It is with a heavy heart I must admit that after 24 years in print and well over 20,000 copies sold, Burning Wheel is out of print. The reason is both simple and nuanced.

The simple reason: we’re out of money. Prices for everything rapidly increased this year. Sea freight costs doubled from when we planned work to when projects shipped. Even Gen Con’s costs skyrocketed. We also gambled that having new products would elevate our sales overall, so I pushed us to produce Middarmark and SPG: Interceptor this year (and I even wanted to do a third project as well), but preorders didn’t hit their marks. Even with the launch of SPG: Interceptor at Gen Con—one of our most successful debuts ever!—and we still lost money.

The nuanced reason: The balance of being an indie publisher always involves choosing whether to reprint old titles or invest in new ones. Our sales have been at the end of their long tail, so we decided to invest in new titles to try to create energy and show folks that we’re still here. As of yet, that gamble hasn’t paid off.

The industry has changed a ton in the past 24 years and the forces arrayed against us now as a venerable small press publisher are considerable. We’re not “content creators,” voice actors or reviewers, nor do we want to be; we don’t make D&D clones with busy layouts. We make fundamentally good games that introduce new ideas to the conversation about RPGs — we want to play them with you to have that conversation. And yet the number of folks who come to us looking for those types of games has been steadily dwindling, so we need to discover new strategies to connect with those people again. We know they are out there!

Which takes us back to the top: the simple reason of bad timing. Our stock ran out as we are cash poor and production and shipping prices are super high. It’s a heavy blow—a severe wound—but we’re not down yet. We passed our Steel test. With enough Artha to shrug off our wounds and some luck, we can get back into the fight. It will just take some time and a few helping dice from people who love our games.

Source: Luke on reddit.