Reading this gaming industry retrospective I ran into a few phrases which confused me.
The d20 bust caused by 3.5e (2003) and the over-saturation of d20 products ran right into the Great Recession.
What's "the d20 bust"? I came into RPGs shortly after 3.5's release, so I can't compare before and after. It seems to me like the d20 System was dominating the conversation for most of that decade, and that doesn't sound very bust-like.
[…] a lot of different publishers seem to be succeeding with a lot of different sorts of games. Pathfinder and Mutants & Masterminds show that post-d20 games can still do well […]
If you show me the phrase "post-d20 games" on its own, I'd think it was describing games which learned from the d20 System's decade of development and designed new non-d20 games building on that insight. But since Pathfinder and Mutants & Masterminds are both self-evidently games in the d20 System family, I'd clearly be wrong about that. What does it mean to describe these systems as "post-d20 games"?
Best Answer
Like every boom/bust cycle, the "d20 bust" was what happened when the "d20 boom" ended.
What's the d20 Boom?
I don't know if that's an official term, but it's one I use because it works, and it fits the idea of a bust pretty well. If you look back to when 3.0 came out, it did an interesting thing that no game with it's reach had done before: it made it easy to use it in third party material.
This was due primarily to the OGL. 3.0 got very popular in the market, and now there was a way to write stuff for it. Lots of third party publishers jumped on that. Some (like Paizo) did official Wizards licensed and even D&D branded material. Others were able to use the d20 system trademark, which was pretty liberal to use. The most notable exception is probably the Book of Erotic Fantasy, which Wizards blocked from using the d20 logo, so it used the OGL instead.
Here's a list, which may or may not be complete (I honestly don't know). It's really big.
As you can see there, a lot of publishers jumped on board with the d20 system. Far more than we'd seen for any one system in the past. Everybody thought that with so many people playing a d20 based game in 3.0, that there would be a market for all kinds of books. Quite a few of them did well, but...
At The End of Every Boom...
So what's the bust? Take 3.5 changing enough rules that 3.0 books were nontrivial to bring in to a 3.5 game (thus hurting the value of the third party 3.0 content), combined with the sheer number of competitors. While most of the books would sell somewhat, there was simply too many people making too many books for the amount of buyers. At the time, digital distribution for RPG material wasn't a significant thing, and so you had to have the money to do a print run and get a book into stores to sell them (both things require significant upfront investment and can lose you a lot of money if it sells below expectations).
Stack that on top with the sheer number of books that Wizards put out, and the money dried up. What happened is that we saw fewer people making fewer books. That's the "bust" at the end of the boom. It's worth noting that some people still did alright in this market, but the era of people jumping in to make d20 branded books in large numbers was over.
Post-d20
This sounds like a bit of a silly term, since Pathfinder is d20 based (but not actually a d20 system as 'd20' is a trademark owned by Wizards). Pathfinder maintains a state closer to the idea of the d20 system era by having its own OGL and being friendly to third parties (see this related question for info) than D&D itself did, as 4e moved away from that.
In general though, the only way I've heard post-d20 be used is simply for systems that had their genesis in the d20 system, but continued with it after d20 itself stopped being supported. In that sense Pathfinder definitely qualifies: it came into existence in large part because Wizards stopped supporting d20 and the OGL with 4e and left Paizo in the cold with no game to write content for. They had to do something, so they took the 3.5 SRD, made it their own, and here we are. Mutants & Mastermands is also heavily influenced by d20 but isn't a d20 system per-se, hence 'post-d20'.
Another thing that changed after the d20 is digital distribution went more mainstream. Games like Fate can be successful today without needing the financial backing to do a print run and distribution to stores. While they likely won't sell as many copies, the margins per copy sold for a digital product are much higher. That's opened the market up to new and smaller games to thrive, where they likely would have been strangled in the cradle at the height of the d20 boom.
While a game like Fate had a much better chance of success in the market in the conditions created by the end of d20, it's not really a 'post-d20 system' as it's not really a derivative of d20 in any way.