Tabletopia is free to play non-premium games, for $5/month you can play all premium games and for $10/month you can play all premium games and invite people playing for free to join you. Essentially I don’t like taking things away from people that are making them happy.
Or even if that digital copy turns out to be the only version that ever existed if it’s one of the (many) ideas that doesn’t make it to full game hood. It especially makes me hesitant to upload prototypes and do playtesting because it’d be a real shame to introduce something new that people are enjoying and that they can’t get anywhere else and to have it swiped from their hands before the thing even exists.
Tabletop simulator has a huge advantage in terms of being able to offer people something that can be theirs forever rather than disappearing in a puff of vapourware in a year or two. So I’m very aware that if I were to upload games to Tabletopia they might disappear on people in the future and that makes me very hesitant to do it. Now I notice this particularly keenly in my position because I work for three different groups, at least two of which plan to publish one game and move on – and the third might decide it doesn’t want to be in the industry in the long term depending on how things pan out. If they stop then the game is gone for everyone. If the game has any non-standard 3D components then someone needs to pay $20/month to keep it live. Hell if TTS itself went down you’d still have it locally and someone’d probably hack a server together somewhere. It doesn’t matter if the designer or publisher stop supporting it.
If you download or buy a game on TTS is yours forever.
I’d like digital tabletop environments to share everything that makes physical board gaming great and one of the things that I can do at the moment is pull down my fathers games, which were created before I was born and crack them open for a game.
So what’s TTS got that Tabletopia lacks? In a word “Permanency”. That’s a huge deal for me as a designer too because I’ve got friends in countries all over the world that I’d love to invite to my early playtests, but at the moment can only say “Hey, want to pay £15 to try out a prototype that might suck?” That’s nowhere near so appealing or so easy. It’s also going to have a great influence on your chances of finding a game, you’ll likely see more people in the lobbies and if you don’t you can ping any of your friends over your internet chat client of choice and say “Hey, want to play?”. There are plenty of reasons that’s huge, for one people won’t trust the digital format until they’ve had a chance to get used to it, by now everyone’s had an experience with a bad digital format and the opportunity to make sure that you like it and it works is going to be really positive. Anyone will be able to sign up, join a room and start playing a game without forking over a penny.
I cannot stress enough how much of a difference that this makes. Let’s do Tabletopia first, it’s big advantage is free access. It’s my profound hope that one of these platforms manages to modify itself to adopt the best advantage of the other, because the result would be spectacular for gamers and game designers. There are multiple pros and cons to each platform, but to my mind each platform has one significant advantage that I would consider indispensable to the future of the hobby. One of the points that keeps coming up is the comparison between Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia, which I thought would make an interesting topic to discuss today. Most recently I’ve had a discussion with our backers about the possibility of creating some Wizard’s Academy DLC on a digital games platform, over 100 backers have chimed in with their feedback and there’s a lot to think about. While I’m excited about my current Kickstarter I think it’s really important to look after your existing backers so have been doing plenty on the previous one too.