August 25, 2021 by Polar_Bear
A bold headline, I know. But another I contemplated was, “A post about nothing” a-la Seinfeld. Either way, Privateer Press is posting an update about what they’re working on and actually, a bit more of the process behind what they’re working on. In this update, we get a look at how the pandemic and changing convention scene has altered the way PP thinks about releases and thus, heralded the death of the Keynote Speech.
From the article:
I’d love to show you a great picture of something new and exciting that we’re working on, but I don’t have anything at the moment that we haven’t shown or are ready to show. So instead, I’m going to write a thousand words or so to let you know what’s been going on at Privateer.
A few months ago, in another Insider that was also looking ahead, I suggested we might present a keynote in the fall. Since then, the practicality of that has dwindled—and I’m afraid the annual “keynote” as we know it may be a thing of the past. But there’s a good reason for this: historically, we planned our major annual product releases around Lock & Load and Gen Con, which meant our products were on a somewhat parallel development cycle, as those events are only about a six weeks apart. This made the early part of the year a crushing experience as we raced to meet deadlines for multiple projects simultaneously and then get releases off to print in order to have them arrive in our warehouse in time for one convention or the other.
As the world has changed, we have planned more of our major releases around Kickstarter campaigns, and this has been impacting our product development cycles in an interesting way. Instead of all releases running neck-and-neck to the finish, we now find ourselves working in focused blocks on one project at a time, moving from one to the next in a more linear style. While the deadline pressure is still present, the opportunity to focus on one major project before moving on is much less hectic.
Source: Tabletop Gaming News
