Critical Mass for Virtual Tabletops and Online Conventions?

Tech­nol­ogy for run­ning tra­di­tional table­top RPG games using online soft­ware has been around for a few years now, but I’ve noticed we seem to be reach­ing some­thing akin to Crit­i­cal Mass in the use of these tools to sup­ple­ment face-to-face gam­ing. For exam­ple, this week­end in my game group we’re using Google+ to video con­fer­ence in a dis­tant player while the rest of our group game meets around a phys­i­cal table. Kick­starter and online ‘vir­tual’ con­ven­tions also point to the surg­ing inter­est in online vir­tual table­tops.

Kick­starter

There’s been a lot of buzz on Kick­starter regard­ing two very sim­i­lar new tools: Table­top­Forge and Roll20. Both have had very suc­ces­ful Kick­starters. Of the two, I’m more famil­iar with Table­top­Forge which has the promise of being per­pet­u­ally free, with fea­tures like 3 D dice rolling in the works. Their Kick­starter met­rics were as fol­lows:

Roll20
1,580 BACKERS
$39,651 PLEDGED OF $5,000 GOAL

Table­top­Forge
1,926 BACKERS
$44,413 PLEDGED OF $5,000 GOAL

Vir­tual Con­ven­tions

Now comes online ‘vir­tual’ con­ven­tions. Of the five below, Indie+ and Aether­con seems to be the best orga­nized and offers dozens of games over sev­eral days.

1. Indie+ July 9th – 15th, 2012
2. Fan­tasy Grounds Vir­tual Gam­ing Con­ven­tion July 20–22, 2012
3. Con­cur­rent Aug. 15–18, 2012
4. Mon­k­ey­Con Octo­ber 19th and 20th
5. Aether­con Nov. 16–18, 2012

Have VTTs (vir­tual table tops) come of age? What has been your expe­ri­ence with vir­tual table tops? Are these tools ben­e­fi­cial to your game group?