Weekend Update: 5/8/2021

Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 5/8/2021

  1. Dune: Adventures in the Imperium
  2. Worlds Without Number
  3. Yogg-Sothoth’s Children, a Korean Call of Cthulhu supplement
  4. Hard Wired Island
  5. Stargrave: Science Fiction Wargames in the Ravaged Galaxy

Top News Stories

Big Bad Con to be Held Online: With the pandemic nowhere near ‘over’, the announcement that Big Bad Con would be held online this year was not surprising, but potentially sad for those eagerly awaiting the return of in-person events. That said, kudos to the con organizers for making the health and safety of their attendees a priority.

Apple Lawyers call Itch games ‘Unspeakable Content’: The Epic Games/Apple Lawsuit, already arguably a farce, has now featured the lawyer for Apple calling some games on Itch, which is accessible through Epic Games, “both offensive and sexualized”. In response, Itch stated (possibly joking) on their Twitter account that the adult content tag would be renamed ‘unspeakable games’, in response to another particularly hyperbolic statement.

Discussions of the Week

The Slow Weird Return to In-Person Play: Speaking of pandemic, the Indie Game Reading Club has posted Paul Beakley’s meditation on all the things that make playing online great…and how odd it’s going to feel when we return to our normal tables. As someone who’s run an online group for over a decade…there’s nothing saying you can’t keep it going even after this is all over!

Fair Pay is Still a Debate Apparently: The discussion of freelancer pay bubbled back to the discourse surface after a Kickstarter campaign advertised a stretch goal for paying their freelancers five cents a word instead of the original three. While this was rightly met with condemnation, the broader discussion melted down in the face of, well, Twitter. None of the longer threads are really worth linking, but the Cannibal Halfling position is straightforward: Freelancers should be paid more, 10 cents per word is, while not necessarily ‘enough’, at least a starting point, and royalty and profit-sharing models, while not a panacea, should become more widely discussed and offered, especially in the small press world.

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, or through Twitter via @HungryHalfling.

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