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 postponed, generally for budgetary reasons.

I have a problem, it might be just me, or it might be more general: I am much more likely to buy a game from Kickstarter (or any other crowdfunding website) than from a shop. This is driven primarily by FOMO. If I see something exciting currently crowdfunding, I know that I can purchase it now, while I have no idea how easily available it will be in the future. The indie scene is small, and often when things sell out, they're gone. This is also self-reinforcing, because I know this about myself: If I don't back the crowdfunding now, it will be competing for my limited RPG money against whichever crowdfunding campaign is ongoing whenever it releases in shops.

In the end, this means that the books accumulate on my shelves: if something looks interesting enough that I might want to play it in the future, I back it, because I fear that I would regret not doing it. The book(s) then usually arrives a year or more later, and it's exciting and cool, but I already run a weekly game and barely have time to read on top of this and other hobbies. But I don't regret backing, because a little voice inside my brain says yes, I might want to run this in the future, and I definitely want to read it. At some point. In the future. When I have time. Sure. It will happen, I tell myself. Indeed, this is also partially why I have started this blog: to give myself a kick in the backside and read the things on my shelves, so I can write about them (Fabula Ultima thoughts coming Soon™).

But this brings us back to the original problem, and my question for the community at large. Are we actually reading and playing all the games and modules coming out? Or are they languishing on shelves like mine, cool-looking when they appear on Kickstarter, but ultimately falling by the wayside as we return to our comfort systems for out weekly campaigns, occasionally peppering our consumption with a one-shot or throwing in a pre-written module?

Perhaps the OSR have it right, we should write adventures rather than systems, because they could be converted to our system of choice and thrown into whatever campaign we are playing. However, I remember hearing anecdotally from Nova of Playful Void that systems sell much better than adventures. Perhaps we all just like filling our shelves? Or maybe everyone else has much more time to play than me?

I think it is only natural to ask ourselves if it really makes sense to keep writing if the books are just going to end up unplayed, or maybe even unread, on shelves around the globe. This leads directly to the question of why do we write? If we just write for its own sake because it brings us joy, then by all means we should continue. For some, it might also be a livelihood, and as long as people keep buying, it will bring food on the table whether the books are read or not. But what if we want to be read? How do we ensure that the books get off the shelves?

I'm not really offering solutions, everybody in the indie space who writes presumably likes it, so perhaps the problem is all in my head, but sometimes I can see the appeal of living in the walled garden of 5e. No shameful backlog of unplayed games, just piles of character options that you could technically use in your game.

At the end of the day, I am happy to be supporting an independent creator when I buy an indie game, and physical space limitations means that my shelves will never end up like my Steam account, simply because of the limitations of existing in physical space (let's not think about .pdfs).

No great conclusions, but I guess that this is less of a specific problem to be solved and more of a consequence of existing under capitalism. If there is to be a great takeaway, it would be to reflect on what makes each of us buy and write games, and whether we are personally happy with our own choices?