Precinct Omega Podcast scripts

Ey-yo, folks. Some patrons have let me know that they don't really do podcasts or, alternatively, that they do so many that they don't have time to add mine to their playlist, but they're still interested in the content.

As it happens, some of my podcasts are - shock! - scripted. So I actually have a written version of pretty much everything I say in them, which I've been sporadically posting up on my blog at precinctomega.co.uk when I remember.

So, would anyone like to see those scripts here and, if so, in what form?

To give you a taste of what it would look like, my most recent script (News #42) is below:

***

Games Workshop has launched its new subscription service, Warhammer Plus, to astonishing levels of general enthusiasm. I’ll look at what’s on the menu, why it’s proving popular and how this surprising move by GW is actually something that should’ve been 100% predictable.

TSR is a thing again… again. Ernest Gary Gygax Jr has announced a reclamation of the TSR name and logo with plans to licence and develop new roleplay game products under the storied brand. But the announcement has been swiftly and dramatically overshadowed by comments Ernie made publicly as part of the promotional campaign to announce the new company. I’ll look in detail at those comments, and what they mean for the new TSR.

Mantic Games has announced a new miniatures board game with a scifi theme. What? In addition to Dreadball? Yes! Overdrive is a gladiatorial arena combat game, and although details are sparse, right now, more will be revealed over the coming weeks and the plan at Mantic is to release straight to retail this Summer. Did you hear that right? Straight to retail? Not via Kickstarter? Heck, yes. Straight to retail this Summer.

And finally, I am going to talk about two current Kickstarter campaigns - perhaps against my better judgement. Red Joker’ Cyber Odyssey is a spectacularly over-complicated RPG boardgame hybrid with a cyberpunk theme, whilst veteran game developer, Mythic Games, has just launched - and, inevitably, massively over-funded - their board game version of Ubisoft’s Rainbow 6: Siege. I encourage those who are interested in such things to carefully watch both of these projects. They have a lot in common. High-end visuals, high-concept stories and - important to this podcast - very, very cool sci-fi or near future 28mm miniatures designs.

Why should we be watching them. I shall explain all in due course

DISCUSSION

Let’s start with Games Workshop.

I’ve been talking, for a while now, about the irresistible rise of 3D digital printing as the new market for tabletop miniatures and, even though I have a lot of reservations, I’m open-minded enough to recognize that this is the future, whatever I may happen to think. But there are still some challenges to be overcome with the concept - some of these are illustrated in my latest YouTube video, which is a review of the Transvaal Kinetic Solutions miniatures set from Enemy Spotted Studios. But one that I don’t touch upon there is how 3D printing is to be effectively monetized.

It’s that regular question: what’s the value of a digital product? How do you track its ownership and ensure that designers receive a fair compensation for their product creation?

I’ve said several times over the last year and a bit of podcasting that I was sure that GW was aware of this challenge and that they were working on a solution, but I had no idea what it was.

I had planned to readdress this subject, because former interviewee, patron and Auroch Digital CEO, Tomas Rawlings, happened to comment on this subject to me, and he said “service”. It was his considered opinion that GW could potentially sell digital versions of their miniatures for home printing en masse by providing an aftermarket service that would outcompete those selling the pirated or tabletop equivalent miniatures. And I was planning on using that little nugget of wisdom to do a segment imagining what GW’s “service model” might look like.

And then… Warhammer Plus.

If this is news to you, let me explain.

Warhammer Plus is GW’s digital subscription plan. You pay them a fixed monthly fee on subscription for access to a very wide range of exclusive products. These include professionally-made short animated movies set in the Warhammer universes - like, a Warhammer Love, Death & Robots, if you’ve got a Netflix subscription. But it also includes access to tonnes of other hobby related content, including video content, a White Dwarf archive, army building apps, premium event access, novels and audiobooks and… an exclusive miniature… and the option to buy a second exclusive miniature.

But hold on, now, I hear some folks complain. Those exclusive miniatures are plastic minis that will be sent to you, in the post, like a cave dweller.

To which I say, yes, they are… for now.

Warhammer Plus is incredibly clever for several reasons.

First, they are offering content of genuine value to Warhammer hobbyists and - miniatures aside - it’s all digital content that nevertheless possesses inarguable practical value - probably greater, individually, than the annual cost of the subscription - currently £5 per month or £50 per year. So it’s objectively a great deal.

Second, they’re offering content in such profusion that the average user is highly unlikely to burn through it in a month and cancel their subscription, thus setting up the subscription as an habitual expense - just as other digital subscriptions seek to do.

Third, GW is leveraging their immense back catalogue of content and their literal army of content creators - including recruiting talented independents to come in-house and create it for them - to make sure that new Warhammer Plus content is going to be a steady stream of new income for them. These are two levers that their only realistic competitors in the same market simply don’t possess. Only the one giant operator who could eat GW whole - Hasbro - has anything like the muscle to compete on this level and - to be fair - has been for a while with their D&D Beyond subscription service which - by the way - still isn’t as stupendous a deal as what Warhammer Plus is offering.

With this move, GW is securing for itself a digital content monetisation platform that will occupy and dominate this ground for the foreseeable future. They are going to use it to sweep the best independent content generators - Patreon painting tutors, YouTube animators and fanfic authors - firmly under their umbrella. And they are also creating a retail framework through which the sale of digital miniatures is going to become a realistic prospect.

And I know it’s been a success because some of the biggest GW cynics I know - people whose objections to the Lenton Monolith go far beyond getting the hump because their new orcs don’t look right - are already signing up to Warhammer Plus with happy smiles on their faces.

Not me, obviously. I can’t deny that I’m tempted. But do you know what killed my desire to sign up?

It was that damn Vindicare model. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, google Warhammer Plus Assassin.

Snipers don’t stick the whole damn barrel of their long-gun out of their concealment location. And they definitely don’t locate themselves with their heads in the middle of a massive cross-hair.

Yes, yes, of course it’s a “Rule of Cool” thing and I should embrace the grimdank, but… At the very least, it snapped me out of the sense of hypnotic compulsion I found myself in watching the previews of the animations because, damn… they do look good.

Now… TSR.

This is one mangled, twisted spider web of a mess, so I’m going to try to hit the key notes on this story. TSR is the original company that published Dungeons & Dragons as well as a bunch of other games back in the 70s and 80s. Eventually it went under, in complicated circumstances; the IP for D&D eventually ended up in the hands of Wizards of the Coast - by then owned by Hasbro - and so the story of D&D continued and now we have 5e - it’s great; happy ending and everyone levels up.

But it couldn’t end like that!

TSR made a comeback as TSR Games some time ago. Basically, a game enthusiast acquired the rights to the TSR name and logo and started a new company to - among other things - re-boot one of the roleplay game properties not acquired by Hasbro: Top Secret, a roleplay game about slick spies and evil masterminds. This venture initially involved a couple of TSR founder Gary Gygax’s children, including Ernest Gary Gygax Junior.

This year, Ernie Gygax announced that he was starting a new company called TSR. Basically, TSR Games missed a deadline to re-register their registration of the TSR name and logo and Ernie Gygax snapped it up. Now TSR Games is licensing the right to use the TSR name from the new TSR company.

The new TSR company also plans to release new roleplay games.

And if you think this mess is a recipe for confusion, acrimony and failure precipitated by inevitable litigation… well, then let me just remind you that this is all happening in America where undertaking commercial activities out of misguided spite is something of a national obsession.

But even if the whole enterprise wasn’t doomed by those factors, Ernie managed to make it so much worse by opening his mouth in an interview with Live From the Bunker where he managed to make racist comments about American Indians and attack the “woke” culture of modern roleplay games in which things like race, gender, disability and sexuality are… like, something you consider, because it’s a game, and we want people to have fun playing it.

In short, Ernie thinks all of this is stupid and that what folks want are roleplay games in which they play sweat-slick muscle fantasies, while the women are relegated to boobing their way breastily down the stairs.

Perhaps I am putting words in his mouth and doing him a disservice. I would encourage you to either listen to the interview for yourselves or read the transcript of the key parts painstakingly compiled by Morrus on Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG News.

My prediction is that the new TSR will flail ineffectually at making “old school” RPGs before quietly shutting the hell up and going back to running a bad museum for geeks.

More positive, by far, is the news about Overdrive.

Now, of course, I could be feeling positive about the news of another quality miniatures board game from Mantic Games. And there’s no denying that I do love a sci-fi arena combat game - I am a huge fan of Corvus Belli’s Aristeia! - possibly a bigger fan of that than I am of Infinity the Game, and you all know how much I do like that game. But this isn’t why I consider the release to be good news for Mantic and for miniatures wargaming in general.

No, as you may have inferred from my headlines, the reason I find this news uplifting is because the release is going straight to retail rather than via Kickstarter.

I don’t know what Mantic’s experience of Kickstarter has really been. Certainly, they’ve run a lot of successful Kickstarters with big numbers. But they’ve also run an awful lot of big-margin sales on post-Kickstarter retail stock. If you consider Kickstarter to be a pre-order platform - which, in cases like this, it certainly is - they’ve been getting great pre-order numbers and pretty awful sales on stuff after pre-orders are fulfilled. This is undeniably one of the big problems with Kickstarter: it draws all of the most engaged and enthusiastic fans into the pre-order, giving a distorted impression of the subsequent anticipated sales.

Ours is a fickle hobby in which people seem to take a weirdly distorted pride in the number of shrink-wrapped copies of games and boxes of miniatures they have hoarded up. But when it comes to game product releases - like Dreadball or, going back further, Dwarf King’s Hold or Star Saga, just to name three games that Mantic Kickstarted - if these games languish, unopened, on a shelf they lose something absolutely critical to a game’s long-term success: table time.

So my guess is that Mantic has looked at its historical sales data on these game releases and realized that they end up burning a lot of their up-front profits on retail inventory that never sells - or which sells slowly enough that it ends up costing the company money in storage space that could be used by products that might actually sell.

So seeing Overdrive go direct to retail tells me that Mantic has learned this difficult lesson.

But it also says a couple of other things which might or might not be true.

First is the Kickstarter Stigma. I think this is a subject that would benefit from some serious academic study, but my gut feeling is that people are developing a feeling about Kickstarter-based projects that don’t look like they really need Kickstarter. These big, flashy, high-production-value releases that over-promise and generally under-deliver are starting to wear down people’s patience with this kind of project. And although I don’t see the Kickstarter wave crashing any time soon, I do think that companies like Mantic are beginning to see that it may not be in a game’s long-term best interests to be tied too closely to Kickstarter. Plus, Kickstarters tend to offer products to backers at below-retail price and they surrender 10% of their gross funding to Kickstarter, before they account for shipping on top of that.

Second, though, is what it says about Mantic: that Mantic has the financial wherewithal to develop and release a high-quality boxed miniatures board game without needing to go cap in hand to its fanbase for pre-order money. The pay-off for them is multiple: they get to sell the product at full retail price, for a start, and don’t have to give up a chunk of their proceeds to a middle-man of questionable added value. But they also get the game into retail and onto shelves from the start, pushing customers into their FLGS to buy their copy, sustaining local communities and, crucially, making table time a far more likely prospect for the game than it would be if it was just another Kickstarter reward arriving in the post.

And all of this brings me, of course, to Red Joker’s Cyber Odyssey and Mythic Games’s 6: Siege.

If you look only at the Kickstarter launch page, these games look very similar - slick graphics and digital miniatures-design for high-concept board games with a near future or sci-fi theme. But the 6: Siege game launched on 22nd June and is already at over £800k - over 1000% funded - whilst Cyber Odyssey is at around £55k - which is well past its funding goal, but is it far enough?

I could do a whole breakdown on the differences between the companies and games in question, and their respective pre-launch marketing campaigns, as well as their past track records. But the residual fact is that Mythic Games doesn’t need to be on Kickstarter at all. They have routinely smashed the $1m mark on previous projects and even the $5m mark on at least one. And I’m not saying that to whinge that they should be like Mantic and go straight to retail - morally, I think they should; but commercially, why mess with a winning formula?

Rather, I’m pointing out that 6: Siege is a done deal. There is no way that game isn’t going to be released. Odds are it’s already been manufactured and the first set of units are sitting in a warehouse somewhere, ready to go. The only question is when the marketing folks decide is the optimal time after concluding the successful Kickstarter to send them out.

Meanwhile, Cyber Odyssey has been cancelled once already. Now, I need to say that all of Red Joker’s previous Kickstarted campaigns have been fulfilled and there’s no reason to think that this one won’t. But the gap between the campaign ending and fulfillment beginning is going to be a big one. To look at their previously biggest campaign, the campaign ended in December 2017 and shipping began in May 2019, which was six months later than planned.

So what? Well, it speaks to the wisdom of Mantic’s decision. That’s all I’m saying.

PRECINCT OMEGA

As ever, then, what does all this mean for Precinct Omega?

Well, the first thing to say is that I am still moving forward with my own plan to develop a small miniatures range inspired by the Horizon Wars setting. And this will still be manufactured in white metal. Although I may recognize that the days might be numbered for this medium, that doesn’t mean they’re gone quite yet and I expect it to be a minimum of another five years (and probably more like ten) before domestic 3D printers will be cheap and easy enough for a majority of hobbyists to prefer home printing to buying physical, so I think there’s still a market worth talking about.

However, I also think that my decision to go with digital sculpting over traditional is being borne out, because it will mean that, even once physical manufacture is no longer viable, I will still have the STLs are a saleable product and, hopefully, we’ll have a better grasp by then on how to control and ameliorate the impact of piracy.

I remain conflicted over the use of crowdfunding but I’m glad to see companies like Mantic taking a step away from the Kickstarter platform. Right now, I have two designs for miniatures complete and two more on their way to completion in the next few weeks. I’m working on the concept art for the stretch goals I would want to add to any kind of crowdfunding campaign and I continue to study the strategies of crowdfunding while I try to decide on how best to approach it.

Looking at my own sparse financial reserves, my guess is that I can’t take the project as far as I originally wanted to. I can most likely get to the point of making the resin masters, but I’ll need crowdfunding money to make the moulds for metal casting, to purchase the raw materials and to run the spins.

This, of course, means that I won’t have the reserves at the start of the project to complete stretch goals beyond concept art before the project begins, so I also have to begin aiming-off for a multi-stage fulfillment plan - which will mean additional postage costs.

In short, a project like this has a lot of moving parts and I’m just one guy who’s also trying to write more games and supplements at the same time.

Still, I’m excited by the prospect of creating these miniatures and hopeful for what that could start to look like as we creep closer to a place where it could be a reality. So watch this space.

NEXT WEEK

Not long ago I got to chat to Jake Thornton, game designer at large. And this week I had the chance to sit down for a long chat with another big inspiration in my game development journey, Gav Thorpe.

We had a great conversation about his career path to date and, inevitably, got to talk about the secret origins of one of Games Workshop’s most iconic failures - Inquisitor. We went over how it came to be, what factors contributed to it never really gaining traction, and yet how its ultimate legacy continues to influence miniatures wargaming both within and outside Games Workshop to this day.

We even managed to find time to talk about the subject I invited Gav on to discuss in the first place, which was how to create a narrative experience within a game.

So come and listen to that… next week.