A wave has rolled through the physical print media section of the TTRPG industry—one that was already on the way out, though chaotic tariffs from the US certainly haven't helped matters. Diamond Comic Distributors filing for bankruptcy is one of those ripples.
Diamond is a US-based distributor that served a few big-name clients—DC Comics and Marvel to name just a couple, though DC cut ties back in 2020, and Marvel wasn't far behind—but it also sells books for D&D and Pathfinder 2e. Or, well, 'sold', because it filed for bankruptcy back in January.
Recently, it's put forward a motion (via Wargamer) to enable "sale or other disposition of consigned inventory". In non-legal speak, this means Diamond wants to sell all of its current inventory at whatever price works to pay off its debts—while the publishers that handed it those books wouldn't see a dime.
This is business as usual. When a company with significant inventory goes bankrupt, such as a retailer, its first obligation is to pay its creditors. It does this by liquidating whatever it has—selling it off at whatever prices it needs to. The wrinkle is that, per the motion, Diamond wants to "seek to sell or otherwise dispose of the consigned inventory free and clear of the interests, if any, of the consignors."
The "consignors" are the people who sent Diamond stock—ie, the publishers whose books it was supposed to sell. Anyone who trusted Diamond to move their product would simply see potential profits vanish into thin air.
Wizards of the Coast, owned by Hasbro, will likely be just fine—well, the amount of fine that it was previously—but anyone who isn't the TTRPG giant is going to be having a hard time. In a video posted to their YouTube channel, Stephen Glicker of Roll for Combat explains: "I spoke to my attorney, he looked it over, and his exact quote to me was 'It's not as bad as you think it is, it's much worse'."
Glicker then went on to tell Wargamer that Diamond has "$120,000 worth of our product in their warehouse". Oof. In a thread on the Pathfinder 2e subreddit, Mark Seifter (who helped build out PF2e's monsters before heading onto Roll for Initiative as its director of game design) elaborates: "We're going to be OK because the significant majority of our books weren't with Diamond," but still, it's "obviously painful."
Even Pathfinder 2e's Paizo, who you'd think would be big enough to take this on the chin, is still going to be rubbing its jaw afterwards. The company's CCO Erik Mona replies: "We’ll be ok, but it’s a giant pain in the ass and blows our annual budget to shit." No minced words here.
Mind, while this is all very cutthroat, it's not as if Diamond is raking in the cash and laughing—it has creditors to pay, even if this whole debacle is very much on its shoulders. A summary by Publishersweekly reports its debts to be in the millions.
Per ICv2, there'll be a chance for consignment vendors like Roll for Initiative to air their grievances on July 21—for example, Diamond might not have fair dibs on anything shipped to it by consignors after the bankruptcy filing.
Otherwise, this whole thing feels like another death knell for the physical TTRPG book industry, which has been slowly, but surely, going the way of the dodo for some time now. Companies like Paizo have been making bank via official integrations with Foundry, and virtual tabletops seem to be the way of the future. Unless you're Hasbro, in which case you already found a way to mess that up.
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