Will gaming companies ever go 100% digital?
- Thread starter Kzach
- Start date
Unless you use a Mac, then the learning curve skews a bit.Yes, I see that Fantasy Grounds recommends using emulation software, but I'd rather not have to purchase that, as well as a copy of Windows.
Maptools is better than Fantasy Grounds anyway. I have both and have used both and regret paying money for FG when I feel that Maptools is superior.
I live in Australia, dude. We have awful pricing and cap structures. Even I would say your comment is irrelevant, though, to this discussion.
Hussar
Legend
I've long been a proponent of the online game. I've recently become a convert of Maptools, which has turned out to be pretty decent most of the time. Currently having some connectivity issues with one player, but, that's pretty much par for the course.
I will never understand why the bigger players in the RPG industry haven't put out a dedicated VTT. To me, this is the way in which to draw a much larger audience than we have currently. It's the only way to appeal RPG's outside of the suburbs. People in rural areas are always going to have problems finding groups and people inside the cities have too many things competing for their free time to make getting a group of five people together an easy thing to schedule.
VTT solves the geography problem.
To me, what I'd like to see is a company fully embrace it. Put out a game, start demoing it on a dedicated VTT with the game dev's running games. How many people would line up to play with Erik Mona or Mike Mearls or Piratecat or any number of others? You start off by running something like the D&D Encounters program - short, more or less one shots - and build an entire community from there.
There's obviously some important step I'm missing because I don't know why it hasn't been tried. Is a VTT setup like Fantasy Grounds or Maptools really that complicated to build? I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea what kind of work a VTT entails. But, if a bunch of guys in their basements working in their spare time can build Maptools, I would think that you could do something pretty decent in a short amount of time with professional programmers.
I will never understand why the bigger players in the RPG industry haven't put out a dedicated VTT. To me, this is the way in which to draw a much larger audience than we have currently. It's the only way to appeal RPG's outside of the suburbs. People in rural areas are always going to have problems finding groups and people inside the cities have too many things competing for their free time to make getting a group of five people together an easy thing to schedule.
VTT solves the geography problem.
To me, what I'd like to see is a company fully embrace it. Put out a game, start demoing it on a dedicated VTT with the game dev's running games. How many people would line up to play with Erik Mona or Mike Mearls or Piratecat or any number of others? You start off by running something like the D&D Encounters program - short, more or less one shots - and build an entire community from there.
There's obviously some important step I'm missing because I don't know why it hasn't been tried. Is a VTT setup like Fantasy Grounds or Maptools really that complicated to build? I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea what kind of work a VTT entails. But, if a bunch of guys in their basements working in their spare time can build Maptools, I would think that you could do something pretty decent in a short amount of time with professional programmers.
To answer succinctly, no. There will be plenty of folks who want print copies and don't want to wait for their POD edition: they want it NOW and are willing to pay for it.
There's a joke among artists that traditionally painting was doomed with the invention of the camera. Well, it's been decades and painting is still around. Personally, I'm still waiting for the so-called "paperless" office.
Jan van Leyden
Adventurer
This.
Selecting a PDF device as printer or output format does not make a digital product from a book, just a digitally distributed analog book.
Also, combining explaining text (rules for combat), fluff, pictures, and raw data (powers, feats, ...) in one entity (e.g. PHB) is an organization which is optimized for analog books only.
Say you want to look up the rules details of some power but are not absolutely sure about its name. With a dead tree book you'll probably navigate by thumb. You roughly now where you'll find it and can quickly find the page. This works via a sort of bookmarking function in your head; you know how the book looks like in the vicinity of your target and have an idea of how far from the beginning or end of the book this information is printed.
With the PDF version of the book you'll have to rely on efficient bookmarking. Either you have to go to Classes > Fighter > Powers and scroll through maybe 10 pages of text or you go to Classes > Fighter > Powers > Level 5 Daily Powers > perhaps I recognize the name.
I find this method extremely cumbersome. It's much more convenient to go the Compendium way, even though the query interface it's still far from perfect.
Totally agree, as one of those rural dwelling people
Yes and no, I reckon the Maptools guys had some prior relevant experience or at a need to develope the relevant experience.
If you look at map tools there are a number of distinct developer skillsets in evidence.
There is the stantard GUI (the menus, file open/save dialogs and so foth ) that any developer could knock together.
There is the macro parser which took a bit of work but most developers should be able to learn but can be tricky to program but are bread and butter to a lot of developers.
There is the map drawing layers which are probably built on top of a specalist library. These things are somewhat specalised and many commercial business application developers may never use in the course of their careers. Gaining proficiency with that library is probably a lot of work.
Finally there is the networking bit. Now again the libariries are there but getting it to work as smoothly as Maptools would indicate to me that there is a networking guru involved. (if he/she was not in the beginning I suspect they are now
)So it is not a trivial application, and while open source guys in their spare time can take the approach that we will release it when its done that usually does not work in a commercial environment where there are budget constraints.
The other problem with commercial software development in my experience is that a company with little or no prior experience of software development putting together a team (or even tendering it out) have very limited conception of what they want.
They may have a high level concept but no real ideas on the details of the execution.
So a spec is put together, everyone signs off on it and a project plan is drawn up.
Then the team starts doing their stuff and an early alpha appears. This is the first time the user seen this kind of thing and it will be wrong.
They will want a million and one changes, some because the developers simply do not understand the business, some because some executive wants to stick his oar in and make waves but most because they will make it a much better product but the client did not understand fully what they wanted until they could play with a working application.
The deadline arrives and the application is half finished, then what?
In my experience, if you have a client with no prior sotfware development experience and a new team that never worked together then very likley you will have to build the application twice, once to find out what you want and once to get it to work the way you want.
I very much suspect this is what happened to WoTC.
If you have an established team that have done this before, then you have a good chance of a product but if the client is green it willl still take longer than you though and a lot more money than you expected.
Scurvy_Platypus
Explorer
I'll grant without reserve that current pdfs are not an ideal approach to the digital approach. Given what most gamers are demanding their rpgs behave as (instruction manual and art book) there's not much choice though.
Producing 2 entirely different versions isn't practical. I believe most pdfs are generated from the same files that are sent off to be printed. Doing a landscape version for pdf and a portrait version for print means that pagination is going to be different, the art might very well not be matching up with the text... it's just messy.
And doing landscape isn't practical, because many people don't like the style, there's additional stress on the pages in the book, compensating for that additional stress means that cost is likely to go up... it gets messy just like doing 2 different versions.
Plus, who wants to take point on trying to set a "standard"? D&D could have done it, but they refuse to consider the electronic market, except for subscription based services. Even if they were to change their stance, they're not going to take the risk of innovating. They won't set a standard for format, because right now there's too many competing agendas and they want to upset the least number of people possible.
If WotC isn't willing to step up and try and set up some standards, there's no way anyone else will. Sure, small press/indy rpgs are doing this, but they don't really count. Why? A variety of reasons, one of which is they don't care about their customer base. By which I mean, the general approach small press rpgs have is, "if it works for you, great. If it doesn't, that's fine change it until it does or buy a new game". This is not a D&D philosophy.
I'm not sure "better" is correct. Being an early adopter of pdfs for rpgs, I've seen plenty of reasons/excuses for why gamers don't do digital or insist on print in addition to digital. And let's not forget everyone that argues that pdf is inherently inferior and not worth as much as print products. Every person that's arguing that pdfs should be cheaper? They're saying pdf is worth less. "No, they're arguing that pdfs are over-priced because the costs are so substantially lower!"
No. The problem isn't that pdfs are over-priced, it's that rpg books are under-priced. And I say this as a dude that has left the U.S. and now lives in a country where the average rpg book costs $80-$100. Hell, a Dresden Files paperback costs $20 here.
People have a default: buy print product. It's what most are used to doing, and humans are creatures of comfort and habit, just like anything else. They don't want to change without incentive. And for every incentive offered, they've got an excuse (or reason) to justify staying with the familiar, known, and comfortable.
Judging people for this is kinda like judging a cat for torturing its prey before eating (or killing) it.
People change once that incentive exceeds their reasons/excuses for not doing so. As long as the incentive continues to benefit them more, they'll continue doing it.
There is no such thing as a perfect medium. Electronic or print, both have their problems. You have to find solutions to these problems, which people are already used to doing with print. They're so used to these solutions, they don't think about the coping mechanisms in print as coping mechanisms, they're just "logical" or "obvious" and just the way things are done.
Is it judgemental of me? I suppose so. I call it the way I see it. Much like the glass half-empty/half-full thing, it's a matter of perspective. I don't sit around thinking how gamers are scum for collectively disliking pdf products, nor do I feel morally superior, or anything else like that. I simply buy pdf preferentially, and refuse to spend more than $150 on a gameline. They can either get that upfront in one fell swoop on a single product, or they can get it over time via several products which are less expensive individually.
Actually, it is fairly practical, but you seem to be stuck in an old mode of thinking about content...
The landscape/portrait thing is only one example. Note how a physical printed page is of fixed size, but your computer application window isn't? And how even if you re size a window, page length (and width) aren't necessarily fixed at the window size? Note how when you're looking at most modern web-pages, the material presented changes position and "reflows" as you re-size the window? That's an example of how you probably want your digital content to behave - single fixed presentations are not really appropriate when you cannot predict the exact size of the display.
And that's on top of what Jan van Leyden mentioned above how finding content in the two media is different.
Publishers wishing to move into the digital age need to consider having a single database of content in the back that feeds multiple streams of presentation, with different styles. There is no real reason, for example, that the printed D&D core rulebooks and the DDI cannot both be built from the same database of content.
[quoe]Plus, who wants to take point on trying to set a "standard"? D&D could have done it[/quote]
The problem of digital presentation of content is much, much bigger than RPGs. It is an issue pretty much every publisher on the planet has to deal with.
Interesting. You know, of course, that cats don't actually "torture" prey, right? That would imply an understanding of pain, and an intent to cause it, that cats don't have. Cats play with prey for roughly the same reasons they play with non-living toys, the same reasons a person might play with a Frisbee or a soccer ball.
And you know, of course, that generalizing to say that folks resist change just because of inertia insults every single one of us that looked at pdfs as an option, but didn't adopt them for well-considered, logical reasons? Your position implies that you know better than others what is good for them in practical use, which you don't. People choose a format because it works for how they personally operate.
I agree that you want something that looks on screen like the hypertext SRD but that you can print like a pdf and search better than either.
The publisher also wants to deliver it as a single file and it would make it easier on the user also.
There is essentially a format war on at the moment in the publishing industry, with the main plays at the moment by Apple, Amazon and Google. Some regular publishers are well aware of it like Baen books but who will win and what format comes out on top remains to be seen.
My opinion is that the publishing industry better get is act together of one of the big 3 will be dictating terms to them in a couple of years.
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