Steve Jackson Hands Off the CEO Chair at His Own Company After 46 Years

Here’s a piece of news that could easily read as a routine org-chart shuffle, but we don’t think it is: Steve Jackson, the guy whose name is literally on the building, just stepped down as CEO of Steve Jackson Games. He’s not going anywhere — he keeps his titles of founder and President, and by every account he’s thrilled to spend more time actually designing games instead of running the business that makes them. But the succession itself, and the year and a half that led up to it, tells you something real about where the tabletop industry’s mid-size publishers stand right now.

The announcement went out Friday, September 11th, through the company’s Daily Illuminator blog: longtime staffer Sabrina Gonzalez is the new CEO, and Managing Editor Allison Page moves up to Chief Operating Officer. Gonzalez has been with SJ Games since 2013 in various production roles — Production Artist, then Production Manager — sat on the company’s board since 2021, and spent a stretch away from the company picking up manufacturing-side experience elsewhere in the industry, which is a genuinely useful thing for a games CEO to know cold these days. “As a general goal, I’d like us to continue to grow,” she said in the announcement. “The goal is always to make great games that people love.” Page, who joined in 2023 after work as a narrative designer in video games and as executive artistic director at Killing My Lobster, put it more simply: “We’ve always worked really well together and want the same things for SJ Games.”

What makes this more than a feel-good internal promotion is the road that got here. Jackson wasn’t supposed to be CEO again at all — Meredith Placko held the job for about two years before resigning in April 2025, a departure she tied directly to tariffs squeezing the industry’s margins, on top of wanting to refocus on her own company, Turbo Dork. Jackson stepped back into daily oversight of Placko’s former reports essentially as a stopgap, and that stopgap lasted roughly a year and a half before the company found its next real answer in someone who’d already spent over a decade in the building. That’s not a company in crisis, but it’s also not nothing — it’s a smaller publisher navigating the same manufacturing and cost pressure that’s been hammering the whole industry, and doing it by promoting from inside rather than going out and hiring a name.

There’s a neat, if imperfect, historical echo here for anyone who’s followed the company a while. Steve Jackson Games’ most famous brush with existential crisis wasn’t financial — it was the 1990 Secret Service raid on its Austin offices, when agents seized computers and the master manuscript of GURPS Cyberpunk on the mistaken theory that the book was a hacking manual. The company nearly went under, Jackson had to personally re-engage with day-to-day operations to save it, and the resulting lawsuit became a foundational case in digital civil liberties, helping inspire the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Nobody’s raiding anybody this time, and tariffs aren’t the Secret Service. But the shape of the story — Jackson stepping back from daily involvement, external pressure forcing a reset, Jackson stepping back in to stabilize things before finally handing off cleanly — rhymes enough that it’s worth noting SJ Games has been here before and come out the other side fine.

And the company isn’t just holding steady under the new arrangement — it’s actively building. SJ Games has been expanding its RPG footprint through a partnership with Possum Creek Games and by licensing indie titles like Grand Guignol and Last Train to Bremen, and its crowdfunded RPG anthology 7 Part Pact has pulled in more than $1 million from roughly 5,800 backers, with fulfillment currently projected for late 2027. There’s also a Munchkin 5.5E RPG in the pipeline, which tells you the classics — GURPS, Munchkin, Car Wars, Ogre — aren’t being left to coast while the company chases new formats.

If you want a refresher on what’s kept the lights on at Steve Jackson Games for 46 years, Munchkin is still the easiest entry point and still very much in print. This is a leadership transition, not a crisis, but any time a company’s name is also its founder’s name and that founder steps back from the top job, it’s worth watching what happens next. We’ll keep an eye on it.