Welcome home. This is Audio EXP, the weekly podcast from Geek Native. I am your host, Girdy, and today is the 19th of September, 2026. This week, we examine a leadership change at Steve Jackson Games that recalls the company’s earliest existential battles, look at major structural shake-ups across the UK convention circuit, track corporate de-risking strategies inside Dungeons & Dragons, and evaluate what deep discount fire sales signal for licensed roleplaying games.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #348]
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Before we jump into the headlines, an update on our community feature. I am currently speaking with Simon from Red Ruin Publishing, our September RPG Publisher Spotlight honouree. While our full conversation isn’t live on the site yet, there is an important detail worth highlighting right away. Their formal agreement to produce books for Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson’s classic Dragon Warriors system specifies that they cannot earn a single penny from those releases. In an industry increasingly dominated by venture balance sheets and digital storefront algorithms, Red Ruin represents a genuine labour of love, crafting high-quality material purely to preserve and enjoy the game rather than for commercial profit. Keep an eye on the site for our full Q&A coming soon.
Our lead story this week involves a changing of the guard at one of the hobby’s most historic institutions. Steve Jackson has stepped down as CEO of Steve Jackson Games, appointing long-time production and supply chain veteran Sabrina Gonzalez to lead the company. Allison Page steps up as Chief Operating Officer, while Jackson transitions back to pure game design. The restructuring follows severe operational turbulence and supply chain headwinds, coming after former CEO Meredith Placko’s departure and an unpublished 2025 stakeholder report. The transition echoes 1990, when the infamous US Secret Service raid on their Austin offices over GURPS Cyberpunk forced Jackson back into day-to-day operations to rescue the studio from the brink of collapse. Thirty-six years later, Jackson is stepping back once again, leaving Gonzalez and Page to navigate current manufacturing realities while he returns to his design desk.
Meanwhile, corporate leadership shifts are also redefining how Wizards of the Coast manages risk. We are slightly late joining the conversation, but our analysis breaks down how Dan Ayoub plans to de-risk Dungeons & Dragons by splitting the party across external partners. Following the catastrophic fallout of the 2023 Open Game License debacle, the corporate strategy has shifted away from trying to lock the community into a closed, single ecosystem. Instead, Hasbro is aggressively offloading operational risk, licensing core properties out to external digital teams, established video game studios, and third-party board game partners to protect the brand’s balance sheet from internal missteps.
Behind the scenes of the UK tabletop scene, we are seeing the beginning of a massive institutional shift across major gatherings. First, UK Games Expo has appointed AireCon co-founder Mark Cooke to lead its operations. Cooke’s track record in building accessible, player-first community conventions in Harrogate brings valuable operational expertise to the UK’s largest hobby show. Simultaneously, the capital’s premier winter gathering is transforming. John Dodd has detailed Dragonmeet’s expansion, complete buyout, and full operational independence as the convention prepares for another year in ExCeL London.
This was also the week I updated Geek Native’s living infographic of convention sizes. The project, now seven years old, has a vanity address of its own – go to geeknative.com/conventions. The update added Tokyo Game Show, Comiket and Tabletop Scotland.
In publishing logistics, an astonishing clearance sale raised eyebrows across the industry this week. Modiphius cut core collections for Dune: Adventures in the Imperium and Mindjammer to just £5, offering what is normally nearly £100 of material at a 95 percent discount. I picked up a deal myself, but steep fire sales like this are rarely random. Slashing an established product line down to pocket money pricing typically signals contract expirations, pending licence renegotiations, or the quiet sunsetting of a line before rights revert.
Over at Chaosium, the publisher has been tied to two intriguing stories. On the digital frontier, developer QuestXR has combined augmented reality headsets with Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying system, projecting spatial tokens and interactive dice rolls into physical living rooms. Chaosium has yet to formally respond to our press inquiries about the project, so it remains to be seen whether this is an early prototype or a fully licensed venture. On the historical side, the publisher took their flagship horror system north of the border, hosting a live historical Call of Cthulhu scenario inside the walls of Stirling Castle, using Scotland’s fortified heritage to ground their investigative dread.
In talent acquisitions, a story I have not seen reported elsewhere caught our eye. Glass Cannon Unplugged has signed Nimble 5e creator Evan Diaz to lead new roleplaying game projects. Diaz earned widespread acclaim for radically streamlining d20 tactical rules, and pairing his mechanical clarity with Glass Cannon’s high-production board game adaptations could produce fascinating hybrid games.
Looking at video game design, nostalgia continues to drive digital revenue models. We examine why Blizzard is betting heavily on vanilla nostalgia with its World of Warcraft Forever initiative, analysing why legacy players consistently reject modern mechanical bloat in favour of slower, socially demanding classic servers.
We also have several delightfully quirky updates from pop culture and collecting:
- The Royal Mint has launched an official Star Trek 60th anniversary commemorative coin collection, striking the Starship Enterprise and Captain Kirk into collectable UK legal tender.
- Capcom has unveiled an absurd wearable Street Fighter popcorn bucket that places Guile’s iconic flat-top hair directly onto your head while watching cinema releases.
- Uniqlo has launched a brand-new KAWS Universe apparel collection featuring stylised Earth, Moon, and Sun characters. The last time they had a KAWS launch, they needed crowd control.
- A life-sized statue of Lara Croft has secured a permanent home in Derby Market Hall following a £33,000 crowdfunding campaign, honouring Core Design’s legacy in the city where Tomb Raider was born.
Finally, we wrap up with an exceptional tabletop deal. You can grab scurvy, dark sorcery, and sea shanties with the Pirate Borg bundle on Bundle of Holding, packing Limithron’s rules-light, grimdark maritime rules and supplements into a heavily discounted tier.
That is it for this week. Thanks for listening to Audio EXP. For all the links, analysis, and breaking stories, head over to Geek Native. Until next week, stay geeky.
