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Author Topic: Tabletopia  (Read 6083 times)

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Qvist

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Tabletopia
« on: July 13, 2016, 05:55:09 pm »
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Has anyone tried this yet?

For anyone who doesn't know: It's basically Tabletop Simulator with "legal" content. The idea is that board games get implemented officially by the designers and designers even playtest their new board games there. A lot of famous designers like Vital Lacerda already use it for that. It's basically a 3d representation of a board game with no rules enforcement.

So apparently, you can get it for 10$ on Steam for an Early Access as it's still in development, but it has already around 200 board games to play. What I'm not sure is the subscription model they have. You can pay 5$/month for Silver level or 10$/month for Gold level. Paying apparently gives you access to "premium games" whatever that means and "private gaming rooms" whatever that means. Also I'm hesitant to pay 10$ as I'm not sure what you can do yet in the Early Access.

junkers

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #1 on: July 14, 2016, 05:01:43 am »
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It's basically Tabletop Simulator with "legal" content.
So...VASSAL (again)? But in 3D (again)?

If designers want to use it generate more awareness of their games, then that's a good thing. More players means more people are likely to pick up the cardboard versions, right? Something something first impressions on Adventures circa June this year.

But like with Steam itself in general, it appears to be an attempt to make one official hangout, to hell with everything else - especially unofficial versions and mods. Say what you will about TTS, but at least it had the potential for user-generated content.

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Paying apparently gives you access to "premium games" whatever that means
That sounds like it's going to kill it pretty quick. What kind of games are they going to lock behind a paywall? Only stuff from big publishers? 

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"private gaming rooms" whatever that means.
Presumably invite only sessions, perhaps restricting it to people on your friend list or whatever. Might stop players joining your game with the intent to shit it up. Although if the game doesn't come with TTS' ability to hurl components about, I suspect that kind of person would stay away in the first place.
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popsofctown

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #2 on: July 14, 2016, 01:54:07 pm »
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Not monetizing the games at all and using them to encourage meatworld sales would be a way more promising model, seems to me.  Not because there's something inherently wrong with charging money, but because although I haven't tried tabletop simulators, I see no possible way they compete with actual physical board games and video games designed to be video games in terms of the quality of the experience itself.  So it seems like a subscription service would fall flat by failing competition with board games the player already owns and video games they could subscribe to instead.  Like yknow Hearthstone, rocking that 0$ a month subscription.

If the service stayed free it would be a super promising thing to get some open competition going on games based on their quality and not their marketing and to pull people together IRL on the truly best, tested by crowdsourcing online, games, instead of guessing based on reviews and the back of the box and dropping half the games they buy after one play.  Payment is gonna hurt that utopia a lot.
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junkers

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #3 on: July 15, 2016, 06:08:58 am »
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Not monetizing the games at all and using them to encourage meatworld sales would be a way more promising model, seems to me.
Marketing at its best, mate: why give it away for free when you can slap a (seemingly or actual) nominal fee on it and have people pick it up because it "looks cheap"?

Not because there's something inherently wrong with charging money, but because although I haven't tried tabletop simulators, I see no possible way they compete with actual physical board games and video games
They're not trying to: they're glorified match-making services with silly physics simulators bolted on. They're there for the sake of convenience: you can never get a game of Caylus going because your playing group is a bunch of punks, but now there's thousand of other players online at all hours.

This one in particular seems to be nothing other than a marketing opportunity at, as you pointed out, a questionable cost. It's stripping the potential for creativity from TTS. And without rules implementation, its got nothing on established services like BGA and yucata.de that aren't total resource hogs in the first place (inb4 java).

instead of guessing based on reviews and the back of the box and dropping half the games they buy after one play. 
But buying a tonne of stuff you don't even intend to play is what props Steam up!
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popsofctown

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #4 on: July 15, 2016, 10:33:09 am »
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I think it hurts the competitivity of the steam market too and wish the fire sales were somehow restricted.  Or imagine a system where when you buy two games at the same time and play one for 30 hours and one for 2 hours, steam automatically siphons some of your payment over so one developer gets less and one gets more?
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junkers

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #5 on: July 18, 2016, 03:36:14 am »
+2

I can kind of see where you're going with that: amount of time spent with a product commands a higher profit for the developer.

But it sounds like a horribly needless level of tracking, and where's the cut-off point? You might play Game A for six hours this week, Game B for three minutes. Within two weeks, you've got a yourself a weekend off and have sunk the majority of it into learning the complexity of Game B and clocked up thirty hours. Meanwhile, you've been idling in Game C for 400 hours for some idiotic reason. You'd have to create an subclass of Valve accountants just to monitor it all, and it would still be open to abuse.

I think games need a flat payment at their time of purchase. If you've spent so much time with it, you'll find a way to let the developer know how much they've touched you. Like with this macaroni necklace I'm making for Donald X. right now.
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Kirian

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #6 on: July 18, 2016, 10:25:33 am »
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I'm entirely unsold on it.  I see no reason at all to play at a computer unless the computer is handling the logic, rules, etc.
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popsofctown

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #7 on: July 18, 2016, 02:00:15 pm »
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I can kind of see where you're going with that: amount of time spent with a product commands a higher profit for the developer.

But it sounds like a horribly needless level of tracking, and where's the cut-off point? You might play Game A for six hours this week, Game B for three minutes. Within two weeks, you've got a yourself a weekend off and have sunk the majority of it into learning the complexity of Game B and clocked up thirty hours. Meanwhile, you've been idling in Game C for 400 hours for some idiotic reason. You'd have to create an subclass of Valve accountants just to monitor it all, and it would still be open to abuse.

I think games need a flat payment at their time of purchase. If you've spent so much time with it, you'll find a way to let the developer know how much they've touched you. Like with this macaroni necklace I'm making for Donald X. right now.

I thought about that, and I think it's, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, especially starting out with some minor incentives.  Status quo, it doesn't even matter if the game gets launched, cmon, what's the abuse case for developers getting a bit more money if their game is actually launched once?
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junkers

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #8 on: July 19, 2016, 04:53:35 am »
+1

Because it's directing attention away to something that is so incredibly simple that it shouldn't even need to be said. It's not a developer's fault if consumers are too stupid to buy things they patently don't need or even want. And why should developers be punished for that mentality?

If you decree that even a base RRP is tied to a single boot, developers are going to spend some of their time reminding players to launch their games - and, frankly, any amount of time doing that is just plain ridiculous. Why? Because it's taking their time away from actually creating games to babysit a bunch of morons.
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popsofctown

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #9 on: July 19, 2016, 03:11:31 pm »
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Well the only thing more absurd than rewarding a marketing/development strategy that encourages players to buy your game and launch it a single time is rewarding a marketing/development strategy that encourages players to buy your game and never launch it.  We currently have the latter.
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junkers

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #10 on: July 20, 2016, 04:35:59 am »
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Well the only thing more absurd than rewarding a marketing/development strategy that encourages players to buy your game and launch it a single time is rewarding a marketing/development strategy that encourages players to buy your game and never launch it.  We currently have the latter.
Fair call. The kind of person that take advantage of the current situation is going to abuse your system likewise - at least you're trying to assist legit devs.
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pedroluchini

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #11 on: July 20, 2016, 10:46:10 am »
+3

Time spent in-game is not at all correlated with game quality, and I oppose any system that doles out rewards based on this erroneous notion.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #12 on: July 20, 2016, 11:50:40 am »
+1

Time spent in-game is not at all correlated with game quality, and I oppose any system that doles out rewards based on this erroneous notion.



I think a system that rewarded developers for time spent playing would just push devs to needlessly pad their product with time-wasting non-content.
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junkers

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #13 on: July 21, 2016, 05:16:49 am »
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I think a system that rewarded developers for time spent playing would just push devs to needlessly pad their product with time-wasting non-content.
We're already there, though: look at how many games have pointless grinding "RPG features", often for purely cosmetic rewards. The natural progression of playing something for a bit, getting better at it, and unlocking neat stuff has already been subverted to horrible, horrible degrees.

And that's not to mention the inverse: games(/publishers) that can't imagine you have the attention span to unlock things and therefore slap them behind a paywall.
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popsofctown

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #14 on: July 21, 2016, 09:43:58 am »
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Maybe once you reach the cap on a game you play a lot, it could let you dedicate your time to a game you finished quickly and really liked.  So when you take a break from elder scrolls to play portal and then finish that and go back to elder scrolls, the time on elder scrolls builds for portal.  It could even do that automatically, your playtime shows you played portal long enough for it to actually be an experience, and now it has nowhere else to put your overtime for elder scrolls.

A short game might be at a disadvantage but there would be big benefits for the industry as a whole.  Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater
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popsofctown

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #15 on: July 21, 2016, 09:45:41 am »
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My understanding is that music actually already works this way.  No one seems to have an abundance of concern about artists padding their albums with tons of mediocre songs so that they will have more total songs to listen to and so that services like pandora or spotify will have to repay them more repeatedly.  The artists just try to make good music.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #16 on: July 21, 2016, 12:53:08 pm »
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My understanding is that music actually already works this way.  No one seems to have an abundance of concern about artists padding their albums with tons of mediocre songs so that they will have more total songs to listen to and so that services like pandora or spotify will have to repay them more repeatedly.  The artists just try to make good music.

Doesn't seem comparable to me. Producing a mediocre song is still a lot of work, but inserting extra grinding in a game could be as simple as lowering experience gained from mobs.  With streaming, you can just listen to what you want and skip the bad/mediocre songs, so users just won't listen to them and Pandora/Spotify will just pay for the hits. But with games, you have no choice but to slog through it to get to the ending.

Put another way -  do streaming services pay artists based on airtime, per song, per album, per play? Will artists make more money if they pad an individual song out so that it's a 10 minute piece when it really should have been 3?  I thought it was per play, in which case one big hit does way more for them than a dozen mediocre songs.
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popsofctown

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #17 on: July 21, 2016, 03:36:54 pm »
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I've dropped lots of games midway through, amidst suspicions they had a good ending, because they had a repetitive slog.  WindWaker comes to mind, as it has a sailing quest that requires lots of driving across empty overworld in a straight line that you must complete to unlock the game's final dungeon.  Under such a system WindWaker stands to lose money from me, since the time I would have spent in the final dungeon would add to the pay out.

Adding grinding to an otherwise good game could be a calculated risk, maybe.  But likelihood of staying with it to the end goes down.  Then my likelihood of recommending it by word of mouth goes down.  My likelihood of replaying it goes down.

I think if the system was gamed, it would be from added postgame content, that comes after the games "a winnar is you" sort of moment and lets people who enjoyed the game an awful lot keep running the toll up.  That might be a minor negative, some developer gets yanked away from fully debugging some section 40% of the way through the main story to work on postgame content that's not the absolute best allocation of resources.  But I really doubt it specifically enables a strategy that makes more money from creating inferior games more so than status quo.


I guess to some extent what you're saying does happen with these trilogy movies that come out, and then the trilogy becomes a quatrilogy because they break a book up to make things longer.  But each individual movie in those cases has pretty good quality and has to (the very last one, less so, like the postgame content) or else people drop the series altogether and criticize it.  It's no blank check.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #18 on: July 22, 2016, 12:20:42 pm »
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Hmm, fair enough. I'm curious how often people will drop stuff in the middle of it like you do vs. how many stick it through. Surely it's a gradient, and I expect devs to find the optimal threshold and go for that. Personally, I tend not to drop games/books/TV shows/film series once I've started them unless things get really, really bad.
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popsofctown

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #19 on: July 22, 2016, 01:23:18 pm »
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Hmm, fair enough. I'm curious how often people will drop stuff in the middle of it like you do vs. how many stick it through. Surely it's a gradient, and I expect devs to find the optimal threshold and go for that. Personally, I tend not to drop games/books/TV shows/film series once I've started them unless things get really, really bad.

I think I feel some common ground about this, there is a certain desire to stick with something even if it seems to have a patch in the middle that's not your favorite, and there's lots of ways the creator of that art can draw people in to want to see its finish.  It doesn't necessarily have to even be a story element, it can even be the bottom rung of a skill tree that lets you shoot the rocket launcher WHILE riding the surfboard and makes you want to see the game's mechanics stitched together in endgame or whatever.

I think dropping a game before you finish it is going to be more common.  It might not always even be that the game's rough patch is that bad, it just my revisit themes or concepts you've experienced in another game, so it doesn't do as much for you.  That becomes a lot more likely as the exposure of the average player goes up.

Either way, though... if the developer made you care about the ending so much that you're willing to grind, maybe that's positively correlated with how good the story is, so he deserves money anyway.  It's just, we'd rather give him the money outright without having to to put the kill 30 bloodfen raptors quest in the middle of the game.  But which is worse, not giving him any extra money at all and not having to deal with him adding the 30 dinosaurs with frustratingly high HP and enjoying the great parts of the game that would make it so good you would have put up with that?  My argument is that short term, yes, you'll get a better game without that grind incentivized.  But at the end of that fiscal year when all the crappy games that tried to put in a grind in the middle got unfinished because they had nothing but marketing and 1 good voice actor, you'll see the industry funding the good game instead.  That good outweighs the bad.  And then I'm also optimistic that developers would find healthier ways to pad the playtime, like postgame quests, and replay-the-whole-game-as-a-different-character.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Tabletopia
« Reply #20 on: July 22, 2016, 01:37:35 pm »
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Well the ideal thing would be to pay what the game is worth regardless of its length, so devs can make short games and receive compensation for quality rather than quantity. That's why your proposed system is flawed, IMO.  It rewards increasing quantity and diluting quality, with the devs having to put in effort to dilute it just enough to get  more profit without losing the player base.  I guess I'm not optimistic about the industry learning a lesson and funding the good game.
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