you break down the market globally, the majority of play is now happening online. If you looked at it in the early 00s and ‘10s, this type of gaming was mostly happening in person with maybe some digital tools to augment the play. That is now fully inverted. There are some countries where people almost exclusively play online, like Japan and Korea. There are huge role playing demographics there where the TTRPG acronym doesn’t even stand for ‘tabletop RPG’, it actually stands for ‘table talk RPG’. And they’re meant as conversation games and almost exclusively played only online.” Dwight says that while it’s true that the pandemic
TABLE TALK The problem for Role, by pitching itself as an alternative to VTTs, is that it naturally is compared to all of them. Search for the best VTTs online and Role will be on the list, which means for those that place an imposing feature list above approachability, Role might appear to be an underwhelming option. “What we often find is that the second somebody
actually sees our software, like when they really can see it being used on a video or on a stream, or can play around with it themselves, that evaporates very quickly, because there’s a very short understanding gap that people get over, of realising that we are a completely different experience. You can run your first game very easily and once you’ve played one game on Role, you can run almost anything. And so [it’s about] getting past that understanding gap of helping people see that we really are not asking you to learn another complex VTT.” What about the other side of that coin - that online role
playing fans might soon have too many VTTs to choose from to the point that Role is lost among them? “The huge growth in role playing games is leading to a massive growth in online tool usage,” says Dwight. “If
has boosted the growth of VTT gaming, the trend was established by the widespread adoption of video conferencing. It’s a technology that has allowed a genre once tied to pen and paper to thrive like never before. “When you look at some of the more long running products, like Roll20, they have over ten million active users and growing. They’re seeing exponential growth every year. Wizards as a company is seeing exponential content growth, and a lot of that growth is almost exclusively digital. For a company like ours, being around now for nearly three years, we see very rapid growth across our player base and platform. Just last month alone we saw a 200% increase in D&D play alone.”
ON A ROLL What isn’t entirely clear is how Role intends to make money. During an early access period last year there was a small $10 charge to gain access, but right now Role is entirely free to access without restriction. Other VTT’s (if we’re assuming Role is one of them) typically offer tiered subscriptions, with the more established among them featuring a marketplace that sells a mixture of official rulebooks and player-created content such as map tiles and player tokens. As well as increasing interest in D&D (Role now unofficially supports Wizards’ companion service D&D Beyond), that wealth of player content, it seems, is what Role may be hitching its long-term future on. “Content is changing. It isn’t just that people are playing
D&D. There’s a lot of custom creation and a larger library of games available to play. You have a lot of people who exclusively publish their games only digitally. They might publish smaller scale games that are more like a zine, something with simpler rules. And they publish them just as PDFs or whatnot. We’re seeing a huge growth in the market there and we aim to grow into a distribution platform for game publishers, game studios and independent content creators worldwide. “ According to Dwight, Role is fast becoming the go-to solution for game prototyping, especially among indie
44 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2022
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