The Business: Your Suck Tabletop Product Could Win In Vidya

A comment I made on Twitter about how old Tabletop properties should be remade in Vidya.

I bet a lot of tabletop adventure game products that didn't work would work as indie videogames, if they are of the sort that goes hard on mechanical complexity like Phoenix Command.

What style of game to make of them? XCom clones and reskins (Jagged Alliance, etc.)

— Bradford C. Walker (@MrBCWalker) August 1, 2025

I mentioned Phoenix Command by name. Let me list a few more.

• The Morrow Project/Aftermath could be a Fallout or Wasteland mod
• Cyborg Commando (a perfect XCom 2 or Xenonaughts mod)
• Space Opera/Star Frontiers/etc. are good mods for XCom/Xenonaughts or even Rogue Trader's Vidya adaptation.
• Mercenaries, Spies, & Private Eyes/Merc/Twilight 2000 are obvious mods for Jagged Alliance

You get the idea. (By the way, now is the time for the folks who own Renegade Legion to return to Vidya. You are leaving money on the table!)

A lot of these products are designed wrong for the medium. Those same products, transformed directly into Vidya, would do so much better and they would be a far better fit in both terms of medium and in terms of audience expectations. The catch? You are on the Indie Level. At best you can someone like Owlcat to give you the time of day, but that's not likely. We're talking A or AA, not AAA.

The reason I talk in terms of mods for existing games is because that's how best to do Proof Of Concept for properties with no known Brand presence and sweet fuck-all budget for making things. Making a Tabletop post-collapse product into a mod for a known Vidya game with that marketing tag is (a) how you signal to the curious that (Tabletop) is in the same category as (Vidya), (b) skip a shit-ton of dev time by building from an established base that's already Close Enough, and (c) thus can go from I Have An Idea to Here's A Thing To Play faster.

If the mod does well? Good. Now you can pitch that success for a Kickstarter campaign to make a stand-alone PC game (yes, PC). Now you can directly translate that unwieldy mess of tabletop design into a Vidya product where that medium's very nature welcomes such complexity and makes it friendly to the end-user to employ it.

Be modest. Your final product will sell on Steam and GOG for $19.95. Why that? That's the limit for impulse buys in Vidya. You don't need to be massive, or multiplayer; a tight, simple campaign of 20 hours or so will do. You can add a score as a stretch goal, as can a digital artbook (and, if you want to be daring, a code for a POD copy at Your Fulfillment Shop Of Choice), but not as a baseline offering. Be modest.

If that sells, make expansions; bundle them together on the sales page.

"But what about the original product?"

Throw PDFs of that in with the PC game. Works for ATOM RPG and Mutant Future. You can then do print copies as an upsell.

Far too many of you people sitting on your suck properties aren't seeing that things are way different now than 10 years ago, nevermind 30 or 40. Find some partners, cut a deal, make the move to Vidya because I am certain that your designs will be successful there because they are exactly the sort of thing that Vidya rewards and Tabletop does not- and that includes some other cult followings like Rolemaster.