Dropout.TV is becoming a surprisingly big name in the streaming world as an inexpensive service that puts its fans and employees above maxing out profits. Game Changers is already an ambitious show, but now host and Dropout CEO Sam Reich is thinking about what it would mean to bring Dropout into the world of video games, according to an interview with Kotaku.
Reich told Kotaku that if Dropout did release a game, it would be based on either Game Changers or Dimension 20, the service’s successful tabletop roleplaying series (which played a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden earlier this year).
“I think that we would be into that, and we’ve talked about it,” Reich said. “At this point, it’s honestly, more than anything else, just a bandwidth issue…If we’re going to do it, we want it to feel like us.”
Part of that means direct involvement from Dropout and the Game Changer team.
“We’re not going to farm the IP out to some third party,” Reich said. “We want it to feel personal. And it needs to be something, therefore, that we’re excited enough about and feels differentiated enough from what’s out there that it feels worth our time.”
Game Changer is, technically, a game show of sorts, but you won’t see random people off the street competing. Instead, Game Changer features a rotating cast of comedians and performers doing a sort of competitive improv game. Each episode is different than the last; episodes begin with host Reich pretending to assume that players know how the game is played, and the players emphatically disagreeing. The show has become increasingly ambitious (and sometimes quite manipulative), and just completed its seventh season. Some more straightforward episode concepts have included players competing for second place, forcing the players to look for increasingly well-hidden buzzers, and having comedians known for crowd work compete to see who does the best crowd work with a crowd hand-picked for the occasion.
Meanwhile, some of the most ambitious episodes have included an episode that gave players a year to accomplish a number of tasks, a “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” spoof that ended with a fan-favorite player taking home $100,000, and an episode where people competed to make the most viral video to advertise Dropout.TV. (one such video featured Dimension 20 DM Brennan Lee Mulligan pretending to announce his departure from Dropout.TV to make shoes for American Girl Dolls).
It’s not hard to imagine a Jackbox-style game for Game Changer, where players are asked to perform improv tasks and be judged by their friends and family. Dimension 20, meanwhile, could be a simple RPG or a huge AAA-style RPG based off of one of the Dimension 20 hosts’ concepts.
