Jake

You're super late, but you're definitely not the only one amazed. TF2's big rollouts have all been super impressive. My favorite one is still the War rollout, with Soldiers versus Demomans trying to tally up the most kills, regardless of team side. It was a weird couple of weeks there, where you would run into another Demo on the opposing team out on the map and know that though you were enemies, you were also on the same side.Bonus idea: Would a Thumbs TF2 steam group make sense?

There's no advantage other than when you set up a subscription it delivers to you automatically. Some people direct download, some people have some sort of subscription sync set up (through RSS or iTunes or whatever) and other people get it through a third party service or storefront which pulls it from our site. Whatever works for you works for you.

TF2 + co-op... yes.

I posted about this on the Something Awful forum so I will cross-post!

It's been slightly stereo for a while. That was a joke about the wild stereo panning right there (brought on by Chris and I sitting on opposite sides of Sean and saying the same thing at the same time). No way. The only reason we can do stereo now (which I think Chris is still playing with to tune) is because through the Kickstarter we were able to buy measurably nicer audio equipment, with all of our mics coming in on separate channels. In the old pre-Kickstarter setup we were recording everyone off an analog board which went in as one unified signal to the computer. So, all the old episodes are already pre-mixed before we even get the audio files into the computer. There's no going back.

LIVE ON THE INTERNET! Idle Thumbs 68: That's the Stuff Idle Thumbs traveled to QuakeCon 2012 for the express purpose of casting a pod at you live in real time (and also to check out Dishonored). With special guests Nick Breckon and Steve Gaynor. (You can watch a video of the live recording at http://twitch.tv/idlethumbs.) Games Discussed: Dishonored, CLOP, Diablo III, Torchlight, Quake III: Arena, Unreal Tournament Direct episode download. iTunes page. There's RSS! Blog post!

Q3A was very much about distilling multiplayer deathmatch down to its core and make that as tight and consistent as possible, while UT seemed more about trying to expand outwards from that core and see what's going on. At the time, the clean simplicity of Quake was way more appealing to me, both as a gaming experience in and of itself, and as a clean slate for modificiation. UT just seemed messy to 13-years-ago me. If both games came out at this point I don't know what I'd prefer (or if I'd just play both, or neither).

Going up on the blog today!

Weird, I remember the game having fewer colors in my head, but that is the one we played. I guess it's slightly later era than I was visualizing on the cast.

Fixed.

It's third person over the shoulder, instead of a more omniscient third person RTS camera. I am the third person to reply to this question with a nearly identical answer.

This is probably bad, but I like that you could back Day One, get your name written on Pendulo's wall in paint pen, and then cancel your pledge before the campaign's over. That would be a fairly rude thing to do.

I imagine Sean and Chris were as well.

Yeah the savegames likely just work. If they don't (eg if you have to move them into a Steam-specific location) you will find some .save files (sweet file extension) in a Telltale Games directory within your My Documents directory.

Progress. Idle Thumbs Progresscast THE F14RTEENTH ONE Chris is playing a bunch of the Civ V expansion. He's also playing FTL. Idle Thumbs responds to these and other events in this short, fourteenth Progresscast. Sid Meier's Civilization V: Gods & Kings, FTL Read the full Kickstarter update. Direct episode download. Keep the RSS fed!

Both iTunes and Amazon let you redownload, and also offer some sort of streaming/persistent support through their individual Cloud Solutions.

Seems unlikely that, at least out of the box, this thing will support any Android app stores but its own proprietary one. They promote it as hackable/rootable/open so presumably some other dorky subcultures will pop up around it, but it looks like their core expectation is to have basically XBLIG without XBLA and hope that the popular things filter up to the top. I don't think I'm backing this because I am already neck-deep in a lot of industrial design/tech Kickstarters who haven't actually delivered me anything yet, but this is the sort of thing I inevitably wind up interested in and accidentally buy somehow once it's actually available.

I think practically speaking the all-or-nothing offered by Kickstarter does make sense here. If they let some users subscribe to "no ads," but have other users who don't do that, it will potentially unpredictably fuck with their circulation numbers, which will fuck with their ad rates."We have 3,000 visitors to the site" means exactly what that means, until 1,000 of them pay to turn off ads. Then you can't charge advertisers as much for ads, and at some point I'm sure there is a weird diminishing return there. I know Shacknews used to let you subscribe to turn off ads, but I always assumed that was because their ads were fed at a fixed rate through a large ad network or something. Penny Arcade has an internal sales team and they hand pick their ads and their rates based on audience size and stuff. It probably made more sense to them to turn that into a binary decision ("if enough people pay, we turn it all off") instead of managing the dual perpetually-sliding scales of Paid Customers vs Ad Circulation Rates. With a sliding scale like that it also means their sales team is in a weird place employment wise. If there is a six month period where 2/3 of the readers are paid subscribers, do you take 2/3 of your salesmen off of that and put them on something else for the time being? Maybe that sort of thing is less in flux than that, but I'm sure the binary all/nothing made that sort of thing easier to plan for.

What is "success"? Idle Thumbs was costing (read: losing) sometimes hundreds of dollars a month in hosting. We asked for enough money to fulfill our rewards, get a small recording space, and host the site and all the podcast bandwidth for two to three years. People responded in a way which totally melted our faces when they overfunded us by like 3-4x, but what we were asking for was "a recording space, because we lost ours, and the ability to cover costs." Penny Arcade clearly already makes about a million dollars a year just from ad sales on their main website (as that's what they're asking for to replace the ads), but they also run two or three other ad-driven spinoff websites, an ad driven video site, a seemingly popular online store, and host two consistent-sell-out gigantic annual national conventions. That's not to say they shouldn't change their business model -- banner ads are shitty, the people who run ad-driven websites hate banner ads and end users hate banner ads -- just... The sticking points for me are the use of Kickstarter, as it feels not in the spirit of that service (even if its within the letter of the service), and some of the rewards themselves feeling a little self-aggrandizing ("One of us will follow you on Twitter for a year") which left a bad taste in my mouth. Crowdfunding is something I think is totally awesome, giving your supporters/fans/community the ability to directly support you and your work financially is something we need more of. The tone of the campaign, and the use of Kickstarter itself are what irk me.Again, Penny Arcade switching to a model where their fans pay for their content is something I wholly support. As MrHoatzin said, more things should operate that way! It's not the WHAT, it's the HOW. Anyway I think I am repeating myself forever now.

I think Kickstarter likes concrete projects which go from start (or early concept) to finish through their service. "Help us produce and manufacture our band's album," "Help us fund and then attend our event," "Help us realize this crazy piece of industrial design," that sort of thing. Idle Thumbs was probably already pushing the boundaries of a Kickstarter, because we were asking people to fund a space to record and a new website for a podcast -- something nebulous and with no end date. Another way to put it: Kickstarter seems to strongly prefer projects where the reward is the thing you fund. "By funding [New iPod Dock/New Video Game/Documentary Film/Event] you get [New iPod Dock/New Video Game/Documentary Film/To Attend Event]" With Idle Thumbs, everybody in the world (not just backers) gets the podcast -- therefore the podcast couldn't be the reward, so we had to invent ancillary stuff to give away for backing us. That's a good sign that we were probably not squarely in the center of Kickstarter's "this is what our site is actually for" ideal circle. We knew that going in, and in part only really thought about Idle Thumbs would work as a Kickstarter because Venus Patrol and The Comedy Button had already done successful Kickstarters. I don't think we would have thought it was appropriate if there wasn't already precedence. We justified it to ourselves because we were going from nothing (other than a microphone in Chris' apartment) to something (a recording studio, a new website, money to try out some small other projects and expand to do things like help Three Moves Ahead) -- there was a "project" there even if the project itself and the rewards didn't line up 1:1. Still weird, but it made sense. With Penny Arcade it seems even weirder, though. "Removing ads from an existing successful business for a year," while an awesome thing for a community to fund, seems very counter to the specifics of Kickstarter to me. There is usually a "project" of some sort at the heart of every Kickstarter, whereas with Penny Arcade's, it seems they're instead using Kickstarter to change their existing business model, and they've said in the FAQ that if it works, the plan is to use Kickstarter to do that every single year. The idea is fantastic, it's the methods which seem a little off.

Penny Arcade already has everything. What exactly are they "Kickstarting"? That's the question I think. Your webcomic generator "support further development so I can finish this" makes way more sense for Kickstarter than "Take our already successful website platform, owned by the parent company of a sells-out-in-three-hours bi-costal convention, and pay us for it." I understand a subscription/donation model, direct fan support, etc. That stuff is all awesome, and I'm happy to see Penny Arcade doing it. Kickstarter as the source of it is what makes it feel weird to me. (That and the Twitter-follower-type rewards.)

For what it's worth, we support more than binary decisions on that closing stat screen. Duck or Shawn in episode one has "neither," for instance.

Maybe it would make sense to get into the wall-side huts through a tunnel system coming in from the back instead of clogging it up with stairs on the surface?

Yeah that we were running 32 bit java was a depressing mid-stream discovery. Next time we'll be prepared.