When the cameras start rolling at the Critical Role studio in Los Angeles, Ed Lopez and Ben Van Der Fluit are never in front of them.
There are eight far more famous faces that front the operation. Critical Role’s cofounders, a team of self-professed nerdy voice actors, have been streaming their show, going on tour, and starting their book business and game publishing arm.
Lopez, the team’s chief operating officer, and Van Der Fluit, senior vice president of business and content development, have kept things humming on the business front. The duo sat down for a call with Business Insider, during which they talked about their plans to grow Critical Role into a legacy media brand.
From a Twitch stream to nerdworld’s big leagues
Both Lopez and Van Der Fluit were based in Los Angeles when they met the cast members of Critical Role. It wasn’t even a company at the time.
“Ed and I really had the chance to dig in with the founders in those early days, to start to imagine it beyond just that show,” Van Der Fluit said.
The multimedia company that became the Critical Role brand was incorporated in 2015. Lopez, Van Der Fluit, and one other staffer were the company’s original executives.
“The second they have to start worrying about how many units of a book we have or don’t have, we’re doing it wrong,” Van Der Fluit said. “So we were saying that, early on, ‘Let us worry about that stuff.'”
Goalposts
Over the years, Critical Role has evolved into much more than just a Twitch stream, and its co-founders each have specializations. Cofounder Sam Riegel and CEO Travis Willingham helm the development of the team’s Amazon-backed animations, while cofounders Liam O’Brien and Taliesin Jaffe have focused on the team’s art, comics, and book publishing efforts. Creative director Marisha Ray remains in charge of programming, while Laura Bailey oversees merchandise.
Matt Mercer, the team’s chief creative officer, relinquished control of the main campaign stream earlier this year, but has been spearheading work on the tabletop game “Daggerheart,” the crew’s answer to “Dungeons and Dragons” and the main product from Darrington Press, their game publishing business. Ashley Johnson leads the Critical Role Foundation, the team’s nonprofit arm.
Lopez and Van Der Fluit work on the administrative end of things, from inking deals with brand partners to content development.
Champagne problems
Van Der Fluit said that in Critical Role’s early days, working on smaller expansions, such as publishing comics, felt like natural extensions of the Twitch stream.
Things have moved quickly since then, the duo said. The team began major projects, such as their two Amazon-backed animated series, at the five-year mark, when they thought it would’ve taken longer.
That project took off after Critical Role raised more than $11.3 million via Kickstarter in 2019, providing seed funding to create what would become “The Legend of Vox Machina,” their first Prime Video animated series.
“We have goalposts in terms of where we think we want to take the business, but we’re not a traditional three, five, 10-year plan company,” Lopez said. “We kind of go with the flow, go with what our fans are asking for and what the community wants.”
The team has a solid three-year roadmap for how they intend to grow “Daggerheart,” Critical Role’s flagship game. It sold out worldwide in under a week after its launch in May.
“The amount of units that we ordered we thought was going to last us a year, and it lasted us literally two weeks,” Lopez said. “It’s a great problem, it’s a Champagne problem, but it’s now changing our view in terms of what this product can be.”
Snagging top creative hires
Darrington Press this year hired Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, two senior creatives formerly with Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro-owned company that makes “D&D.”
“We’ve been good friends with them for quite a while, but the timing never really made sense until recently,” Lopez said.
In November, months after Perkins and Crawford joined the team, Critical Role announced “Daggerheart: Hope & Fear,” the game’s first expansion, which is scheduled for a summer 2026 release.
“We really want their creative juices brought to the world of ‘Daggerheart.’ That being said, we’re also doing a bunch of ‘D&D’ stuff, and who better to bring in than the guys who used to do it?” Lopez said.
Dream partnerships
Van Der Fluit said Critical Role still has some “boxes to tick” in terms of collaborations. Critical Role has dealt in themed coffees and alcoholic beverages, but it plans to expand into the food and beverage sector.
“We continue to think about new markets and areas we can get into,” Van Der Fluit said. “We’ve never done something yet in the footwear space.”
Lopez said the team’s partnerships with Dark Horse Comics and Amazon have opened doors. But the cofounders don’t just want to work with Fortune 500 companies; they want to find collaborators who “vibe” with them and understand how they want to work.
Lopez added that Critical Role loves being independent, and that there’s a “desire to keep it that way.” But he did not rule out the possibility of taking private equity or venture capital funding to grow the business.
“If that opportunity does come, we’ll be very prudent and very aware about what that might mean for us. But again, I think we aren’t going to take money from a third party if we don’t have a plan for it,” Lopez said. “We have to just make sure, if that opportunity does come up, that we feel like we can treat that money with the respect it deserves and do the cool things that we want to do with it.”
Legacy
Van Der Fluit says he’s focused on helping the team expand into video games. Critical Role is working with the Los Angeles indie game outfit AdHoc Studio on what will be the team’s first video game.
“It is my job and Ben’s job and Travis’s job to kind of figure out, ‘Hey, we can’t do this forever, and we have to figure out how to give this business longevity,'” Lopez said.
He added that fans of the show will see a wider variety of Critical Role content beyond what the founding cast have built, and new faces on the Critical Role stream who can “continue the legacy.”
Lopez added that there’s been a renewed focus on the business end about reaching out to a younger audience, beyond viewers on Twitch and YouTube.
Still, that doesn’t mean Critical Role as we know it will be changing anytime soon.
“If they want to stream until they’re 80, we’ll do it,” Lopez joked.
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