I've been doing a lot of work lately as a contractor converting board games to @TabletopSim and @TabletopiaGames. I've played a bunch of mods also, and I'm getting an idea of what makes a game shine or not in the new medium of virtual tabletops (VTTs). +
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I played one mod recently - I won't mention the game - where the person who did the conversion put in a bunch of fancy stuff, like advanced lighting and particles, that didn't actually enhance the play so much. +
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There were a lot of things we still had to do by hand - changing the lighting, adding components to make the game more playable, and so on. They spent a lot of time on the wrong things. +
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But I also played the fan-made TTS mod for The Crew, and it is just about a work of art. The scripting is pretty advanced, but it's also well-considered. It makes playing the game extremely frictionless. A lot of thought and planning went into it; I was blown away. +
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As some of you know, I worked at Audible for over 13 years, and I've heard a lot of audiobooks. I feel like VTT conversions (TTS and Tabletopia) are to board games as audiobooks are to print books. +
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Likewise, the mod author is analogous to an audiobook narrator. We recontextualize the work to a different medium, but in a way that attempts to flatter the original work, and to make the characteristics of the new medium succeed for the game. +
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Most people will always prefer playing the physical game to a VTT, just like most people prefer reading (be it physical or digital) to listening. But not everyone - I found that I followed a narrative much better for an audiobook. +
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It turns out I'm actually pretty crappy at reading books; my mind wanders, I jump ahead, I get impatient. Audiobooks force me to savor any word. With a good narrator, this becomes a pleasure in and of itself. +
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Likewise, playing a good mod becomes a pleasure in and of itself; it harnesses the strengths of the medium and minimizes its weaknesses. A good mod should still give you the experience of playing the game. +
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Of course, this brings up the question of revenue. Tabletopia has a revenue-sharing model with publishers, but Workshop mods in TTS do not; it's mostly fan-made stuff there. +
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That's where the analogy breaks, and I wish TTS would be better about allowing verified publishers to monetize mods. (TTS offers DLC, but those are all done by TTS themselves, and it's a "we'll call you" situation.) +
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Right now, the pandemic is giving me plenty of work (I wish that were the case for everyone), but someday, COVID will no longer be an active threat, and game groups can safely meet again. How will VTTs keep their momentum? +
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I feel like if publishers could see enough revenue from VTTs, they will be able to justify official mods post-COVID. If not, VTTs risk becoming a historical quirk. +
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Tabletopia is in a better position here, but I get the feeling (and this is speculation) that their paid player base needs to be larger for them to make payouts that are sustainable for publishers. +
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So, to summarize: 1) VTTs can look to audiobooks (and Audible's success) as a model to recontextualizing board games into a different medium. +
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2) This thing would be a whole lot more sustainable if publishers could monetize TTS mods, or if Tabletopia's paid player base was larger. (FIN)
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Postscript: if you want to try something I worked on, check out these two games from
@beziergames!https://twitter.com/TabletopiaGames/status/1294704577179246595 …
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