in the middle of the Exhibit Hall, and I did briefly see Ed Greenwood at one of the booths over in the far left hand side of the Exhibit Hall --you can't miss that beard of his-- next to the... wait for it... MIT Press booth.

Yes, you read that right.

MIT Press had a booth there at the con, because they print Jon Peterson's Playing at the World 2E, a newer edition of Jon's original self-published work. My son and I got a chance to talk to the guy at the booth, and while they don't print games themselves, he was surprised to discover that there was a lot of interest in MIT Press' catalog of books at the con. (Oh, and Jon's book sold out.) He and I discussed another surprise con vendor, Central Michigan University, who actually do publish board games through their academic press. If you played the journaling RPG Five Hundred Year Old Vampire, then you ought to know that a multi-player version has been released as a CMU published game.

Anyway, we reconvened at noon with me texting out "Avengers Assemble" to the group chat when the time came, and we grabbed lunch at the nearby Old Spaghetti Factory. We didn't go to the nearby mall, because it appears the mall is being/has been sold to a development company and is shutting down. So... no more food court, I suppose. We got a chance to catch up over the hour plus we spent at OSF, and it was a pleasant way to geek out over things we saw at the Exhibit Hall.

There was someone selling "smelly dice" there at the con, for example.

"Want to smell my dice?" my oldest asked with a savage grin.

Uh, what?

She got the one named "Cemetery Soil", which smells like moss, although to me it smelled like allergies: pleasant but full of earthy overtones.

I tried to link to the pic from Studio Woe, but
it wouldn't take. So here it is.

My son has gone far enough down the rabbit hole of Warhammer 40K that he picked up an Eldar t-shirt. "Space Elves", I translated for my wife. 

Speaking of my wife, she discovered this game that is going up on Kickstarter soon, called Mystic Curling Club, which looks a bit like Sorry Sliders but with using dice:

I'd have gotten a pick of some people using it next to this
display, but I figured this photo would be enough.

My nephew is really into owls, and my wife also found a 100 piece puzzle this is about owl anatomy, or "owl-atomy"...

I mentioned the 4 person chess set that I discovered, and my son's partner just kind of gave me the "Okay, NOW I'm interested" look about it:

I looked and that and thought,
"My brain would hurt keeping track of that."

When we returned from lunch, I made sure to get a few extra photos...

The obligatory front view of the entrance.

For the record, not a Pandaren.

Gotta respect the classics...
Dungeon Crawl Classics, that is.

This was also the 50th anniversary of Chaosium, the creators of Call of Cthulhu, Runequest/Glorantha, and Pendragon. There were several glass displays out in the hallways celebrating the company's 50 years in business:

There was another display for Chaosium in general,
but it was taken down close to closing time on Sunday.
Given all of the rare items on display, I can totally 
understand why they made it a priority to make sure
the items were safe.

There's also the obligatory Dwarven Forge display pic:

That chimney in the bottom left was actually smoking.
And this year I actually signed up for their mailing list.

I told my wife the surest sign that we won the lottery is that I started buying Dwarven Forge items.

And oh yeah, here's the obligatory "gamer table" pic, although I could have chosen one of several companies to display:

Okay, they're two photos because I couldn't fit the entire thing into one pic, but you get the idea. The DM screen is wooden, like everything else, and it just screams luxury. And ambience. And "I'm an AI developer with money to spare."

At 3:30, we assembled, said our goodbyes to the family, and headed for home.

***

I really feel like what we're seeing in this Gen Con is the impact of Embracer's attempt to dominate the board game and RPG industry. As Princess Leia said in the original Star Wars...

From memegenerator and Reddit. (And Star Wars.)

That's what's happening in the industry right now. As people tried to dominate the industry by buying up all of the companies and intellectual property, developers have gone independent (by choice or layoff) and their separate companies are now bringing games to Gen Con. The ability of people to utilize better design and build techniques at home enable them to bring far more polished prototypes to places like Gen Con to generate interest. Crowdfunding enables small groups and companies to generate capital without relying upon venture capital firms who have proven to only have short term goals at heart.

There were a lot of people interested in supporting new designs and games, as well as a lot of people flocking to the Artists' Alley and Authors' Alley areas; it was so thick there I couldn't make it through and kind of gave up. Still, despite my disappointment, it shows that art in its various forms is still generating interest.

This atmosphere lent an air of a trade show to the con, something that you'd have seen in Origins in years past. 

And before you ask, there was an unsaid amount of concern about tariffs there, but given that nobody at the con had the least bit of control over said tariffs, it just kind of was just there as a dampening effect.

***

As for me, I didn't buy anything this year. A good part of that is due to finances: I'd already committed to Gen Con before some of our major car repair bills made their appearance, and I had a hard time buying anything with all of THAT hovering over my head like the Sword of Damocles. 

But even more than that, I wasn't feeling well. 

I believe I've mentioned before that on average of twice a month my digestive system reacts to my medications and kicks me in the ass for a day or two. Well, Sunday was one of those days. The moment I woke up I felt something was off, and sure enough before I could even eat and shower I began feeling like crap. Still, I soldiered on, hoping that the bout would pass and then I could get back on with enjoying things. That didn't exactly happen, but I concealed my issues as best I could** and tried to enjoy things at Gen Con. The crowd was energetic, people weren't assholes (not too much, anyway), and ordinarily I'd have had the time of my life. For this introvert, that's saying a lot. But I just couldn't get into the groove, and I decided to take some time off and stroll about the hallways to recharge my batteries.

There was still a large crowd out in the hallway
where the balloon sculpture was.

Here's a closeup of said sculpture, complete with
a sea monster attacking a ship.

The walk helped me feel a bit less stressed, but I just had to grit out my health issues for the rest of the day.

All in all, it was an okay Gen Con for 2025. On the plus side, most of the family was able to get together, and we enjoyed each other's company. On the minus side, health issues. But aside from that, it felt good to be away for a day. 

*Hi, Professor DM! Sorry I didn't run into you. I did keep an eye out, however.

**Apparently I did it well enough that when I finally got over this late Monday, my wife was surprised that I was feeling ill any part of Sunday.