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 10/9/2021
- Minsc and Boo’s Journal of Villainy
- Deviant: the Renegades
- WFRP: Empire In Ruins
- Star Trek Adventures IDW Year Five Tie-In PDF
- Black Spear
Top News Stories
PAX Unplugged 2021 Confirmed, and Mandates Vaccination: From a press release sent to CHG:
“PAX Unplugged, the most attended tabletop gaming convention in the eastern U.S., returns to the Philadelphia Convention Center from Dec. 10 – 12, 2021. Badges go on-sale soon for the first in-person PAX Unplugged in two years, where attendees can experience new game demos, exciting tournaments, panels with industry giants, and more.
ReedPop and Penny Arcade will build on the successful return of PAX West over Labor Day weekend, where robust health and safety guidelines resulted in universal mask compliance and 93% of attendees showing proof of vaccination. PAX Unplugged 2021 will require all attendees to show proof of a complete COVID-19 vaccination series and abide by stringent masking requirements. For more information, please see the official health and safety guidelines.
Three-day badges for PAX Unplugged 2021 go on-sale soon for $75, while individual Friday, Saturday, and Sunday badges will go for $35 each.”
Vendors name-dropped in the press release include Cephalofair, R. Talsorian Games, CGE, Bézier Games, KOSMOS, Rock Manor Games, Lone Shark Games, Mage Hand Press, Devir Games, Chaosium Inc., Leder Games, and Wyrmwood.
Discussion of the Week
Twitch Hack reveals streamer earnings: The massive Twitch hack which dumped the site’s entire source code, among other things, revealed the revenue made by top streamers on the service. Of particular interest to the TTRPG world was the top streamer on Twitch, Critical Role (of course), which made roughly ten million dollars over the last two years. There’s been a lot of discussion on this front, including Critical Role fans getting unnecessarily defensive about…everything? More germane to the conversation is how earnings play into criticism. Critical Role was already the centerpiece of a conversation about diversity and representation, areas where their very white cast really could do a lot better. Combine this with Twitch’s overwhelmingly white top content creators, and there’s a lot that we need to talk about. Does the volume of CritRole’s earnings change this conversation? Not much. They are at the forefront of RPG streaming and they need to consider that, and those earnings make any excuses for not addressing their diversity problems a little hard to believe. Besides that, though, they do not become the bad guys merely because they’re popular and make a lot of money.
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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