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 1/22/2022

1. Trinity Continuum: Prometheus Unbound
2. BattleTech: Tamar Rising
3. Traveller: The Spinward Extents
4. Star Trek Adventures Player’s Guide
5. Star Trek Adventures Gamemaster’s Guide

Top News Stories

Critical Role Kickstarter gets jeers from backers: The Kickstarter for Critical Role’s Vox Machina animated series has begun fulfilling, with the series set to debut on Amazon Prime. However, backers found themselves getting less than they bargained for when a backer update made it clear they’d only get early access to the first two episodes (and only if they RSVPed within a three day window), and then to see the rest of the show they’d have to pay for Amazon Prime like everyone else. While this has caused no lack of outcry, the campaign for the show never promised access to the show itself; all backer rewards at every tier were other, secondary items. While this move is certainly bad PR for the show, it also goes to show that the ‘high risk pre-order’ model of Kickstarter was not its intent and is not how it needs to be used. On the other hand, the Critical Role team exploited parasocial relationships to take millions of dollars from their fans, and then still made them pay for the content they Kickstarted twice.

Discussion of the Week

Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast to campaign on Indiegogo: As the discussion around Kickstarter, its blockchain involvement, and alternatives continues, Jay Dragon has become one of the most successful Kickstarter funders (Wanderhome netted over $300,000) to publicly shift their next project to a competing platform. What was interesting, though, was that that competing platform is Indiegogo, one many people including myself had written off due to historical trends that included even worse favoritism towards large projects than Kickstarter, as well as the founder’s dalliances with crypto at least five years prior to Kickstarter’s. Well, times have changed, and Jay has laid out in this big Twitter thread what they found prior to making their decision. Jay’s done their homework, and the thread is well worth reading for any other creator who has to put money on the line for their next project.

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