Betteridge's Law Kind Of Continues To Apply, Including To ‘Is Altered Going to Change the TCG Industry?’From youtube.com
The person behind Dixit has a new business venture for a TCG called Altered. Quick highlights include mostly stuff about collectibility:
- Each card has a unique ID that can be tied to someone's account through a phone app, like Keyforge.
- This means also that the secondary market is entirely subsumed; it only exists at the whim of the publisher, who owns the database of digital owners.
- Print-on-demand lets them refill cards given proof of virtual ownership, including one traded on their first-party market. Some interesting ideas there about that meaning that there is guaranteed transfer and language-independence, for example.
- This allows for some mechanics that are imported from digital games, like the idea of wildcards or card upgrades (e.g., spending a resource you find in physical boosters to make a card into a enhanced version of itself, which then you own and can be printed and sent to you), or cards that exist in one specific copy.
Of course, a lot of this raises flags about 'pay to win' mechanics and bomb-driven metas — if certain unique cards are mechanically very relevant, what does this do to game balance?
Also, thematically, there's a bunch of handwringing around nonviolence — but no specific mechanical info. It looks like a symmetrical race game? Which begets a lot of questions about, say, how does interaction work mechanically or thematically in this game, none of which are answered. (Gameplay taking a backseat to collectibility/monetary concerns is always a red flag for a new game.)