Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne lays out his predictions for 2025.
Since we made it through 2024 successfully, more or less, here are a few things I think will happen in 2025.
Tariffs. In a previous column, I discussed the ramifications should President-elect Trump impose the tariffs he’s promised (see “Tariffs, Take Two“). After giving them some thought and observing Trump’s behavior since the election, I do not think he will impose them, or if he does, they will get dropped quickly or reduced to a much saner level. Here is why:
- Trump has already shown he responds to whomever talks the most and the loudest about a particular issue. Case in point, the recent end of the year continuing resolution extending the current budget several months down the road. Although the bill was quite bloated, running over 1,000 pages and including items unrelated to the budget like restrictions on companies investing in China and regulations on prescription management, president-elect Trump showed little interest in the bill until “first buddy” Elon Musk started agitating against it, tweeting his opposition to the bill over one hundred times in one day. Only then did Trump start agitating against the bill.
- Trump changes his mind even on issues that he has positioned himself as unwavering on. One example is the continuing resolution mentioned previously. It incorporated pretty strong restrictions on companies investing in or otherwise doing business in China. This is something that Trump has always taken a very hard line on and yet he let this opportunity to restrict Chinese growth pass by. In addition, a major issue Trump ran on was restricting immigration and he has come out against H1-B visas for foreign workers, cutting the number of them during his first term and considering eliminating all of them when he assumes office again. However, once the co-chairs of his Department of Governmental Efficiency, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, started speaking favorably of them, he began indicating he supports the program now.
- Stock Market. One more thing Trump pays significant attention to is how the stock market is performing. He continually referenced the growth of the stock market during his first term and has pointed to its growth since his election. Companies and investors do not like the idea of large tariffs and imposition of large ones would drive stock prices down, which President-elect Trump would not like.
What I think will happen is there will be a lot of loud talk and negotiation over tariffs, much like we saw with the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, which replaced NAFTA back in 2020 but did not make any major changes from the original agreement. Something far less than 25% will be agreed upon and Trump, much as he did with the USMCA, will claim it as a huge victory for the United States.
TCG Shakeout. Companies are releasing an increasing number of TCGs into the marketplace, physical, digital and some combination thereof. Although the market has grown greatly over the past 20 years, the industry is seeing a number resembling the number of games released shortly after 2000 and few, if any of those, are still played. Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms make it much easier to launch a new TCG but I do not see any groundswell of support from the player base for any of those releases so I would expect to see a shakeout of a lot of systems this year. Many of them will have a small player base but not command shelf space in most stores.
D&D Gift Set. I mused briefly last week on a gift set collecting the new core Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks but based on the release schedule for the 5E Gift Set, I do not expect to see one release much before 2026.
Happy and Profitable New Year to you and yours!
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The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
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