Ken Burnside on how screwed Asmodee is

[Cergorach]

the several months with no new products during the transition, plus killing the forums several months prior to that when Asmodee first bought FFG, did not help sales at all. And seeing the FFG SW staff, the people who knew the game, kicked to the curb or migrated to boardgames was also not popular with the fans.

The L5R staff seem to have all left.

Asmodee bought/merged with FFG on November 17th 2014. The RPG forums were still up and being posted to in 2020.

Or do you mean FFG stopping with RPGs and Asmodee moving the RPGs over to Edge Studios? That's 2020, at least 5 years after the merger with Asmodee. And about two years after FFG founder and then CEO of Asmodee NA Christian T. Petersen left the company (with a boatload of money).

As for all the L5R writers leaving... I love the L5R setting! I still have a ton of the Clan Wars stuff, the old CCG, and the old RPGs. But it was never that popular/profitable in the first place... It's not for nothing that Five Ring Publishing was dissolved, bought by WotC, then sold again to AEG and sold again in 2015 to FFG. AEG didn't sell L5R to FFG because it was doing so well... And the current slow release cycle of L5R books might just mean the TTRPG market has changed significantly, even the biggest player in the sandbox WotC hasn't been releasing as many books for 5e as they did for 3e/4e D&D...

AND FFG has always been an opportunistic company in the first place milking an IP for all it's worth and then dropping it when it shows it's not doing as well or showing signs of decline. Just look at all the licensed IPs FFG has had, and all of it's own IPs that aren't active anymore (some for a LONG time). And that's behaviour from way before they sold/merged themselves with Asmodee.

You can't blame everything on Asmodee when clearly many of the things people complain about were FFGs bread and butter way before Asmodee came into the picture.