While I may only develop tabletop games, I do enjoy playing games in all of their forms, and after a long day at work when I just don’t have the mental energy or when some friends are online I like to play video games.

I am primarily a PC gamer. There is a Switch sitting on my desk, but it has a bit of dust on it. Being a PC gamer also means that I make extensive use of Valve’s Steam client, and something that is a key feature is the wishlist.

Currently I have 260 games on my wishlist. Yes, I know that seems like a lot, and yes I am overdue for a purge, but the neat thing about the wishlist is that every time a game releases, comes out of early access or goes on sale, I get an e-mail from Valve alerting me of it. Even if I am not waiting for a sale, I find it very helpful to remind me of new releases.

In the realm of tabletop games, we don’t really have a system like this. Sure you can subscribe to newsletters from publishers and Kickstarter can remind you of upcoming projects, but everything is detached. We don’t have a single unified system like Steam, where every developer goes to host their work. The closest thing we have is Board Game Geek, but even that is just board games, and if you want RPGs you have to go somewhere else.

Indie developers also greatly benefit from Steam’s discovery system, which recommends games based on other things you have played, and can often lead you to interesting games that you may otherwise have never noticed. This is further helped by the community review system, that while it has some flaws, does do a decent job of informing potential customers.

The tabletop industry could benefit from a clean, well structured, centralized system to alert us to release dates and offer a discovery system that would allow small developers to enter the spotlight. This of course can never happen, because if one project starts to gain success others will want a piece of the pie and will flood the space with copycat websites. Steam only works because of it’s large market share and any company capable of gaining that much weight would likely be more interested in profits then in the good of the community, which would ruin the whole thing.

So, is this a fantasy? Yes, yes it is, but it is still an interesting topic to think about, even if it will never come to pass.