Remembering Jeff Bezos: The Man Who Accidentally Kickstarted a Tabletop Revolution

By the DiceBreaker Books team

We lost Jeff Bezos this week, and while the world rightly mourns the titan of e-commerce and space exploration, we at DiceBreaker Books find ourselves quietly toasting a very specific, very weird legacy he probably never intended to leave: the modern tabletop renaissance owes more to Amazon.com than almost anyone wants to admit.

Think about it. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, role-playing games were dying a slow death in the wilderness. Game stores were closing, Wizards of the Coast had nearly imploded, and finding obscure indie RPGs meant either mailing a check to a post-office box in someone’s basement or praying your local shop would special-order it and not mark it up 300%. Then came Amazon: infinite shelf space, customer reviews, lightning-fast shipping, and (crucially) the ability for tiny publishers to reach readers without ever printing a physical copy in a warehouse.

Suddenly, a $15 PDF on DriveThruRPG could sit right next to the Player’s Handbook in a customer’s cart. Kickstarter campaigns for gorgeous hardbacks could promise “we’ll fulfill through Amazon” and actually mean it. A kid in rural Nebraska could discover Critical Role because the algorithm said “people who bought Dimension 20 merch also bought these dice.” The barrier between “I wish this existed” and “it’s in my hands in two days” collapsed overnight.

Jeff Bezos didn’t sit down in 1994 thinking, “I’m going to save Dungeons & Dragons.” He just built the most efficient book-distribution machine the world had ever seen, and it turned out nerds with 300-page rulebooks were perfectly sized cargo for that machine. The explosion of indie RPGs we celebrate today (Blades in the Dark on every table, Mothership winning awards, Lancer pods printing mechs in kitchens) simply doesn’t happen at this scale without Amazon’s logistics backbone and marketplace reach.

He never played (as far as we know), never tweeted about nat 20s, never showed up to Gen Con in a Blue Origin polo. But every time a new creator nervously clicks “publish” on a strange little game about sad space lesbians or mushroom wizards, part of the reason it finds an audience is infrastructure built, indirectly and unintentionally, by Jeff Bezos.

So tonight, raise a d20 to the guy who turned a virtual bookstore into the circulatory system of modern tabletop gaming. The cosmos is a little quieter without him, and our shelves (both physical and digital) are fuller because of him.

Rest easy, Jeff. You rolled higher than any of us expected.

— The DiceBreaker Books team 10 December 2025