Kickstarter FOMO and the Content Firehose
I will preface this with the fact that I am not an industry analyst. I am not looking at any hard data here, relying instead only on my own anecdotal personal experience, and vibes. I look at enough data at work, I'm not going to do it now. There is a great mismatch in the heart of the TTRPG hobby, in fact there may be more than one. I am talking about the mismatch between the "products" being written and bought, and those being played. You could even add in the intermediate stage of being read. Most of us are limited in the amount of products we buy by money, and all of us are limited in reading and playing by time. For non-solo efforts, play has the additional complicating factor of getting schedules to align, meaning that in general, fewer games are played than read, and for some (including myself), fewer books are read than bought. And yet, I there are many books I would like to buy (or have supported in crowdfunding), but have (probably) wisely skipped or postp