He did say at one point that he was no longer employed by them, right?
No. Christopher, Adam, and Paul are all still FRG employees (at the time of this post).
However, from this and the post he made about the RPG, it’s pretty clear he has no part in or insight into anything they’re doing. He can’t even access the RPG materials that were works in progress—which, I infer, means he’s not even allowed to talk to the freelancers who were working on a lot of it. So they might be signing his checks, but calling him “employed” by them might be a functional misstatement.
Specifically, the RPG update reads as follows:
Hey, folks;
I don’t have new dates or approvals to share this month. I’d love to be able to send you anything at all, but I don’t have access to any materials now, so I have nothing to show, though I’m still hopeful about the future and ready to spin up work whenever I’m able. This is not much of an update, but it’s the honest one. When anything moves, I’ll let you know. Would love to deliver a plan and schedule instead of vague reassurance.
-Christopher
Probably safe to assume that the zine spinoff game is in the same straits, even though it wasn’t originally part of the KS goals.
AFAIK, they’re not only all GTG employees (under FRG, of course), they’re also all of the GTG employees. Everyone else was let go when the subsidiary company was shuttered.
Hopefully if Disparation sells like hotcakes, things may develop more positively. They couldn’t afford to keep running this giant operation with lots of products under development constantly; if they’re able to dig themselves out of the hole and even make back some profit, then things may start to look up again.
I hope FRG just figures out whether they are or aren’t going to move on from GtG. They’ve basically have had GtG in a limbo since April and haven’t really been clear on their plans. Before it was announced Disparation was finally going to be printed and distributed, they sold off Compile and a few other items with a message saying they wanted out of the Board Game industry. In August, Christopher seemed to think he might have more news about GtG to share that month but never did.
The last two months of updates were written in a way that strongly suggests to me Christopher is under company limitations on what exactly he can share in public.
FRG owned a few other gaming imprints. Do we know what happened to those? Are they pulling back from everything tabletop, or just GTG?
It certainly looks like everything tabletop.
Flat River games sold Synapses Games and Luma Imports to ACD Distribution (and then sold Compile, Get Bit, and Medium to Synapse Games), which included having three employees that I think they hired as part of acquiring Luma leave to reform it under ACD. They also returned Cheapass Games to Crab Fragment Labs, so that’s out.
With those groups gone, I’m pretty sure that Greater Than Games is their only tabletop subsidiary. I went to see if there were any games under distribution that weren’t covered by the sales aside from Sentinels and Spirit Island, but the Greater than Games store page is still advertising Synapse and Cheapass games (presumably they have deal to sell off warehouse stock?) so the following information might be wrong.
In addition to GtG, Synapse, and Cheapass, the GtG webstore seems to have games from a variety of European publishers. I think those publishers are all under the Luma license, but I’m not actually sure. They’ve also got a handful of games from Darrington Press, but not their newer games, and a handful of distribution of American miniature games, which I have no idea if they’re still doing or not.
I believe FRG is just using the GTG online store front to unload things they want to get out from under (e.g., things they have in the warehouse but haven’t been able to get distributed to anyone for one reason or another), as it’s the only tool available to them to do so. ![]()
If FRG had any intention of possibly staying in the tabletop game business, they wouldn’t have sold off Compile. It’s wildly successful—not as successful as Spirit Island, yet, but moreso than Sentinels. I’m sure them offloading Sentinels and Spirit Island is a question of when rather than whether.
All you big spenders on the Patreon should just pool your savings accounts and go to FRG and say “here’s two million in cash, sell us all the Sentinels IP”. They might take it.
I’m not sure FRG has control of the Spirit Island IP. Thought that was still creator-owned, although I might have misunderstood.
Could be that FRG owns the publishing and/or distribution rights.
“IP” is not one all-encompassing thing. FRG owns the trademark “Spirit Island” in a board game context. It is possible that they do not own the copyright to the game design. I believe the copyright to the artwork is left with the artists (so they can sell prints, etc). And then there’s distribution rights.
Okay guys, maybe I’m dumb and this is nothing, it could just be a fan edit that happened a year ago and it’s meaningless and everybody knows about it…or I may have just stumbled on the answer to all this radio silence.
So this Marvel United game has apparently existed since last year, and the Fandom wiki about it has Baron Blade in it. Maybe FRG signed a deal with CMON, and/or even with Marvel Disney, to create Sentinels United? I have my doubts that the companies would refuse to say an official word about it, yet allow fans to edit a wiki with details, so I’m probably just being a moron…but at the very least it’s a strange coincidence that I found this while we’re all in limbo here.
It’s just a fan-made thing. I stumbled on it too a bit ago. At the very bottom of the page you link to is a link to this page:
Which clearly states that it’s only “A homebrew design.”
Oh well. It was nice to have hope for a moment.
Curiously, without any links to follow, that page claims to have 32 locations, which is almost a half dozen more than actually exist in all of Sentinels. I’m assuming they included a couple from DE Rook City and even Disparation, but even then, they must have some seriously deep cuts to exceed the current list of environment decks. I wonder if they chose any of the locations I’ve long thought needed a deck, such as the Citadel of the Sun, or The Sentinels’ Southwest.
Also odd is that they have four variant heroes, two of which are different Legacies, one is a wildly different Haka, and one is just Guise when he feels festive.
That is… a weird Baron Blade writeup. Lithuanian instead of Mordengradian, a Soviet super-scientist instead of the man who overthrew the Soviets and conquered his country, an orbital shrink ray… I wonder where they found it.
edit Oh, wait, I found it! Half of the writeup is about Baron Blade’s father, the golden age villain Fyodor Ramonat.
The locations are in the google drive link on that site.
It’s nothing that fancy - locations are much less elaborate in Marvel United, and you play six of them in a single game, so the makers of the fan expansion broke a bunch of environments into multiple smaller locations.
Mordengrad is a city state within Lithuania, close to the Latvian border, that’s established as canon somewhere.