Reply To: All kinds of everything remind me of Blood Bowl!

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Because OTT gets paid to promote

For me, I think this is why I’ve sort-of lost interest in OTT in recent weeks. I’ve often said, I came for the content, and stayed because of the community. And that is holding up more than ever in recent… well, months even. The video/content weekender-side of things feels very much like a series of “info-mercials” more than a show about pushing little fighting men around a tabletop.

I was really excited about Myth & Goal. I took part in the Needy Cat online seminar a few weeks back (which, if anyone is interested, was excellent) and I feel like James put together a really good game for this (he did talk about it a little, but his whole game-planning and design process is very impressive). But the whole Myth & Goal campaign was just a massive air-balloon – six months of (pretty poor) Flash-like animations, no info on rules or playthroughs until after the launch and then…. pffft. I followed the campaign closely after throwing my money in the ring. They aimed for £70k and hit about £130k then it just stalled for days and days.

Personally, I think it’s a bit of a shit move hitting more than double the quoted “target” and then pulling the plug. If £130k isn’t enough to get the game made, why bother with such a “low” target of £70k in the first place?

It just feels like Blacklist has dropped the ball here – the game itself reads really well, but the campaign was a bit half-arsed from the start. Their original selling pitch of “get some cheap proxies for Blood Bowl” really undersold the game that James and NeedyCat had devised. And their “this game deserves more” statement just reads like “we’re going to relaunch and try to get more money out of you next time” rather than “we want to add ever more stuff to make this really, really cool”.

Which brings us back to the hype around it – and in the part OTT played in that. The original video “what makes this a great Blood Bowl killer?” was spurious at best, since the video revealed almost nothing about the actual game, let alone explain why it was going to be the Blood Bowl killer it claimed it would – the entire campaign (not just the OTT video) was a series of aims and aspirations, rather than actual, played content.

And that’s where a lot of the OTT video content feels like it’s been recently (at least on the weekenders) – reviews of photos of games, reviews of up-and-coming releases, reviews of digital renders of 3d .stl files, rather than hands-on experience of actually playing these games (or printing the .stl miniatures). It’s like watching a few people on Zoom talking about websites they’ve stumbled across. Maybe there’s more to it than that and I’m doing OTT a disservice – but I only really flick through the video chapters these days, rather than sit and watch an entire 2hr video like I used to (because the content just doesn’t “grab” me like it once did). So all I see is “here’s a photo of something” and then the timeline shows 10 minutes of content; FFWD to the next section – “here’s a website talking about something else….”

Getting people in to talk about their new projects – even ones in development that don’t exist yet – is still quite interesting; but without any follow-up, it does feel like OTT (weekender at least) is becoming an outlet for “puff pieces” and adverts rather than a site where we know the personalities and connect with them. I don’t know. OTT is a very different website to the one I joined years ago. Many of us have expressed our opinions on the Zoom vs Studio format, but it feels like the very content of the videos has changed, not just the format of presenting.

As for Myth and Goal, I still think it’s a great looking game. But I’ve absolutely zero interest in supporting Blacklist Games. If a variation of it were to come out from Needy Cat (or some other publisher) I’d be inclined to look into it, as the game itself still looks really interesting. But it feels like Blacklist are just on a cash-grab by cancelling and looking to re-launch and I’ve no interest in pledging to give them my money a second time!