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"There is no Cloud. There is only someone else's computer."
The tariff thing is really revealing some things about some paradigms many businesses were working under.
They didn't actually make what they were selling.
They designed it, then farmed out the manufacturing to someone else because they have no in-house manufacturing at all.
The put all of their manufacturing in West Taiwan and are now freaking out because it sure looks like they cannot economically make their product elsewhere.
Even worse, they don't sell anything that people MUST have to live.
Entertainment products are high elasticity demand.
But something these game companies lost when the prices on custom dice and miniatures dropped through the floor from West Taiwanese manufacturing is we used to play these games without any 3D elements at all.
Little square counters punched out of cardboard were universal. Those can still be printed in the good old USA economically.
They could go back to that.
We didn't use figures to play any of the roleplaying games I played for a really long time. The only figures I had of characters were because it was fun to make and paint them, not to bring to the game and put on the map.
Even now, my figures are Lego Minifigs.
But it's rare that I unroll the hex-map and have people get out their little dudes.
I think that gaming companies could recapture a lot of market by just going back to imagination.
I say this and realize that I know several GM's who never did make a world of their own, they just ran the pre-made modules.
Maybe there's less imagination out there than I think...
But, maybe, that's why I was always welcome as the GM. They couldn't buy the adventure I was about to put them through and get some pre-knowledge. I noticed that my players were doing that with T2K. So I increasingly used those modules as world building rather than running the adventure.
Completely changing Operation Reset is a pretty decent example. I should write that up sometime.
you could always 3d print your own?...panzer guy
ReplyDeleteWe scaled up the turn template for Matchbox back in 1983 for Car Wars, so official minis didn't have any allure.
DeleteWe've even played at 1/24 scale!
Lego minifigs and bricks make scenery easy if imaginations fail.
Pretty much the same situation for the one tabletop game I do play... BattleTech rules have not really changed much since the 80's when I started playing and the saying I hear often is "3-D printer goes whirrrrr" for the miniatures if needed. Yes, the official events at the big conventions try to require the official minis, etc., but the current license holder is "less popular" with their political activism overriding the "just play the game with big stompy robots", so lot of us were already heavily cutting back our official purchases long before Catalyst announced they were in trouble with their manufacturing all coming out of China.... With my job I am unlikely to be able to get to the big conventions to play in any case, and locally 3-D prints are considered perfectly fine to play, so...
ReplyDeleteThat seems right, I used to play war games (SPI and Avalon Hill) and we just had cardboard counters, hex grid and a D6.
ReplyDelete