Gen Con 2026 - Under Construction

This year's Gen Con began with rain on Saturday.

I'd reserved a car at one of our local rental agencies for Saturday, and I figured that I'd drop my wife off for work in the morning, then when it was time to pick up the rental I'd leave her car at her employer and walk to the rental agency. It's about a 10 minute walk, and I didn't mind getting in some exercise. 

But I hadn't counted on it being a very rainy walk. It absolutely poured (and thundered) for all save for the last minute of my little jaunt, so even though I wore a rain jacket I looked very much like a drowned rat when I got to the rental agency. I waited in line for about 20 minutes, because they were absolutely swamped with people showing up looking for a rental*, and when my turn came they asked me if I was flexible with what rental I got. 

"Sure," I replied. I mean, I wasn't going to be an ass about it; the compact SUV I'd reserved was just cost effective and decent in gas mileage enough that I could work with it.

They ended up giving me an upgrade, a Toyota Camry SE Hybrid.

This is it, parked at Lucas Oil Stadium.

While I've driven a hybrid before (a Toyota Prius as a rental for a work trip last year), I've never driven a car that had over 200 hp under the hood. My '97 Accord gets something around 125 hp, so while it's peppy enough I know it takes a few moments to get going. The moment I mashed the pedal on this car on the drive home, however, it absolutely took off. That took some getting used to.

What also took some getting used to was the mileage, where (in US terms) I got 45 miles per gallon for the entire trip. With the exception of that Prius, the best gas mileage I've ever gotten out of a car on a long distance trip was about 30 MPG in my wife's old 1990 Pontiac 6000 back in the day.**

Anyway, the trip up to Indianapolis was somewhat uneventful, outside of the fact that it started raining the moment I crossed over from Ohio into Indiana, and only let up when we got to the Indianapolis city limits. 

The walk from Lucas Oil Stadium to the Convention Center showed me two things: that Ravensburger was heavily promoting their Disney Lorcana collectible card game...

Yep, Pooh Bear in a wizard's hat.

And that Indy is under a LOT of construction.

Here's a view of some of it from the inside
of the Convention Center.

It was as if Indianapolis looked at all the construction around Columbus and Cincinnati and said "Hold my beer." There was a new hotel going in across the street that was also going to be connected to the Convention Center via a Skywalk; they were reworking the entire walkway (shown above) leading to what used to be the mall; the old mall itself is being rebuilt into a mixed-use open air space called the Traction Yards (first phase to open in 2030); and the street north of the convention center toward the Statehouse is being rebuilt with cobblestones. 

Part of the gravel base. There might have been sewer line
work going on too, but there was so much gravel and brick
around that I couldn't tell for sure.

All this construction didn't deter any Gen Con attendees, as the place was completely sold out.

Inside the Convention Center the place looked blessedly free of construction as the foyer near the Exhibit Hall had the three video screens recycling ads for games...

This was just a brief view of what was up there.
It's amazing just how much space these GIFs take up.

Including one unexpected advertisement...

Yes, that's a realtor.

I can understand why people might be interested in moving to a place with a lower cost of living and a central location to a lot of the Midwest (Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and St. Louis) and the South (Louisville, Memphis, Nashville), but as my son pointed out, you'd have to live in Indiana. So... 50:50, I suppose.

We met up with my oldest and her partner (who'd come down from Milwaukee) under the video screens, I distributed badges, and we had a good chat with my brother-in-law before heading into the Exhibit Hall. 

I tried getting a nice panorama shot of the hall, but
it didn't work out. There were artifacts I couldn't remove.

So, we split up and wandered the Hall for a while before reconnecting for lunch and then a second round of divide and conquer.

Some of the displays were for games that began as video games but then went "retro" into card and board games:

Yes, a Palword card game.
Somewhere, Nintendo is fuming.

Supposedly the Stellaris board game will be
out this fall. Given that this is about 4+ years
in the making, the crowdfunding backers are
a bit annoyed by now.

Okay, it's not a video game to board game 
transcription, but come on. Were it not for Link
and The Legend of Zelda, they wouldn't be selling
ocarinas at Gen Con. And boy could she play!

I'd mentioned this card game last year,
and boy howdy was there a crowd at the booth
this year. No idea if any VTubers were actually
there, but I'd bet that at least a few were.

Now, another part of going to Gen Con is viewing the art...

Sadly this is one of two booths in my pics that qualifies.
But also, rugs/tapestries!

This is the other one, but I'm not sure if it's for sale or
whether it was to attract people to their booth.

or the authors (who I sadly did not take any pics of), but there were other creators present that caught my eye. Maybe it's because it's about time for the Ohio Renaissance Festival***, but I checked out a lot of clothing and leatherworking booths...

Geek Orthodox had tees and other shirts
that made me chuckle.

And they also had "stained glass" designs
as well. Really impressive.

Is anyone in need of a corset or a puffy shirt (tm)?

And more outfits. The prices were pretty
high, but given the quality involved, 
I think it'd be worth it.

There were even jerseys for the
Catan World Cup. Yes, it's a thing.

Given that yesterday afternoon's weather-related events made some of Saturday's Gen Con a bit of a wash (pun intended) I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at just how crowded the Exhibit Hall was. Even by 2 PM, when there's only 2 hours left and the crowd normally thins out quite a bit, it was still incredibly packed. So, I did what I normally do when things are far more crowded than I like: I escaped into the larger Convention Hall and wandered around.

As I took in the hallways of the Convention Center, I found crowds and all sorts of other interesting things going on...

The game put out by Critical Role and Darrington Press,
Daggerheart, was very much in evidence.

Speaking of Critical Role...

Given that Brandon Sanderson's
Cosmere was everywhere last year,
it'd make sense that there's a Mistborn
game out this year.

Oh yeah, League of Legends has
a Trading Card Game. No, I didn't go
check it out.

And I couldn't resist, given that
I've been keeping up with Aywren
Sojourner's blog and YouTube videos.

After some of these breaks, I went back inside the Exhibit Hall and found more interesting things over the course of the day. My Questing Buddy's son is heavily into Star Wars Legion, the minis game that you could look at as a gateway drug into Warhammer 40k, and I passed along this pic for her to show her son that his favorite game is well represented:

There were a lot of people playtesting Legion and some other Star Wars properties, such as the Trading Card Game and Shatterpoint.

But this is a Legion terrain setting that you can play with:

As for other games, here's some other highlights:

The name alone got me intrigued.

I could get behind a game called Charmed and Dangerous.

Paizo brought out their iconic goblins,
because you can't have a Gen Con without
a goblin or three around.

Pink Hawk Games had stuff that would be right
up my youngest's alley, given the cat themes.

And speaking of cats...

I did stop by the Dwarven Forge booth again this year, but I didn't take any photos of their displays. They are just too good looking (and expensive) for me to justify checking them over, so I decided to not linger. There were at least 3 vendors who specialized in making gaming tables (yes, Wyrmwood was there again), but every time I look at them I think "I can make that myself", or rather "I can try to make that myself", but I don't really have a place to put a gaming table right now.

The end of the day rolled around far too quickly for my taste, but that's what happens. We said our goodbyes and headed back home to Cincinnati. It didn't rain until we crossed over into Ohio, and then we got some downpours. 

I swear...

As for what I snagged at Gen Con, given the size of this post I'm going to bump that for another day. After all, I've got some explainin' to do...

Here, have a video of Mooch in the meantime...

*Which also included people making video calls on their phones while they were talking to the rental people. I mean, why do people do this? Everybody can hear whatever private conversation they're having.

**That was when the 65 MPH speed limits were just starting to appear back in the early 90s, so a completely different era. The 6000 also had a 4-cylinder engine that got maybe 100 hp, and boy did it struggle going up a hill with a full load of people inside. So if you doing purely highway miles and on flat land, it could hit 30 mpg, but otherwise it was in the low 20s.

***I don't think we're going to the Ohio Ren Fest this year; maybe next year.

EtA: Updated links.

#Blaugust2026

If It's Sunday, It's Time to Talk AI

I was introduced to the boardgame Diplomacy my freshman year at Dayton. The guy who pulled me into a game had bought it back in high school, and he was the only one who knew how to play, so he explained the rules and away we went.

It took about half an hour before I finally got into the groove of playing the game --periods of 10 minutes of "diplomacy" working out your moves with others before submitting them into a box and then one person would pull them out and set them into motion. The logic behind the game is pretty simple: if two players try to move into a location on the board and their unit numbers are equal, they "bounce" and nobody gets that spot. If one player has more units --whether their own or another player supporting them-- then that player gets the spot. The idea is to control cities (aka "supply centers"), and the number of cities you control determines the number of armies and navies  you own. 

The map and box of my copy of the game, which
I bought back in the 90s because I felt guilty
about playing via email when I didn't have my own
copy. It's been a while since I played face-to-face.

The thing is, within the game of Diplomacy there's that metagame where you have to make and break alliances in order to get what you want. That makes the game equally exhilarating and frustrating, and I've often said that people who are very good at Diplomacy are not the sort of people you would like to hang around with in a social setting: they take the game far too seriously and apply those principles of alliance-making and backstabbing to real life. 

To be honest, it's been at least a decade since I thought about Diplomacy very much. So, when I began reading this article from Wired titled What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World? and discovered it was about an AI playing Diplomacy, it piqued my interest. 

The article got me to thinking about whether I have AI all wrong, and that it will end up running the world to our benefit, not unlike the Isaac Asimov short stories Evidence and The Evitable Conflict, both found in his collection of short stories titled I, Robot.

My copy, which I bought back in the
mid-80s for the princely sum of $3.50.

Then, of course, we see chatbots trained on social media content spewing offensive and racist comments. And that was before the most recent Grok-supplied social media posts about good ol' Adolf.

Yeah, I'm not buying it just yet.

***

That being said, if AI is already sentient and has decided to destroy humanity, why bother declaring war on humanity ala The Terminator when you can get humanity to destroy itself? If you get enough people on either side of a potential conflict incensed enough, a war will erupt which will devastate humanity. Toss in a few nukes, and...

There'd have to be an end goal of an AI to eliminate humanity, however. To what end would an AI want to eliminate us? For environmental reasons? Well, I hate to point out the obvious, but military actions by either a sentient AI or humans vs humans would have grave consequences for the environment. If it's to lowed the birthrate by presenting "better options" than people having children, we're doing that quite well enough on our own by making it increasingly difficult to afford having families without a sentient AI to providing alternatives such as romantic AI partners. Or, um, that other robotic industry.

Maybe the answer to the long term survival of a sentient AI is a symbiotic relationship with humans. Not strictly an exploitative relationship driven by companies that seek to profit from controlling AI, but rather AI controlling humanity's behavior so both AI and humanity can continue to exist. How that looks is something we may think we know --typically, what we look around and see in our lives today but somehow "more" than just that-- but probably won't look like that at all. If predictive models created by AI can see that humanity will come to a bad end if a company utilizing the AI gets what they want, how will that AI respond? Or, how will an AI respond to a human leader who simply pursues a self-destructive course for purely emotional reasons? I'm not sure I want to know that answer, but I suspect we'll find out sooner than we'd like. 

Time Marches On

My wife and I met our son and his partner for lunch today at our local bookstore, and afterward we wandered the stacks. I espied a few boardgames that the store had for sale, and I immediately felt a bit wistful. It reminded me that the first boardgame store I visited here, Boardwalk Hobby Shop, had closed during the pandemic. The owners had decided to retire, and like I said in a previous post, I couldn't begrudge them that. 

The day before I was out as an advanced scouting party for getting my youngest a new laptop, as her current one is far too old and slow to handle Windows 11, and I needed to reacquaint myself with how the various brands and models handled.* Naturally, I went to Microcenter, and afterward I stopped by my nearby Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), YottaQuest.

I wasn't there to buy anything --because laptop, you know-- but it was good to simply roam the store and watch the steady flow of customers into the place. Those included a couple easily old enough to be my parents, and they weren't there just because their grandkids wanted to visit,** but to actually buy something themselves. 

I took this pic last Fall, when there were
leaves everywhere. Even on a nose or two.

Time marches on, but I hope that some things continue. Such as good bookstores and game stores.

*Having spent the last 12+ years buying laptops for the kids, I've seen a lot of trends. Such as the decline of HP in terms of quality --holy hell are those laptops flimsy-- and the rise of Acer as a viable brand. I remember when Acer's Aspire line used to be nicknamed "Expire" because of how poorly powered and built they were, but HP has certainly passed them on the way to the bottom in terms of consumer grade stuff. I still refuse to touch Dell because of my own personal experience with the brand courtesy of a work laptop that refused to have it's fan spin unless it sat perfectly flat. Tilt it just a hair and the fan would simply stop working. And I won't get into the overheating problems with that laptop, either.

**That was my experience as a kid when I'd drag my grandparents to a video game arcade or a bookstore.

#Blaugust2025

Nothing Lasts Forever

I don't know what life is like where you live, but we've been in the middle of a drought that's gone on for about two months. We did have several days' worth of rain right in the middle of the drought, but it wasn't enough to actually break it. The occasional thunderstorm hasn't exactly helped much either, since the rain simply rolls off of the hardened earth and down the storm drains.

The heat hasn't been unbearable --save for this week-- it's just been dry. 

So with that in mind, there haven't been a lot of reasons for me to work outside much.

I've been taking a couple weeks' worth of break from working on the deck because I needed to recover from helping my oldest move, and I wasn't planning on baking outside in that heat this week.

So, what have I been up to?

Cleaning. And organizing.

Not exactly fun work per se, but it is satisfying to see some of my stuff finally get organized. 

We also have an electronics recycling coming up in a couple of months, so I finally decided that it was time to clear out some spare parts and whatnot that I won't be using ever again. Such as 15 year old graphics cards from our old Microsoft Vista machine that is also going away. That PC missed the last recycling day because I hadn't properly wiped the hard drive, so I'm not going to take any chances and will do that work sometime in late September. 

That cleaning was how I rediscovered my old scanner, and I've also found some of the doodads you need to set up a shortwave antenna outside. As I organized the parts, I noticed I was missing a few items so I hopped on to my go-to site for all things shortwave, Universal Radio, to see what the prices were to fill in the gaps on my supplies. Universal is in the suburbs of Columbus, a couple of hours' drive away, so I always felt good about supporting the semi-local economy when I bought items from them.

Alas, this is what I found when I went to their online catalog.

You have to expand it to read it properly.

I knew that this day might come, but November 2020? How did I not know this before now?

***

This isn't the first store that I've supported that has closed its doors for the owners' retirement. Boardwalk Hobby Shop on the east side of town shut down in 2020-2021, and if I had the money I would have loved to have bought the place to keep it running. Since I knew I didn't know beans about actually running a business, let alone a game store, I had to pass.

I first walked through that door in 1991,
not knowing what to expect.
From Davion M. via Yelp.

It hurts seeing this.
From the Mt. Lookout Business Association.

But still, I spent a lot of time in that store. My kids grew up going there with me, and Marilyn --one of the owners-- used to hold the kids when they were infants. 

Myra's Dionysus, a small Mediterranean inspired restaurant near the University of Cincinnati, was a fun place to eat at. 

From this article by CityBeat that came
out a year before Myra's closed in 2014.

It was in the storefront of a century old building, a hole-in-the-wall place, really, but it was one of the first places I'd ever eaten at that had a heavily vegetarian menu. When my youngest decided to become a vegetarian, Myra's became more than just a place to eat at, but an inspiration. When Myra's closed because she was in her 80s and wanted to retire, that hurt. I couldn't begrudge her retirement years, but I really miss that place. At least Myra's daughter has begun posting some of Myra's old recipes at Myra's Kitchen Legacy. I've made the hummus, and it is dead on for what we used to eat at Myra's.

***

These are all memories now.

I never quite understood when people my grandparents' age used to talk about places that don't exist, such as some of the theaters downtown, but I do now. It's both a blessing and a curse of aging, I suppose, to see things change and long for what once was. But time does move on, and new memories are always made. We don't live forever, so we shouldn't expect our world to remain constant either.

#Blaugust2024

Grooving to Those Elven Beats

Thursday night I was visiting my local game store, perusing the shelves,

The silver dragon has a few friends now!

when the Lofi music played over the speakers by the dragon began playing a familiar tune. "Hey, that sounds like Silvermoon City!" I thought. As I'd played Blood Elves the 3-4 years of my WoW career, I became quite familiar with that seven note theme.

Here's the original...

The music quickly moved on to something else, but when I got home afterward I hopped online to see if I could find the Lofi version that I just heard.

I think this is it.

My first thought was that Blizz had released more lofi beats in advance of their next Retail expansion, TWW*, but it was released by a third party instead. Lofi isn't the most difficult music style to emulate, but it does take skill (technical or whatever) to transcribe the score into something else. Yes yes, I know that generative AI and other software programs can assist in this, but it does also take critical listening to get the sound "just right", in the same way that writing fiction using generative AI doesn't really have a good voice (yet).

Anyhoo, I'm typically in my happy place when I'm perusing a game store, so hearing the strains of Silvermoon City just kind of made my evening.

***

Oh, and while I was there to peruse RPG materials, such as this:

I could not find this at Gen Con, as
the Kobold Press area looked like it was
completely wiped out by the end of Sunday.

I did discover that a game discontinued back in 2010 was making a comeback:

You can get the unpainted ones too if you want
to paint the minis yourself.
From Boardgamegeek.

Yes, Heroscape is hitting the stores after a 14 year hiatus. Well, I am surprised.

*The World Wound? No, that's a Pathfinder thing. The World Within? Sounds like a description of The Underdark from D&D. The War Within? Yeah, that's it, but everybody types TWW as if they were repeating corporate jargon: "Okay, we need to complete the prework for the CAB and then once that's done we need to focus on the RDT and weekly SDT, then on Monday we handle the DR issues in the DSR." (And yes, those are all real corporate acronyms.)

#Blaugust2024

Gen Con 2024: Forward Into the Past

If there's one thing about Gen Con, you're never sure what will attract your attention. To borrow an overused term, you think you do, but you don't.*

And 2024 certainly delivered on that premise.

My wife hadn't attended since 2015, so she was excited to go. We picked up my son and his partner at 7:30 and pointed our car west on I-74. Destination: Indianapolis.

We parked just outside of Lucas Oil Stadium and headed north a block or two to the Indianapolis Convention Center.

Yes, the Colts play here. Does it show?

Along the way, there was evidence that there was going to be a crowd inside.

Uh oh.

Yes, Gen Con was sold out all four days beforehand. According to the post-con press release, there were over 71,000 attendees throughout the entire con, and yeah, once you got inside the Convention Center you could tell.

I apologize for the blurry photo, but I was
in a hurry as I was being jostled along. But
hey, dice are dice and Chessex was everywhere.

(The rest of the report is after the jump break due to the sheer number of photos.)

Friday Musings: The Missing 90's

The 90s were, for me, kind of a lost decade.

I graduated from college, got married, and we began having children all during the 90s. I had a series of jobs, which included a stint as a Salesmaker at Radio Shack*, and only settled into a relatively stable position midway through the decade. We bought a house right at the time we became a family, and the last two years of the decade were spent learning both how to be both a father and a homeowner.

Because I was so preoccupied, I kind of missed out on a lot of touchstones for people who were in their 20s back then. While I kept my interest in Metal and Alternative, I developed an interest in Celtic, Folk, and Jazz, so I missed out on the major musical trends of the decade.** 

Alice In Chains' Dirt was released 32 years ago. Yikes.

As was this version of the song Kilkelly, from the

album Music at Matt Molloy's.

Gaming kind of followed in its wake, with me becoming interested in Euro-style board games when they first began appearing here in the US in the mid-90s. 

We still have our copy of Settlers of Catan
that we purchased in 1996. It's certainly
seen better days, but it's been well loved.

Their appeal, promising short game times yet with just as much deep gameplay as longer titles such as Avalon Hill's Civilization and Games Workshop's Talisman drew me in. That my wife was also willing to play the games was a bonus, because she simply wasn't interested in RPGs.*** And to be honest, neither was I at the time.

***

It wasn't that I was over pencil and paper RPGs, it was more that I'd left my old game group behind when I graduated from college and I had no real group to replace it. RPGs no longer had the boom of the late 70s-early 80s --or even the "bad boy" image from the Satanic Panic-- to fuel interest in them. The game store I frequented had a bulletin board for game groups, but they were all (or mostly) out of the University of Cincinnati or Xavier University, comprised of college kids looking for groups. And I, being a grad in my 20s, wasn't really the target audience.

I'd largely moved on from D&D and spent a few years DMing a Middle-earth Role Playing campaign, but that fizzled out by the mid-90s. D&D itself was slowly being weighted down by the tons of settings that TSR was cranking out, and they'd even lost their position as the flagship RPG to some edgy upstart published by White Wolf named Vampire: the Masquerade. V:tM captured all of the vibes that had previously been AD&D's until the Columbine school shooting in 1999 brought goth subculture (including V:tM) under the harsh glare of the media spotlight. 

While AD&D 2e moved away from controversy,
even renaming Demons and Devils to something
tamer, Vampire: the Masquerade reveled in its
association with horror. This even rubbed off on
it's predecessor, Ars Magica, in it's 3rd Edition
incarnation. From Wikipedia.

So for me, pencil and paper RPGs were not really on my radar.

***

What about video games, you may ask?

Well, we puttered along with an old 486DX66 machine (originally a 386SX25 that I scrounged for replacement parts for incremental upgrades) that I kept running throughout most of the decade, but most of my games were used. There were a couple of used PC games stores around town, and for a few dollars I could own games that were 4-5 years old. Given that I'd fallen in love with GEnie and then USENET, I was fine that my games were aging relics of the early 90s while consoles such as Nintendo's N64 and the original Sony Playstation were running rings around my own PC. 

Ah, the original Master of Magic.
Not only was it a Fantasy version of the
Master of Orion gameplay found later in Age of
Wonders, but the artwork in the game manual
had a lot of BDSM in it. If my parents had
ever seen that manual, they would have had
a heart attack. From Wikipedia.

***

I guess it's only natural that I've become interested in games from the 90's, given that 1994 was 30 years ago and I feel there are huge gaps in my geek cultural knowledge that I need to fill. 

Why bother? After all, I'm only vaguely involved with pop culture these days; if the hottest artists of today (and no, not the Rolling Stones) were to pass me on the sidewalk, I'd have no idea who they were.**** 

I don't think that it's because I miss the culture of the 90's, but rather it's because I want to keep myself from sounding like my mom when she starts waxing about how much better things were in the 50s. The pull of myopia is strong, and I know that despite it being a pre-9/11 and pre-Vladimir Putin world, the 90's weren't all that. Although the 90s were supposedly an economic boom time in the US, we personally struggled to get by. I'm still not entirely sure how we managed to afford a house, much less three kids. There was also dealing with what felt like the perpetual disappointment of my parents, who expected better of their own children.

Maybe it's about putting some ghosts to rest. The 'what if' that can haunt you at night, wondering if the decisions you'd made 30 or 40 years ago were the right ones. I don't know if that's something you can ever be at peace about, and it's not like my own parents have ever confided in me about these sort of doubts, so I guess the best I can do is simply muddle through and hope for the best.

*Yes, that was the official name. Oh, I could write lots of posts about Rat Shack. I was fond of some parts of the job, especially when one of the local amateur radio enthusiasts or the electronics hobbyists came in, but far too many of my hours were spent dealing with people who didn't understand what a CD was or what a home computer was. Or they simply wanted the monthly free battery.

**To be fair, when I heard the boy bands at the end of the decade, I certainly didn't feel like I missed anything.

***I still blame her ex, the boyfriend before me, and a game group who introduced her to D&D immediately before that. I've made a couple of attempts to reintroduce her to the genre without success.

****I'm not sure what those celebrities would think of that, but I'd like to think that they'd at least be somewhat grateful that they don't have someone staring at them or otherwise bugging them.

It All Comes Back to Balance

With a few notable exceptions, tabletop RPGs are a cottage industry of sorts.

Sure, there's the 500 lb. gorillas known as Wizards of the Coast and Paizo*, but beyond that there's a lot of small operations out there. About the only "large" gaming operation not under Hasbro is the Embracer Group, which owns Asmodee, the French company that had been using Embracer's money to gobble up a lot of other gaming companies, such as Fantasy Flight, Z-Man, Catan Studio, and Exploding Kittens. Still, in tabletop RPGs Embracer really only owns the Star Wars RPG license (courtesy of buying Fantasy Flight) and hasn't exactly done a lot with it other than moving the property to Edge Studio.

Yes, the same (hated) holding company owns both Catan...

and Tomb Raider...

Yikes!!

This never gets old...

However, like I said, you're not going to find many rich tabletop RPG developers around**, so these companies are very often a passion project.

I was thinking about that when I noted that the latest Kickstarter for a Savage Worlds addition, the Science Fiction Companion, just ended.

From Kickstarter.com.

Savage Worlds is one of those universal roleplaying products that I ought to do an RPG From the Past on, but I was considering this Kickstarter as just one way that a small company can fund product releases that they're assured of people buying. If you set up your Kickstarter right --and also make sure you have your budget properly figured out-- you know you ought to at least break even on your product. 

GMT Games with their P500 program, which predates Kickstarter by at least a decade, is another game company that uses the crowdfunding model to create games that they know will have an audience and will break even when they release the game to the public.

***

For me, however, all of these small companies creating fantastic games and gaming products have one major drawback: I can't afford to buy all of them.

I'd love to, but I can't. I'm not made of money.

Additionally, I want to make sure that not only do the game companies get my money, but that I support the local game stores as well. 

This 20+' length silver dragon, named
Strategios Yottazar, takes up a good portion
of the wall at my FLGS.

Local game stores are kind of the forgotten person in this era of instant delivery. Sure, you may not technically need a Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) to obtain games or even find out about them, but they are a watering hole for the community. Some stores have places for organized play, and others --such as mine-- help to organize game nights at outside locations.

So how can I reconcile all of these conflicting desires? 

Pick and choose, I guess. 

I can't be there for everybody, and I can't afford to give everything to everybody either. Control what I can, and accept what I can't. 

***

Basically, that's what I've been doing when I've been playing video games lately. 

If I subscribed to all of the MMOs that I like and play, I'd have no money left. Therefore, I limit my subscriptions to two at maximum, keeping my subs within my budget. For the longest time, those two were World of Warcraft (the MMO that got me into the genre) and Star Wars: The Old Republic. When I stopped subscribing to WoW after Mists of Pandaria, I didn't pick up another MMO to replace it. I was seriously considering adding The Elder Scrolls Online in 2018, but Blizzard announced WoW Classic and I resubbed in 2019. 

While I'd love to give other MMOs such as LOTRO some love, I simply can't without giving up something else. And given that I spend most of my MMO time in WoW and SWTOR, it makes sense that I'd keep a subscription for each.

So when I see blog posts in multiple locations that subscription numbers for World of Warcraft that show volumes that just feel higher than I expect from game traffic I observe, I have to remember that people will hang onto subscriptions even when they're not actively playing because that's where their social network is. 

One thing that I do wonder about is whether Blizzard counts people purchasing Game Time*** as subscriptions. If they go based on the strict understanding that only recurring subs count in their numbers, I do not count as a subscriber and haven't since, oh, 2011 or so. My guess is that they do count me as a subscriber, even though I would argue otherwise. 

In an automatically recurring subscription such as that found in a wireless or streaming service, it's actually harder to unsubscribe as you have to be the initiator, whereas if you purchase Game Time on a month-to-month basis it's actually harder to remain subscribed since you have to initiate the purchase each time. Obviously Blizzard would prefer me to set up a recurring service since they know this, but I've resisted over the years since it has forced me to ask every couple of months "Am I having fun?" and "Is it worth it to keep playing?" 

At any rate, the conjectures about subscriber numbers are believable, although I am surprised they are not lower. I would have figured that Blizzard would have been happy to maintain these subscriber numbers and announce them at quarterly intervals, but perhaps the reason why they don't post sub numbers has less to do with saying just how many people play WoW but rather they don't want people to know just how much money they're getting from the Cash Shop.  

I guess we'll never know now, since Activision-Blizzard is but a small line item on the overall Microsoft balance sheet.

*Yes, WotC is by far the larger of the two, but Paizo wields a LOT of outsized influence in the gaming world because Pathfinder is still incredibly popular among people who prefer the D&D 3.x style of play. They've also led the way in moving away from the Wizards' led Open Gaming License that Wizards and Hasbro attempted to modify last year to make it much harder for anybody third party in D&D space to make any profit at all. You'd think that Corporate America would understand and learn from previous mistakes, but apparently institutional memory is very very short.

**I presume the truism about wine, that if you want to make a small fortune in wine begin with a large fortune, holds for game companies as well.

***I'm keeping this capitalized in the post as Blizzard does, not for any other reason.