Links: AEG Publishes Less, Hasbro Earns More, and Asmodee Preps Paperbacks

It's no secret that AEG has in the last few years sold a couple of our premier product lines. And we have also launched Thunderstone and Edge of Darkness on Kickstarter, something we would have never done 7 years ago. I realize that people have strong opinions on both these topics, so I will be doing a deeper dive into why we made these decisions and our opinion on how companies can become their better selves when the market changes and still take advantage of new opportunities.

For now we can say that AEG is using the sales of those games to make the goal of doing fewer games a reality. It would be nearly impossible to make this change without cash reserves. To make this work you must invest more in your games up front and take a bigger risks, all of which are not possible if your product decisions are affected by the cash flow monster we were talking about above.

We have not set a hard target on the number of games we will publish in a year. Who knows? Maybe the Holy Grail is ONE NEW GAME. That seems crazy, especially to us since we love games so much, but who knows. We have gone from as many as 20 new titles down to five or six.

For now we are happy with the idea that every game we decide to publish will be a game that we think has its best chance to succeed. And rather than looking on to the next product, we are going to give every game its chance to find its place in the sun.

Aconyte are also actively pursuing licenses for third-party tie-in fiction, with the first of these at the contract stage. Aconyte will start a monthly publication schedule from early summer 2020, producing paperbacks and ebooks for the US, UK and export trade.

To helm the imprint, Asmodee has appointed Marc Gascoigne, lately publisher & MD of award-winning global scifi imprint Angry Robot. He's hired assistant editor, Lottie Llewelyn-Wells, and publishing coordinator, Nick Tyler, to join him in new offices in Nottingham.

Clearly, since one says "sound" and one says "not sound", we must have a contradiction, right? But suppose that they both dereference their pointers before speaking:

—Albert: "A tree falling in a deserted forest matches [membership test: this event generates acoustic vibrations]."
—Barry: "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not match [membership test: this event generates auditory experiences]."

Now there is no longer an apparent collision — all they had to do was prohibit themselves from using the word sound. If "acoustic vibrations" came into dispute, we would just play Taboo again and say "pressure waves in a material medium"; if necessary we would play Taboo again on the word "wave" and replace it with the wave equation. (Play Taboo on "auditory experience" and you get "That form of sensory processing, within the human brain, which takes as input a linear time series of frequency mixes...")

When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don't use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.