If anyone else is looking for grieving/closure, yesterday’s bad news reminded me of this episode of 99% Invisible: Game Over - 99% Invisible
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I saw a thread over on Bluesky that distilled a lot of why I feel so profoundly sad about this situation.
GTG isn’t just “a board game company”. They’re a company of genuinely good people, something that’s rare among people in general nowadays, let alone companies!
Christopher and Paul in particular I’ve always highly enjoyed any time I interact with them because they’re just both good souls who operate on sincerity.
And they’ve had a solid impact on the industry. They’ve fostered other creators and developed techniques that other creators have benefitted from borrowing from.
Their products are pretty wholesome, too. In an industry that sometimes has discussions about problematic aspects of their IPs, GTG’s products come from the minds of a progressive company that wants to foster creativity. In particular, their most popular product is an uncompromising critique of colonialism. Their original product is one that has a large LGBT base because they took the time to be inclusive and respectful to minorities.
And they’re a feel-good success story. Two best friends (and a later third friend) who wanted to make superhero stories and got to spin that into a successful small business.
Christopher himself is even an immigrant success story, just to add even more to this.
I’ve always felt bad the disproportionate amount of problems GTG used to deal with from other people in comparison to all the above. They had a head-scratching number of “fans” who would be inexplicably bad faith towards them (and sometimes each other), and they had business partners who would cause problems in some fashion or be unreliable.
And this just seems like the ur example of that. GTG closing not because of any particular mistake on their part, but because of the whims of a madman. And from the info I’ve heard, FRG also handled this remarkably inelegantly versus taking the time to do things smoothly and constructively.
It’s like… anti-karma, almost. These are people who deserved better but didn’t get it. And that’s what makes me profoundly sad about the situation.
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Hey, don’t give up on the GTG team just yet. Look at how far they’ve come already, and all the obstacles they’ve overcome to accomplish everything they have! They’ve grown an entire franchise from scratch in a very competive environment, created an entire very loyal community, and published more Sentinels peoducts than I cam count off the top of my head. It may take awhile, but I believe they’ll find a way to recover from this. After all, they are the real Sentinels of the Multiverse!
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Agreed – we don’t know what the plans are, at this point, only that most of the employees were let go.
Hopefully FRG provides some details, soon, on how they plan to move forward with GTG’s backlog of projects. 
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