From The Verge:

In a sign of how far Apple is willing to go to continue raising the profile of Apple TV Plus, the company has worked out a deal with Roku that will give the streaming video service its own shortcut button. This is the first time a branded Apple TV Plus button has appeared on any remote control.

I’ve been a Roku user for years, dating back to when their devices were basically shitty under-powered little pieces of cheap plastic with a laggy interface (the current models in comparison are good, decently smooth-going, and get the job done).

At first, I got a Roku as an alternative Plex machine, when turning on a video-game console was slow and noisy, and I was growing tired of maintaining a DIY home-theatre PC machine with a custom IR remote. I had an Apple TV at the time (which didn’t run third party apps yet back then), so consolidating everything under the same puck-sized device made sense.

What got me hooked to the Roku brand, though, is the remote.

Roku didn’t minimize their remote past the point that it doesn’t feel good in your hand anymore. It’s designed so you can quickly know which way it is in the dark, and work it through feel alone. It always had volume buttons, which can go through protocols like HDMI-CEC to adjust the volume on your super expensive receiver. The remote is still the thing that keeps me with Roku instead of going to an Apple TV.

However, I always had ambivalent feelings about the “quick buttons” on the remote. On the one hand, they’re purely and simply advertisement, right under your hand, and that’s gross. On the other hand, a couple of them are actually useful because they’re apps I do want quick access to. Obviously the ideal thing would be for Roku to offer the ability to reprogram these buttons (some special models do allow that), but that would probably not get them as much money from partners.

Either way, it’s a big deal to see Apple spending some cash to get a space on this remote as one of the “quick buttons”¹. It’s well known that Roku does tracking and advertisement on their dashboard² in order to get enough revenue, as the hardware sales alone don’t cover all the manufacturing costs³, so hopefully they managed to get a sizable chunk of money from Apple. In fact, I wonder how much is Roku’s cut on in-app purchases on their hardware… it would be funny to see Apple lose 30% on all their transactions there, even if that would barely make a dent on their business. In fact, my cynicism leads me to believe that they struck a backdoor deal on that, the same way Apple itself also has backdoor deals with select companies on the App Store… oh well.

I recently posted my #RPGDNA (since that’s a trending thing right now in RPG circles), but I figured it might be interesting to look a bit deeper into my choices. The meme format is either 4 or 6 titles, but because it’s my blog and I do whatever I want, I’ll go to 8 titles – otherwise, like I said in the original post, I keep flip-flopping between the ones I want to include or exclude.

Let’s go in rough chronological order… you’ll probably notice that I’m decidedly a product of the 90s. 😋

From the Grognardia blog, which takes short looks at old-school RPG products:

My love is boxed sets is well known. I strongly believe that the shift away from them had a negative effect on the hobby’s self-identity, leading to the publication and purchasing of more and more “game” products that were, in fact, never used at the table at all but instead simply read. I understand why, for pragmatic reasons, boxed sets largely died out, but that doesn’t change the fact that I wish there were more of them available today, as they were in my younger days.

This is the introduction to the nice capsule review of Chaosium’s Borderlands campaign for RuneQuest (from 1982) which was originally a boxed set and, ironically enough, was made available again recently as a Print-On-Demand book.

The nostalgia over boxed-sets seems to be widespread among old gamers, as I’ve seen other similar comments elsewhere online these past couple years. I don’t have this nostalgia because, frankly, the move away from boxed sets happened long ago. I started gaming in the 90s, when Vampire and Cyberpunk 2020 were simple hardback books. Even the then current 5th edition of Call of Cthulhu (which started as a boxed set) had already morphed into a simple hardback book a couple revisions ago.

My very first RPG, however, The Dark Eye, did come in boxed sets in its French version. I liked how these boxes provided a variety of materials beyond just pages of adventures… for instance, the wonderful vinyl maps of Havena!

From what I’ve gleaned from publishers posting online about this topic, boxed sets seem tricky to make for a variety of reasons. The production of multiple booklets is obviously more complicated and costly than a single book. The box itself is another layer of additional costs and headaches and, as anybody who’s been on the second-hand market can attest, rarely age well, in addition to being prone to damage during shipping. Shipping is more expensive due to the empty space in the box (which a simple book wouldn’t take). Last, some countries have higher taxes for “boxed games” compared to books.

But boxed sets have made a come back in the last decade that many people seem to be missing: as Starter Sets. These are geared towards new players so it’s not surprising that grognards haven’t necessarily noticed, but it’s pretty clear that the industry has standardized around this form-factor for now. For instance, if we want to keep talking about RuneQuest for a bit, Chaosium has announced an upcoming RuneQuest Starter Set which will be, of course, a boxed set. But take a look at what Chaosium President Rick Meints looked at for his market research:

Looking at my own library, I also spot boxes for the Alien RPG Starter Set and the Traveller Starter Set. Plus a collection of miscellaneous boxed sets: some more Traveller, Mausritter, Dungeon Fantasy RPG, Deadlands Savage Worlds Edition, etc. So I would say if boxed sets had “largely died out”, that happened in the 90s and 2000s, and that they’re actually on their way back now.

As for the RuneQuest Borderlands campaign, your trivia for the day is that one of the credited authors on the box is a teenage Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linked-In, who supposedly still keeps up with the latest RuneQuest line in this limited spare time…