Looking at TableTop

If you are in the gaming industry and especially if you are a customer of Alliance or ACD, you have likely heard of the web series TableTop.  For those not familiar with it, TableTop is a series focusing on board, card and role-playing game, running on the Geek & Sundry channel on YouTube, hosted by actor and blogger Wil Wheaton, who also had a hand in selecting all the games featured.  Each episode follows a similar format.  Wheaton opens the episode by describing the game featured (usually each episode features one game, though one episode had three), then introduces the guests playing that week.   Playing the game takes the bulk of each episode but since each one runs a bit less than 30 minutes, a significant amount of time reduction takes place.  Brief comments by each player are interspersed throughout gameplay, then, at the end, Wheaton commiserates with the losers on the Couch of Shame and gives the winning player a trophy with their name on it.  Unfortunately, as Wheaton continually points out each episode, TableTop is a low budget show so the winning player only gets the tape with their name on it, not the trophy itself.  At the end, there is a brief mention of next episode’s game.  Currently the series averages about 400,000 views per episode.