I completely disagree about the added categories. I personally like the free game category and fan content category, but I see your points.
But all the additional categories you mentioned are all the most profitable types of media and would turn the awards into awarding commercial products and could lead to lots of sponsored content. The Video Game Awards show the extreme end of this, where the whole thing is just a sequence of ads, and while TTRPGs aren’t nearly as big an industry, I think that drawing attention to those things would just end up pushing the sorts of things with lots and lots of paid readers and Actual Plays that sell out arenas.
Every category except Free Game is for profitable products (and I'd argue that Free Games are also profitable if they are quickstarts for paid games). Do you see blogs and podcasts as more profitable than publishing books?
Absolutely they are. Publishing is not especially profitable, but podcasts are a huge business. Look at something like Not Another D&D Podcast or Worlds Beyond Number which each pull in thousands of dollars a month on Patreon. Or Critical Role that became a media empire primarily from their videos. Or Dimension 20 putting 20k people in the seats of Madison Square Garden.
As far as Substack, I don’t know of anyone making huge business off their substack in the TTRPG space currently, but Substack in general is very big business .
My point isn’t necessarily that I’m worried any specific entity is going to dominate the space, just that if the awards move to the media that receives the most venture capital funding (at the moment, podcasts and Substack), we run the risk of turning it into a pay-to-play system.
Now, if you’re arguing that it already is and we have to accept it’ll always be about who can spend the most money to win an award, I could handle that argument.
In the article he specifically said non actual-play podcasts and videos. Those do not strike me as particularly profitable, and all my favorite creators in those spaces have full time jobs in different industries! And TTRPG blogs... is not a highly monetized space, and is where the best free content in the whole industry lives.
My gut feeling is that the blogs I follow most closely aren't particularly profitable, but I don't have enough data to have an informed opinion, so I'm willing to trust you on this. However, if you want to cite Critical Role as an example of actual play, then you should compare it to Dungeons & Dragons as an example of published game.
The fact that Critical Role doesn't win gold for Best Streaming Content every year already tells me that pay-to-play isn't *that* much of a concern at the moment.
I'm not keen on the same entry winning multiple categories. It feels like this favours entries with lots of buzz and excludes other great games. Share the glory!
I'd keep Best Free Game. It can give visibility to stuff from people who aren't particularly interested in monetizing their hobby. Maybe limit it to products without a monetized "full version" though.
This is a great take Ben. I would happily give you an Ennie for best advice for the Ennies ;-). In all seriousness though, I hope they hear you because these sound like great, actionable changes.
Those are actually fantastic changes, and I especially agree with all your category substitutions. I am not really into actual-plays, but I listen to a lot of TTRPG podcasts, watch a bunch of different TTRPG YouTubers, and read a whole lot of blogs. I would love to see that stuff represented in the Ennies.
That being said a bunch of my personal favorite stuff which I was hoping would win awards this year (Mythic Bastionland, Mothership, and Moria, a seriously awesome supplement I played exclusively with for a 10 session all dwarf campaign) did in fact win several awards each, so this is my best Ennies yet as a fan!
I didn't know you were at the ceremony! I would have chatted you up. We have a lot of overlap in our notes, especially about removing or redefining categories.
Thanks. Like yours too, of course. I'd hate to shill my newsletter, but that's exactly what I'm blogging about in the coming weeks. I'm doing a full post-mortem from the perspective of one judge.
Primarily, I'd remove a lot of them. I like the idea of having spotlights for content creators, but I don't think the Ennies are particularly good as an institution at doing them justice. We almost need a separate award show that specializes in just that—something more formal/industry-forward than The Bloggies or Crits.
I'd also remove the community content and best product categories.
I agree on most of your reasoning about the Ennie categories.
I see you point about Free Game, and to make it worse, it's mostly filled with quickstarts, which shouldn't qualify imo since they're not really meant to be standalone products.
Best Rules and Best Game are weird to me: as it happened this year again, there's very often a huge overlap.
This year we also had Mothersip's Warden's Manual as "Supplement", which I found misplaced: I would consider it a core book (i.e. part of the "Game").
I wouldn't cut the Silver awards. In fact, I would be happy to see Bronze ones as well! To shorten the event, cut down speech times. Go there, grab the prize, one person per team says "thank you", 1 minute max if they *really* feel the need to add something. Back to your seat. But then again I don't watch the event so I don't really care, I'm only interested in the results.
Good thoughts on improving the meta. You certainly do have a direct, specific voice for someone who explores so many various outlets, which can be noisy.
I completely disagree about the added categories. I personally like the free game category and fan content category, but I see your points.
But all the additional categories you mentioned are all the most profitable types of media and would turn the awards into awarding commercial products and could lead to lots of sponsored content. The Video Game Awards show the extreme end of this, where the whole thing is just a sequence of ads, and while TTRPGs aren’t nearly as big an industry, I think that drawing attention to those things would just end up pushing the sorts of things with lots and lots of paid readers and Actual Plays that sell out arenas.
Every category except Free Game is for profitable products (and I'd argue that Free Games are also profitable if they are quickstarts for paid games). Do you see blogs and podcasts as more profitable than publishing books?
Absolutely they are. Publishing is not especially profitable, but podcasts are a huge business. Look at something like Not Another D&D Podcast or Worlds Beyond Number which each pull in thousands of dollars a month on Patreon. Or Critical Role that became a media empire primarily from their videos. Or Dimension 20 putting 20k people in the seats of Madison Square Garden.
As far as Substack, I don’t know of anyone making huge business off their substack in the TTRPG space currently, but Substack in general is very big business .
My point isn’t necessarily that I’m worried any specific entity is going to dominate the space, just that if the awards move to the media that receives the most venture capital funding (at the moment, podcasts and Substack), we run the risk of turning it into a pay-to-play system.
Now, if you’re arguing that it already is and we have to accept it’ll always be about who can spend the most money to win an award, I could handle that argument.
In the article he specifically said non actual-play podcasts and videos. Those do not strike me as particularly profitable, and all my favorite creators in those spaces have full time jobs in different industries! And TTRPG blogs... is not a highly monetized space, and is where the best free content in the whole industry lives.
My gut feeling is that the blogs I follow most closely aren't particularly profitable, but I don't have enough data to have an informed opinion, so I'm willing to trust you on this. However, if you want to cite Critical Role as an example of actual play, then you should compare it to Dungeons & Dragons as an example of published game.
The fact that Critical Role doesn't win gold for Best Streaming Content every year already tells me that pay-to-play isn't *that* much of a concern at the moment.
Love the new online content categories
I'm not keen on the same entry winning multiple categories. It feels like this favours entries with lots of buzz and excludes other great games. Share the glory!
I'd keep Best Free Game. It can give visibility to stuff from people who aren't particularly interested in monetizing their hobby. Maybe limit it to products without a monetized "full version" though.
This is well founded feedback.
That's a solid list of actionable feedback for the ennies; no disagreements here.
This is a great take Ben. I would happily give you an Ennie for best advice for the Ennies ;-). In all seriousness though, I hope they hear you because these sound like great, actionable changes.
Those are actually fantastic changes, and I especially agree with all your category substitutions. I am not really into actual-plays, but I listen to a lot of TTRPG podcasts, watch a bunch of different TTRPG YouTubers, and read a whole lot of blogs. I would love to see that stuff represented in the Ennies.
That being said a bunch of my personal favorite stuff which I was hoping would win awards this year (Mythic Bastionland, Mothership, and Moria, a seriously awesome supplement I played exclusively with for a 10 session all dwarf campaign) did in fact win several awards each, so this is my best Ennies yet as a fan!
I didn't know you were at the ceremony! I would have chatted you up. We have a lot of overlap in our notes, especially about removing or redefining categories.
Hey Clayton, love your newsletter! How would you have changed the categories?
Thanks. Like yours too, of course. I'd hate to shill my newsletter, but that's exactly what I'm blogging about in the coming weeks. I'm doing a full post-mortem from the perspective of one judge.
Primarily, I'd remove a lot of them. I like the idea of having spotlights for content creators, but I don't think the Ennies are particularly good as an institution at doing them justice. We almost need a separate award show that specializes in just that—something more formal/industry-forward than The Bloggies or Crits.
I'd also remove the community content and best product categories.
Cool, looking forward to the post-mortem.
Hey Ben, forgot to circle back. That post-mortem went live a couple weeks ago. It's a very long 4-parter. https://www.explorersdesign.com/the-explorers-awards-debrief/
I've been reading that as you've been releasing them!
I agree on most of your reasoning about the Ennie categories.
I see you point about Free Game, and to make it worse, it's mostly filled with quickstarts, which shouldn't qualify imo since they're not really meant to be standalone products.
Best Rules and Best Game are weird to me: as it happened this year again, there's very often a huge overlap.
This year we also had Mothersip's Warden's Manual as "Supplement", which I found misplaced: I would consider it a core book (i.e. part of the "Game").
I wouldn't cut the Silver awards. In fact, I would be happy to see Bronze ones as well! To shorten the event, cut down speech times. Go there, grab the prize, one person per team says "thank you", 1 minute max if they *really* feel the need to add something. Back to your seat. But then again I don't watch the event so I don't really care, I'm only interested in the results.
Good thoughts on improving the meta. You certainly do have a direct, specific voice for someone who explores so many various outlets, which can be noisy.
I can without a doubt understand why the Moria supplement won.