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, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 12/28/2024

1. ACKS II Revised Rulebook
2. Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The RPG
3. Warhammer 40k Roleplay: Imperium Maledictum Inquisition GM’s Guide
4. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Deft Steps Light Fingers
5. Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts

Top News Stories

The top selling products on DriveThruRPG in 2024: This article is not that interesting for the actual results (though The Painted Wastelands looks interesting) but rather what it says about DriveThruRPG’s data. Geek Native had previously been able to post genre-driven charts provided by DriveThruRPG, but thanks to the Roll20 and Demiplane acquisitions these are no longer happening. Instead, there’s a broad, genre-agnostic chart with suspect data. GeekNative points out some suspect entries on the chart, like products ranking higher despite having smaller metal tiers. There are plenty of reasons this could be the case: for one example, metal tier rankings (I’ve looked into this before) only count sales, copies which were exchanged for currency. If the overall charts counted free or PWYW copies, or counted Kickstarter distributions, the numbers would be completely different. Of course, the problem here is not that the numbers are different, it’s that the data provider refuses to provide a schema or data assumptions that elucidate the differences. Of course, given that Geek Native ties this to the Roll20 acquisition, the underlying reason is money, likely obfuscating channel sales and possibly doing so in anticipation of a restructuring.

From the Archives

We’re reaching the halfway point of the 2020s, so now seems a pretty good time to dredge up some thoughts on the previous decade in gaming and compare where we were to where we are.

Discussion of the Week

Another post about making physical copies of your legally purchased PDFs: We’ve got so many PDFs in the CHG Library that we have to regularly delete some and banish them back to the itch.io or DriveThruRPG library from whence they came so we have some room to spare. Suffice to say, a thread about printing them out to preserve them in the real has a lot of value.

Have any RPG news leads or scoops? Get in touch! You can reach us at cannibalhalflinggaming@gmail.com, through Mastodon via @CannibalHalflingGaming@dice.camp, and through BlueSky via @cannibalhalfling.bsky.social.