A long-lived independent TTRPG studio, Bards and Sages Publishing has announced it will close its doors. While outlets closing up shop can be a natural result of many factors in the market, the site's owner identifies one major trend that informed the decision: the growing use of AI-generated content.
The Bards and Sages Publishing closure
According to an official announcement, Bards and Sages Publishing's founder, Julie Ann Dawson explained why the closure was happening. First, Dawson prefaces the announcement with the assurance that all contributing authors and artists to the company's published works will gain rights to their work as well as raw files.
This is important since the company has showcased many creative voices, not just in TTRPGs and quarterly magazines, but in fantasy novels as well. When an outlet has been around since 2002, it tends to build up a considerable body of work.
For the outlet's TTRPG offerings, Dawson remarks that she owns the rights to the RPG materials through work-for-hire agreements, and if anyone wants to buy those rights, offers are open. The work includes third-party material for Pathfinder, D&D 3.5e and system-neutral work.
Dawson remarks that health concerns played a part in closing Bards and Sages Publishing. She mentions mental health struggles as well as physical health concerns, and increasing strain from her day job playing a part in her inability to maintain the company.
But the biggest factor by far is AI-generated content. Dawson mentions that, since AI-generated content can be mass-produced spam, sorting them out from actual submissions can take a long time. It's a problem in all creative industries that has lead to controversy at companies like Wizards of the Coast.
Things aren't much better on the business side of things. AI-generated content isn't just scraping work from multiple artists than stitching it together into vague approximations of creative work, it also takes advantage of search engine keywords used by major companies and platforms, making it harder for other material to be picked up.
Meanwhile, Amazon and other ebook retails are pushing full-steam ahead to promote AI-generated content at the expense of real authors and artists. Publisher who actually pay authors and artists and editors now have to compete with AI-generated material churned out in bulk and sold at 99 cents. And while it is easy to shrug this off if you are outside the industry and claim, "Well, the cream rises to the top," anyone that has been around the industry long enough knows that what rises to the top is what Amazon's algorithms push there. And the AI bots are much better at manipulating the algorithms that real people.
While Amazon has recently implemented a new policy where products sold on their platform have to disclose the use of AI-generated artwork, text, and translations, it still doesn't change the circumstances behind Bards and Sages Publishing regarding digital market share.
If you search for something and get five pages of AI material, chances are you'll give up looking through the results before reaching material made by actual human artists.
Bards and Sages Publishing is planning to close down in full by the end of 2024 officially. Until that time, contact emails and social media accounts will remain active for communication and outreach.
