I've taken this from ENWorld's front page. I think it very interesting what Mearls has to say about where they're going with D&D:



"At PAX East a panel took place entitled "What Is Happening to Tabletop Roleplaying Games?" It featured Ryan Dancey (CEO of Goblinworks which is producing the Pathfinder MMO, architect of the Open Gaming License, and one of the people who spearheaded D&D 3E), Luke Peterschmidt (CEO of Fun to 11), Derek Lloyd (owner of the game store 'Battleground Games and Hobbies'), Luke Crane (Tabletop Games Specialist at Kickstarter and RPG designer of Burning Wheel, Mouseguard and more), Matt McElroy (Marketing Director at DriveThruRPG/OneBookshelf and Onyx Path which currently handles WoD products) and Mike Mearls (senior manager of D&D Next). [47 comments]

It's well worth listening to the whole recording if you have an hour to spare, as it contains plenty of interesting summations of RPG publishing over the decades, plus a lot of discussion about how great Kickstarter is and why it's the latest of a series of industry expansions which included the advent of desktop pubishing, the Open Gaming License and d20 System License, and now Kickstarter. It also touches on the various times the RPG industry has almost died (from what Dancey says, the rise of World of Warcraft seriously hit the industry, and later surveys while he was at CCP working on Eve Online indicated that a lot of people playing these MMOs had once played tabletop RPGs but now played MMOs instead, not in addition to).

Ryan Dancey also goes into the various surveys from ICv2 over the last few years (those ones which have put Pathfinder as the world's leading RPG since 2010 or so, although he acknowledges that this isn't a great way of determining sales - they call a number of retailers and simply ask what their top five selling RPG products are within a given month; no numbers, just a ranking), which leads to an interesting exchange between him and Mike Mearls.

Dancey: ...some of those games we talk about being mid-market kind of games, they're on this list. Some of the games that are coming out of Kickstarter are on this list... you know, FATE is on this list, Exalted is on this list.. and then we've got this classic duel between Pathfinder and D&D. I wish I could stand up here today and say, like, you know, any given game you ask me and I can tell you how much it's sold, sales, I have no idea, it's impossible to tell. Y'know anecdotally I can tell you that most of the games on this chart, with the exception of Pathfinder and D&D, they're probably not selling more than 20,000 units of whatever their core product is, and some of them are probably selling less than 10. It's hard to say, especially with games that might have a lot of supplements and add-on products, what the total volume is for any one of these games. And ICv2 lumps them all under one category so every sale of Mutants & Masterminds is in that one line, not just the core books.

But here's the thing I want you to see... some of these games are the classic games, the games that we've seen, y'know, for four decades, and some of these games are relatively brand new games that no one's ever seen before, and they change. So the thing that was really interesting to me is that if we had looked at this data from the 90s - and I have data that's kind of similar to this that was collected by an out-of-print magazine called Comics & Games Retailer - and if you just looked at the top five games from like 1990 to 1995 they were essentially the same five games every month, month after month after month. It was very, very predictable. The frothiness, the rate at which these games change and appear on these lists and go away is new. And certainly the fact that D&D is not the number one game on this list is definitely new, that has never happened before in decades. So, there are some weird things going on in this market. We don't have any quantitative data, I can't put a number on it, but we have this kind of qualitative sense that there has been change, that it's easier to get success but it's harder to keep that success.

Mearls: Oh, I think what's interesting about this graph if you were to take the word "sales" off - I can't see the graph [something]... there's actually [something] well who's releasing the most supplements this actually maps almost perfectly to that measure. And I think the big change we're seeing is in the 90s there was a sort of expected tempo of .. for a tabletop roleplaying game you expected every month that you played Mage or Werewolf or D&D or some of the D&D settings, every month there's a new book. And what we're seeing now is that's not really, no longer the case for a wide variety of reasons. Really, outside .. I realise there's only one or two companies that are still able to do that ... we're not seeing the book-a-month pubishing pattern that we saw ten years ago. And I think that's one of the real big disruptions, where, you know, and there's a lot of questions and is that a good thing for the industry, is it a bad thing for the industry, and what does it actually mean for the ongoing tabletop hobby.

Dancey: And I think, one of the things you mentioned to me before the panel, too, Mike, was that this is really myopic, it's really only going to talk about retail sales, it's not capturing book trade, it's not capturing online, it's not capturing Kickstarter, it's a really myopic slice of the data.

The conversation continues amongst the panel about Kickstarter and the way companies use it to produce sequential different products rather than extended product lines - new games, not expansions.

Dancey: Yeah. Ok, so here's our last topic, which I suspect a fairly significant number of people in this room would like to hear Mike talk about.

(A short sequence of show-of-hand questions establishes that of the people there in the room about an equal number have played Pathfinder and D&D in the last month).

Dancey: OK, so here's my giant spiel. I do not work for Paizo Publishing. I'm not a member of the Paizo Publishing staff, and I'm not here to represent Pathfinder. I'm just moderating this panel. So, Mike is now going to debate an empty chair [laughter]... so, and, prior to this panel I sent the slides round to everybody and I said 'Hey Mike, this is kinda how I see, like, the next three years of life in the, at the top of the chart. Two big, muscular sluggers are gonna duke it out and when that's done one of those guys is gonna be laying on the mat'. And Mike said 'I dont' see it that way', so Mike, why don't you say what you told me about your theory.

Mearls: Yeah, so this knida goes back to what I was talking about earlier about the change and about how we look at the ongoing support for D&D and how I think this ins actually interacting with tabletop games in general. So I kinda have this theory I developed, I call it the Car Wars theory. So back in 1987 when I was 12 I bought Car Wars, it was the game I bought that month, and it had a vehicle design system. And I spent hours and hours and hours building new Car Wars vehicles and drawing maps and just playing with all the things around the game but very rarely able to actually play the game, because in order for me to play the game I had to get my parents to drive me to a friend's house and then get that friend to actually want to play Car Wars and then teach him all the rules and all that other stuff, right? And in addition to having Car Wars, and D&D and other stuff, I had my Nintendo and I had my Apple, too. And I bought new video games at about the same rate, maybe once a month if I did chores or I had a little part time job, I'd get maybe one new game a month.

What has changed now is that a game like Car Wars can work very well if I'm not getting a new constant stream of games. Because I have all this time wherer I want to be gaming but I can't play a game, so I'll do all the stuff that exists around the game. But now thanks to, like, this phone... [something] smartphones, tablets, Steam, uh, XBox Live, PSN, I can buy games whenever I want. I mean, I was at the airport yesterday and I was bored so I bought Ten Million for my iPhone and I just started playing. Because I have other games on my phone, but I thought, nah, I'm sick of the games I have, I'm just gonna buy a new one. That would have been perfect time, back in the 80s, to like work on my D&D campaign, or read that month's D&D expansion, or work on new designs for my, uh, for for Car Wars. But what's happening is we have so many new games coming in that the amount of time that one game can take up without having you actually play that game, like World of Warcraft where you just log in and play, or you do things like in the auction house, thta's part of play, right, trying to get resources, you're selling stuff for actual money that's helping you play the game.

I believe that's what's really happening to tabletop roleplaying, is that it used to be a hobby of not playing the game you want to play. And there are so many games now that you can play to fill all those hours of gaming, you can actually game now, and that what's happening is that RPGs needed that time, we, a GM or DM needed that time to create the adventure or create a campaign, a player needed that time to create a character, allocate skill ranks and come up with a background, and come up, you know, write out your three-page essay on who your character was before the campaign. That time is getting devoured, that time essentially I think is gone, that you could play stuff that lets you then eventually play a game or you can just play a game. And people are just playing games now.

And what we're really doing with D&D Next is we're really looking at thriving and surviving in that type of market. If you've playtested the game, you see we've run much simpler with the mechanics, things move much faster when you play... one of our very early things was was to say, look, I was playing Mass Effect 1 or 2 at the time. I can complete a mission in Mass Effect in about an hour and a half. So why can't I complete an adventure in D&D in that time? Why does it take me 4, 8, 12 hours just to get from page one of the adventure to the end? I mean, yeah, you can have huge epic adventures but I can't do it in less than four hours.

Dancey: You didn't want to have 20 minutes of fun packed in 4 hours.

Mearls: Exactly, exactly, yeah. And so it's looking at the train and saying, well, things have changed, and tabletop roleplaying in a lot of ways hasn't changed with the times. We've been doing the same thing, the same way, that we were doing back in the 80s. I mean, the game mechanics have been refined but really until indie games [something] no one had taken a look at the core essence of what makes a tabletop roleplaying game tick and taken it apart and rebuilt it. And so in a lot of ways with D&D, and you know Ryan has the slide, that's really not how we see it at all because for me that boxing match, it isn't D&D against any tabletop roleplaying game, it's D&D versus the entire changing face of entertainment, of how a tabletop roleplaying game... that's the best thing you can do with your friends. But what about when you're home alone, or when you're online, or when you're waiting in line at the airport and you just want something on your smartphone. The big question for, specifically for D&D is, if you're a D&D fan, what can we do to fill that time in a way that's engaging and fun for you? To take those settings and characters and worlds, the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or whatever, and bring those to life for you in a way that we haven't been able to before. Because in the past it's always been.. we have a new setting, we have Eberron, we're gonna do the 300-page book, and it's gonna be for the TRPG and that's where it' gonna begin, and that's where it's gonna end. All of our back-catalogue and settings, if we're not publishing it for the RPG line, are we doing anything with them, probably not, that's it, all we do is the TRPG. And so for us, it's really been looking at the entertainment, not just tabletop roleplaying, but entertainment as a whole, everything that people do now to engage themselves in stories, thinking where can D&D thrive within that terrain? And what can we do, starting with the tabletop roleplaying game, to make it more acessible, to get that new generation of players in. And even the current generation who are strapped for time and have a million other options, what can we do to live within that environment?

The too-long-didn't-read version of that, I think (and this is my own interpretation of what Mike Mearls was saying) is that much of the stuff we used to enjoy around an RPG we don't do any more, and we do other entertainment-related things with that time instead. So D&D (as in its settings and characters) is focusing on doing those other entertainment things rather than just being a tabletop roleplaying game - the goal, obviously being that "D&D" as a brand flourishes. And, further, that that means it doesn't matter to them what Paizo is doing with Pathfinder, because D&D doesn't need to be the top-selling tabletop RPG (not that I'm saying it won't be - I expect it will be again come next year, though time will tell) as long as D&D as an overall entertainment property is doing a whole bunch of things."

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/content...#ixzz2zh9ALQRu

OnePlus, the startup founded by former Oppo VP Pete Lau, has unveiled its first smartphone, the OnePlus One. It's a powerful effort, with a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 801 processor, a 5.5-inch 1080p display, 3GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel f/2 camera unit, and bottom-facing stereo speakers designed with assistance from JBL. It runs a minimalist custom UI atop CyanogenMod, the modified version of Android breaking out as an operating system in its own right.

---

Undercutting the Nexus 5

More interesting than the phone's components is the case that houses them — the One's back cover finish is made of cashew, and you can swap this out for back plates using other materials including bamboo, wood, kevlar, and denim. Since the phone is constructed from magnesium, it weighs in at a relatively light 162g, and the 8.9mm-thick frame tapers to 4.6mm at the edges.

OnePlus will sell the One in the US, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and several European countries. It'll cost just $299 unlocked for the 16GB version, undercutting Google's Nexus 5 by $50, but there's a catch — you'll need to be "invited" to buy one at first.

The first batch of games conceived out of Train Jam 2014, a 52-hour game jam held on a train travelling from Chicago to San Francisco, are now available on the event's official website.

At the time of writing, the growing list currently offers 18 games available to freely download for Windows PC, Mac, Oculus or Android, or play online in a browser. Games include Android title Disconnect from Rami Ismail, Brice Puls and Benedict Fritz; Off the Grid by Matthew Hudgins; and, Oculus Team by Alicia Avril and Andrew Gleeson.

The event, which took place March 13-15, offered a way to rally developers heading to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and create games whilst in transit.

Train Jam was organized by Adriel Wallick, an indie game developer based in Boston and sister of Indie Megabooth's Kelly Wallick. Wallick was inspired to create the event from her own journey that gave her a chance to take in the scenery and spend some time on introspection. She then founded Train Jam to use the change of scenery to instil creativity in her fellow developers.

"I think that doing something different always helps creativity," Wallick told Polygon. "Riding on a train is not related to game development, but doing something you don't normally do makes you think about different things ... for example, with Train Jam, how train infrastructure works throughout the United States."

As someone who reviews games for a living, I'd like to think that the critical consensus on a game has some correlation with that title's success in the market. That would imply that we critics are pushing consumers to buy games that we consider worthy and to stay away from those we don't like. Alternatively, it could mean that we're simply good at identifying with our audience's tastes, predicting through our reviews which games will appeal to the gaming audience and which ones won't.

Proving this kind of correlation is generally pretty tough, though, thanks to limited public sales data in the gaming space. But that hasn't stopped some from trying. At the 2008 DICE summit, Activision Vice President of Marketing Robin Kaminsky went so far as to suggest that "For every additional five points over an 80 percent average review score, sales may as much as double." (Though some have questioned that statement's accuracy.) Video game market research firm EEDAR tried tying Metacritic averages for the top 10 games by publisher to financial performance back in 2009 and found mixed results. Individual developers have gone so far as to blame Metacritic for their financial problems following troubled game launches.

Now, thanks to our recently unveiled Steam Gauge project, we have another way to try to tie down the relationship between a game's critical reception and its sales success. In comparing estimates of sales on Steam to aggregate review score averages, we found that better reviews do generally translate to more sales for games, especially at the top end of the critical spectrum. That said, there is a lot of variability in the performance of individual games, and a prevalence of good or bad reviews is far from a guarantee of sales success or failure, respectively.

By Adam Smith on April 23rd, 2014 at 1:00 pm.

I visit some strange places during my daily trawls across the vastness of the internet. The search for obscure and eclectic games demands a willingness to look beyond the convenience store of Steam and the archive of Good Old Games, and in recent months I’ve found myself visiting itch.io on a regular basis. I didn’t intend to visit on such a regular basis but interesting games increasingly linked to the site as a download portal. In a reversal of the common high street trend, itch.io is a rapidly expanding independent store, with plenty of freebies alongside the paid goods.

Designed as an open platform, it aims to give developers control over the sale or distribution of their games. I contacted creator Leaf Corcoran to learn more.

RPS: For any of our readers who may not be aware of itch.io, could you explain the basic principles behind the store and the motivation that led you to create it?

Corcoran: Sure, itch.io is an indie game marketplace and distribution platform. It gives you the ability to design a custom page where people can download, play or purchase your games. There are no barriers to get started, if you want to start selling a game then you can do so immediately. Free games and web games are also supported. All purchases are Pay-what-you-want (with an optional minimum). Someone buying your game always has the option to pay above the minimum if they really like what you’ve got uploaded.

The original idea for the site wasn’t a store at all, it was just a way to quickly create a customized game homepage. I had a handful of Ludum Dare games I had created and I wanted a quick way to make nice pages for them. I wasn’t too thrilled about some of the existing game hosts because the pages they provide for your game are filled with distracting content that has nothing to do with your game. Things like ads, other people’s games, promotion for their own site, etc.

After I had a basic game page creation system running I soon realized that I could add buy buttons. I researched PayPal’s API and soon had a prototype up and running shortly afterwards. If you want more background information I wrote this blog post when I first launched the site.

RPS: You have an open submissions policy and allow developers to set their own prices. What are the advantages of a system without any curation?

Corcoran: The biggest advantage is the anyone can use service regardless of how big, small, unknown or well known they are. I’ve heard so many disappointing stories of developers struggling to get their game noticed and voted on just so they could get a chance to sell their game on Steam.

A lot of people were skeptical when the site originally launched, and a lot still are. As I see the library of games grow I’m not disappointed with the quality of the games at all, I’m proud of the eclectic collection of games available.

RPS: Does the open nature of the store create its own problems with visibility for titles? Or do you see the store as a place to facilitate for the logistics of sales rather than a more traditional storefront?

Corcoran: Originally I was satisfied with just providing the tools to sell games. I didn’t even have a way to browse games the first few months, it was up to the developer to share their game’s URL. As time went on I realized I was sitting on top of a lot of pretty cool games, and anything I could do to help promote them would be a great move.

Since then I’ve added various ways to explore the games, either through filtering by platform/genre/price or discovering collections of games on someone’s profile. Even with all this though, visibility is still a challenging problem. I’ll probably be experimenting with various solutions for quite some time, but I have a feeling that user recommendations are going to be a primary form of discovery in the near future.

RPS: Speaking of logistics – what is the workload involved in running itch.io? As far as I’m aware, developers are responsible for a lot of the groundwork such as page design when submitting, but I’m guessing everything isn’t quite as simple as it looks from your end.

Corcoran: Luckily the site has been set up in such a way to avoid as much unnecessary work as possible. The infrastructure of the site is simple to maintain with minimal components. All of the payment providers are configured for instant payout directly to the sellers. When a sale takes place itch.io doesn’t need to hold the money temporarily and handle paying later. This limits what’s possible (eg. it would be hard to offer bundles between multiple developers) but the effort saved is invaluable.

Because time spent maintaining is minimal, more time can be spent on new features. Regular updates is something users of itch.io have come to appreciate as the site has evolved over the past year. The biggest challenge in the future will be keeping the site running smooth as it grows. Making sure the site is always accessible, renders fast, and is continuously backed up becomes more complicated as the number of users grows.

RPS: Valve recently announced that they would be setting up a ‘reports’ procedure. Is there any content that you’d be unhappy to sell and do you have any similar procedures in place?

Corcoran: The acceptable use policy on itch.io is currently pretty vague concerning the content hosted. So far nothing has been removed from the site because of it’s nature. My aim is to make a site that’s accepting and safe for everyone though, so there will be an updated acceptable use policy explicitly mentioning content that serves to be hateful.

Additionally, just like Steam, the ability to report games has recently been added to itch.io. I think the best approach here is to make it easy for users to communicate their thoughts about the content hosted and then act accordingly.

RPS: From my perspective, the ability to go on sale instantly and set a chosen price (including zero) are the biggest advantages of itch.io as compared to more traditional digital storefronts. Are there any other features that have been put in place to help developers?

Corcoran: Everything about the site is streamlined for the developers to get stuff done with little fuss, it’s all self service. In addition to running a sale and variable pricing like you mentioned, they can generate download keys for promotions, share editing access with their game, enter into itch.io’s press system, and link Steam or Desura keys.

Whenever a new feature is planned for sellers it’s planned from the ground up to be completely controllable by the account doing the selling.

RPS: The fee charged by itch.io is 10% of a sale but fees are currently disabled. Could you say why that is and where does the money for server costs and other expenses come from?

Corcoran: When the fee was originally removed, itch.io cost approximately 30 dollars a month to host. I figured it would be a good gesture to let developers keep a little extra from their sales. Since then the monthly cost has grown more than 10x and I’ve still been financing the site out of my own pocket.

I’ll probably be re-instantiating the fee in the coming weeks, but with a twist. The fee will be developer controlled. They’ll have a slider to set a fee that they think is fair for what itch.io provides, with a minimum of 0 as an option. I’ve spoken to a handful of developers about this and they were all very excited.

RPS: Since launching have you encountered any unexpected problems and if so how have you dealt with them?

Corcoran: Things will break. I can do my best to anticipate problems and create well tested code but inevitably something is going to break. The site could go down, payment providers could drop payments, upload could stop working, etc. It can be incredibly stressful at times but I’ve realized that it’s best to just stay calm and think through the issue at hand. If anything every breaks momentarily the community is always very forgiving, which is a great sign.

When I started hosting game jams I ended up getting a lot more submissions than I expected. In case of the Candy Jam, the entire store got flooded with quickly produced games related to candy. It made it really difficult to see anything else. I got some complaints and so I ended up moving jam games to their own separate island, no longer visible from the main site. It was a drastic change but I didn’t have much choice. Now I have a separate process to promote jam games back into the main listing.

RPS: What plans for the future?

Corcoran: Game jams have become a big part of itch.io the past few months. Support for hosting jams was not part of the original plan, I just decided to implement a prototype one day when helping host a jam for a small community of friends. I noticed there wasn’t a turnkey solution for hosting jams already around so I started offering the service to more people as I saw jams popping up. itch.io has hosted the recent Candy Jam and Flappy Jam with great success. Well over a thousand games have been submitted between the two.

There are a handful more jams that have either happened or are lined up as well. Soon itch.io’s game jam functionality will be opened up to the public and I’m really excited to see where it goes.

As for the store, game discovery is the next big task I’m looking to tackle. I have a handful of ideas to leverage the support of the community into creating really great game recommendations and exploration along with a handful of resources for helping developers get more exposure to their games.

RPS: Thanks for your time.

Canonical pushed out Ubuntu 14.04 last week. This release is the first Ubuntu Long Term Support release in two years and will be supported for the next five years.

It feels like, for Canonical at least, this Long Term Support release couldn't have come at a worse time. The company is caught in a transitional phase as it moves from a desktop operating system to a platform that spans devices.

The problem for Canonical is that it's only about 90 percent of the way to a platform-spanning OS, but it just so happens that the company's schedule calls for a Long Term Support release now.

Even if the result didn't live up to expectations, Netflix deserves some credit for realizing the dreams of Arrested Development fans and bringing the show back for a fourth season. With that chapter closed (for now), the company is set to continue its relationship with creator Mitch Hurwitz. According to Deadline, it's managed to sign a multi-year deal with Hurwitz, which will see him both create and produce new shows for the streaming service. “It is incredibly inspiring to get to produce for Netflix, a company that not only doesn’t resist change, but is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone in forging it,” Hurwitz said in a statement.

Netflix has spent huge chunks of cash to guarantee itself exclusive rights to content, but rarely pursues lengthy deals with showrunners. So this agreement is evidence of the company's faith in Hurwitz — even after The New York Times described season four as a public "execution" of Arrested Development that led the show "down a bad path." Hurwitz will also serve as an executive producer on other Netflix shows and as a consultant for the company's future comedy efforts. "The fact that I’m also getting one month of their streaming right to my TV or Xbox free, well, it really takes the sting out of buying that Xbox," Hurwitz added.

leggomymeggos:

allahyil3analsohyouniyeh:

priceofliberty:

thefreelioness:

The NYPD tried to start a hashtag outpouring of positive memories with their police force. 

If this were ever a bad idea, it was probably the worst idea for arguably the most corrupt police force in America. 

via Vice:

What the person running the Twitter account probably failed to realize is that most people’s interactions with the cops fall into a few categories:

1. You are talking to them to get help after you or someone you knew was robbed, beaten, murdered, or sexually assaulted.

2. You are getting arrested. 

3. You are getting beaten by the police.

In category 1, you are probably not going to be like, “Oh, let me take a selfie with you fine officers so I can remember this moment,” and the other two categories are not things that the NYPD would like people on social media talking about. Additionally, the people who use Twitter a lot (and who aren’t Sonic the Hedgehog roleplayers) are the type who love fucking with authority figures. In any case, #myNYPD quickly became a trending topic in the United States, largely because people were tweeting and retweeting horrific images of police brutality perpetrated by New York City cops.

In which the NYPD’s attempt at “public relations” backfires tremendously.

this had me dying of laughter

Leah! Look!

beautiful