Piazo VTT

[Valarian]

The main developments now are focussed on the 3.5e/4e rulesets. The other published rulesets are always in a state of playing catch-up.

[wbcreighton]

Case in point.

It's not trivial to do it even for a large company. Besides, they already devote a lot of time to supporting MTGO. I really don't know why Paizo expects their effort to turn out differently. It's simply not a good ROI for them just so they can maintain complete control and it's definitely not worth the risk of it failing to succeed after investing a lot of time, money and goodwill.

If you read the book: "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast.../dp/0374275637
( an excellent book that I would recommend to everyone )

you would probably judge Paizo's expectations as a case of "inside view vs outside view". The people involved within a group or project generally always view their chances of completing the project as "very good" even when faced with overwhelming evidence from the outside world that their chances are not good. People within the group will judge their own group as different from the norm, and therefore not likely to suffer the same pitfalls as those other groups that failed. I would say this is a classic case.

Having said that, there have been some recent examples of rules system agnostic VTTs that have had good start ups.

[wbcreighton]

so maybe its a good time to approach WOTC again?
if they would provide you licensing and push FG2 as an officially licensed VTT... it would benefit all FG2 users...

My take on the politics of the situation is:

1) Wotc just announced their own failure to deliver on something they promised to their subscribers.

2) They blamed the failure on being "unable to generate enough support for the tool to launch a full version to the public"

3) Where is the political will to then turn around as say "actually we messed up, and we are going to hand over the reins to a company that knows how to do it right" ?

I think until the people who were in charge of the project ( or thought it up) are gone, they won't be going to anyone else that might prove them wrong.

[Illrigger]

My take on the politics of the situation is:

1) Wotc just announced their own failure to deliver on something they promised to their subscribers.

2) They blamed the failure on being "unable to generate enough support for the tool to launch a full version to the public"

3) Where is the political will to then turn around as say "actually we messed up, and we are going to hand over the reins to a company that knows how to do it right" ?

I think until the people who were in charge of the project ( or thought it up) are gone, they won't be going to anyone else that might prove them wrong.

Not necessarily. Just because their vision of the product failed to generate enough support does not mean that the idea behind it was flawed, and the people at Hasbro know it. The reason they went internal on the 4e development to begin with was that they wanted "World of Warcraft money" via subscribers, but in 2012 everyone realizes that WoW was just in the right place at the right time and that nobody (even Blizzard) will ever make that happen again. It's ironic, because what happened was they fell in to the same trap that all of the rest of the game industry did when MTG came out - trying to compete with a "perfect storm" product and losing their shirts doing so.

The beauty of licensing is that it brings in profit with very little investment; they would supply FG with advance copies of materiels, and in return FG would develop the rulesets and pay them for every copy sold. It's win-win, and hopefully they can see that.

[wbcreighton]

It's win-win, and hopefully they can see that.

It is WOTC. Isn't that asking a lot ?

[wbcreighton]

Well there is a way out...
I am the Vice-President of GameTable Online and I am happy to say we will be adopting the VT platform and are currently preparing to host it at our new RPG portal. GTO coded and developed the VT so we are very familiar with the platform and are excited to be going live with this roleplaying game application.


The anticipated name for the new VT will be RPGTable Online and we have claimed the URL address of www.rpgtableonline.com. We have some work to do to prepare for the transition but expect to be back to hosting online RPG sessions at the end of July!


A big concern for us was making sure that your existing VT Dungeons & Dragons campaigns are transferred to RPGTO. To transfer your active campaigns to RPGTable Online all you need to do is register at www.gametableonline.com before we go live and email your GTO User Name and VT Screen Name to [email protected]. When the transition to the RPGTO site goes forward, our plan is to port your content over so all of your campaigns will be waiting for you!


GTO has been hosting online board games, since 2003 so we know and love games. We are looking forward to the opportunity to expand our online games to include RPGs application.


Robert Eng

from the WoTC forum

[ddavison]

I saw that too and I'm tentatively optimistic about that. I think there are plenty people inside WoTC that want to see virtual tabletop gaming succeed. Licensing all their content to multiple companies would simply expand their available outlets and increasing competition is good for future innovation. What I couldn't figure out from the post was whether or not they would actually be delivering any content or conversions of content or if they were just going to be providing the basic framework that they had available in the beta VTT.

I think there is an active market for a lot of their content, both old and new. The same is true for Paizo.

[RosenMcStern]

2) They blamed the failure on being "unable to generate enough support for the tool to launch a full version to the public"

That is a whole mound of ... well, you can guess what.

a) Their development team was simply unable to deliver on time. It happens all the time in software production. Had they delivered when they started the DDI, it would have generated the needed support.

b) They have already planned a new edition of the game, so whatever they do now with 4e will enter "planned obsolesce" in a couple of years, if not sooner. Imagining that their not-so-smart developers can make the VTT so flexible as to work with D&D Next at no cost, and with no trouble for the users, would be madness.

These, and nothing else, are the reasons for the cancellation. The "not enough support" stuff is the effect, not the cause, of their failure.

Let us see what happens next. Anyway, seeing "the big money" not being able to compete with smaller companies that actually deliver the contents the big ones only promise is always nice

[TheMetal1]

Rather suprised to see this announcement. Missed it somehow over at Paizo as well.

I do wish them the best, as it's a great way to get more people aware of VTTs and to expand the hobby. This year has been rather interesting for Paizo, with the announcement of the Goblinwork's Pathfinder MMO and now the Paizo VTT. It seems to me though, that a much larger investment of capital is required for the MMO and the VTT than would be for dead tree publishing. I applaud their move to new markets, but my concern is mission creep - doing too much. I'm suprised they didn't choose just one option for development, specifically the VTT and have that well in had before jumping into things with an MMO which will be 3 to 5 years down the road.