By 2019, the mood had shifted. Several indie game designers began publicly shaming The Trove on social media. For a solo developer selling a $15 PDF on Itch.io, seeing their game on The Trove with 10,000 downloads was not "exposure"—it was lost rent money. Kevin Crawford ( Stars Without Number ) famously calculated that The Trove had cost him over $40,000 in potential sales.
Meanwhile, Wizards of the Coast was preparing its biggest legal weapon: the launch of . The company had finally embraced digital tools, but a free archive offering every 5e book for free directly undercut their subscription model. The Trove Rpg Archive