A bit of background of what happened.
Descent Journeys in the Dark is one of those dungeon crawl boardgames that did not find a good target audience. The game is good but is not child friendly enough to play with kids and it takes way to long to play as an adult. It also tries to be serious and not-serious at the same time, the DC of dungeon crawls.
That being said I liked both the first and second edition and I own both of them and a good number of expansions. We had a rather small but fun and passionate community around this game. We also had a very good relation with the designers that would often ask about balance issues or how would this card play in x scenario.
Shortly before or early during the pandemic Fantasy Flight made a new Descent game, Descent Legends of the dark.
https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2020/10/22/descent-legends-of-the-dark/
The game featured every woke trope, a they/them character, a furry character, strong white female warrior, a black girl dwarf with a butch lesbian haircut, a broken shell of a white male elf and a magic black dude. No option for other heroes - older versions had a mix of female and male of everything, not anymore, you have to play woke characters.
There was also announced how the team was almost all new young hires. I think the older devs were somewhat involved but they were already working on the Star Wars games and probably other games.
Needless to say we were not happy with the game so Fantasy Flight did the normal thing and nuked our forums. No one was saying anything racist just that we did not like the art and the characters are not popular with players, is hard to buy an expensive game when your regular players do not like the characters or that 3d cardboard terrain tends to break. But they did take down all the forums as they could not allow fan criticism.
Time passed and the expansion they announced does not look to be in any news anymore, as far as I can tell it is on indefinite freeze.
I've also checked the download for the app that is connected to this game. It has 10k downloads despite being required to play. This is an abysmal number considering that the game can't be used without the app.
There was an app for the previous version of Decent, that was completely optional and it was made very late in the games and there was little hype anymore but it still had over 100k downloads.
We do not have sells numbers but it does look like the game is a major flop.
OK maybe I'm a boomer but why the heck does a boardgame need an app??
Decent 2nd edition had an app, that was totally optional. It offered new campaigns and the app acted as an AI for the monsters. It was very popular. They introduce the app after most people played the game for a long time so it freshened things up.
FF however did not realize that we liked it as an additional feature not as the main game. Is like saying you like ketchup and then being offered just ketchup on a plate.
Now their new boardgame - is part mobile game. So is not even a proper boardgame. If you wanted a mobile game is not hard to move the entire darn thing on a tablet and be done with it.
To me is more of a thematic thing. I want boardgame to be just cardboard, plastic and dice and being able to play without technology. I still like having a technology to help if you want but not being mandatory to play. It just feels like moving towards a computer game.
That's my worry. More specifically it gets the consumer reliant on the corporations making product and more vulnerable to getting nickel and dimed just to play something they ostensibly own.
More generally I worry it's part of the general societal trend of moving people to the pods and mediating all relationships through a screen. Can't stand things like tabletop simulator for that reason lol
It all serves to making atomized corporate and state slaves of us all.
I don't think they didn't realize that.
Look at the Warhammer Fantasy 3rd Edition which was also by FF. They intentionally added special dice and cards that you needed in order to play the RPG. And of course you never had enough dice/cards so you needed to buy additional packs if you wanted to have a fun/smoothe experience.
FF is purely managed by greed.
It's beautiful. The app can be used to track and harvest data from users, disable used product sales into perpetuity, link players to accounts and ban them for wrongthink, and retroactively censor and remove content post printing.
It's everything pathological cultural marxists could want.
The X-Com boardgame has one as well. Every player has a unique role (researcher, commander, ...) and the initial phases of a round are time limited. If you manage everything in time (the app shows you that) you get a bonus if not you are punished. It also tells you at which locations enemy UFOs spawn.
After the times phase it tells you the order of the other phases and it has an easy summary what to do. So you don't have to consult the rulebook as often if you rarely play.