General RPG DiscussionDiscussion of all RPGs and non-system-specific topics. DM/GM/player issues, settings, etc. Rules discussion belongs in one the forums below.
Absolutely - in all deference to Erik and Mike M., they have enormous advantages today that smaller publishers don't have. The one fallacy that does get me cranky, self-admittedly, is the "if it were good it would sell as well as D&D." There may be a lot of crap out there, but there's lots of good products that disappear in the back bins of LGSs.
The thing is, that the current situation has been the norm for pretty much every year of gaming except the one year OGL/3.0 boom. Good products have nothing to do with it. Finding other people to play with is king in the RPG world, and the big boys almost always win because of it. That one small taste of success has a lot of the indie crowd having unrealistic expectations and the mistaken conclusion that because they can't succeed like they could during the OGL boom that RPG gaming is dying.
Quote:
Originally Posted by seskis281
Ya know, I teach communications and communication theory, and my analysis of message boards, blogs, and forums is really moving toward the idea that "viral" theory is mostly a negative phenomenon. The truth is, most of us don't "know" each other outside the very specific text as we type it, and this often acts as accelerence on negativity. The next thing you know, people are at the "let's take it outside!" moment, but on boards there's no "outside" to go to lol. Just the recent events have had two people I know and have always thought "damn these guys should meet and would get along great" throwing down on other blogs lol....
I've had the same flamewars in person at the local FLGS as I've had here. We do shake hands and grab a beer afterwards, but during the argument it gets just as bad as it does online.
I've had the same flamewars in person at the local FLGS as I've had here. We do shake hands and grab a beer afterwards, but during the argument it gets just as bad as it does online.
Wow, I guess I'm just lucky - never had that happen face to face as of yet....
Then again I'll be at GenCon for the 1st time ever....
(Passes metaphorical beer across to everyone.....)
__________________ John Maddog Wright
"In the Immortal Words of Socrates.... I Drank What!?"
__________________ Veronica: Where's your brother?
Dick: I think he took Ghost World up to his room. They're probably up there making love. Or playing Dungeons and Dragons. Or both, at the same time. They're both, like, 12th-level dorks. I'm just sayin'
I recently said in the other thread that I feel that people say that gaming is dying because smaller games aren't selling like they did during the OGL boom. They might be giving other justifications for it, but deep down thats what they're saying.
Absolutely - in all deference to Erik and Mike M., they have enormous advantages today that smaller publishers don't have. The one fallacy that does get me cranky, self-admittedly, is the "if it were good it would sell as well as D&D." There may be a lot of crap out there, but there's lots of good products that disappear in the back bins of LGSs.
The main advantage Mike Mearls has (or, rather, the main advantage of his employer) is that he works with Dungeons & Dragons, a brand with 85% name recognition in the GENERAL PUBLIC, and a brand with a 35-year tradition of high quality and market leadership. His is also the best-capitalized company in the industry, with long-established market dominance in the hobby and mass market retail channels. Dungeons & Dragons has an existing network of players (i.e. customers) that is at least two, possibly three or four orders of magnitude larger than that of any other brand in the industry.
The main advantage Erik Mona has (or, rather, the main advantage of his employer) is that he works with an Open Game Licensed version of Dungeons & Dragons, which allows his company to tap into the largest player network in the industry. His company also has a robust online community (built-in self-selected audience of potential customers), a strong electronic publishing initiative, an innovative subscription-based revenue model, and competitive representation in the hobby and retail channels. It's also not a wholly owned subsidiary of a multinational corporation, which means it can get by happily on modest success thanks to lower overhead costs.
There is no existing fallacy among gaming professionals, from independent operators like James Mishler to brand managers and major corporations like Scott Rouse, that "if it were good it will sell as well as D&D." Anyone with an even basic understanding of the RPG industry knows that _no_ pen and paper RPG will sell as well as D&D. It would take a CATASTROPHIC failure of game design, distribution, and probably the economy overall for the D&D business to falter to the point at which another company can even contemplate selling in the sort of numbers that Wizards sells.
Most gaming stores, if they carry RPGs at all, carry only Dungeons & Dragons. No, I'm not talking about good stores, but ALL stores that carry RPGs, which vastly outnumber the good stores. When Paizo was publishing 3.5 products with production values and quality equal to or exceeding that of Wizards of the Coast, we continually ran into retailers who refused to carry our line (or the products of any other publisher), because it "wasn't D&D". This is even though we published 100% official D&D in the form of Dragon and Dungeon magazines for FIVE YEARS. Many of the same stores that ordered a few copies of Dragon a month didn't bother to check out our stuff, and still haven't.
That's after 7 years, about 20 ENnies, contributions from many of the biggest artists and writers in the industry, and an awesomely loyal fan base.
Companies that are basically one dude with some desktop publishing software working out of his basement, or who only do PDFs, or who can't get the interest and attention of honest-to-god hobby distributors like Alliance or ACD are completely screwed out of participation in the "industry," and frankly aren't really a part of it in the traditional sense.
This in some ways makes them immune from the challenges that come with major distribution of printed product, which has its advantages to be sure. That's why a lot of folks in this category have been able to find market niches for themselves like direct sales of PDFs, POD, patronage models, etc. You've got to have some sort of angle, because until you can prove to people like Diamond Book Distributors or PSI that you have an audience ready to buy your product in significant numbers, you're never ever going to see one of your products in a bookstore.
Even then, modest success is going to net you something like 3,000 sales, and a huge success would sell maybe 10,000 copies. I hear from a lot of PDF-only publishers that moving 1000 units is a huge, smashing success.
If Wizards of the Coast sells 10,000 copies of a book, they have probably lost money. If a product line routinely sells this number of products, that line will likely be canceled next time it's time for the managers to solicit new products.
A tremendous success in this industry for any company (including Paizo) would likely be viewed as a terrible, terrible failure at Wizards of the Coast.
Thus has it been for the publishers of D&D and the publishers of games that follow in its wake since, oh, about 1974.
Backed down on the ranting quite a bit. Almost detected some contrition and in the second part he backs down from the whining and kind of lets us in on the fact that he was venting about his own struggles from attempting to do what he loves.
My comment from the blog itself:
Quote:
thecasualoblivion said...
On one hand, the RPG industry lasted from 1974 to 2000 without the OGL. It can do so again, and the loss of the OGL community is not the end of gaming.
That being said, for people who bought into the OGL dream, and people who wanted to publish within that landscape, its been a bit of a heartbreak, and I can understand being upset.
Just understand that the world(and the industry) doesn't necessarily revolve around you.
Enough crap has been thrown on the walls to this point, so I'll leave things at that.
Well at least he's stopped trying to coin awkward phrases about the "GREATER DEPRESSION" since he has been called on it.
That said, look at the definable shill he makes at the end of this 3rd (and final!) Rant:
Quote:
Originally Posted by the OP
For the next week, I'm putting Wilderlands of High Adventure: Imperial Town of Tell Qa on sale. Sorry to say that I am going back on my word from the Wondrous Wedding Sale, and offering this at a dirt cheap price: merely $1.80, rather than the usual $9.
Now allow me to quote from Ryan Dancey, who from the text at least implicitly has Mishler's respect by being someone outside the most virile scorn of "Try working in the industry for a little while, then maybe I'll give a damn about your opinion. Until then... you haven't earned the right to have an opinion."
Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanD
There's a rule in brand management that says that if you can't charge a premium for your brand, your brand isn't worth anything. In other words, the difference between "generic store cola" and "Coke" is the value of the Coke brand. If you are charging for your branded RPG products what the market is charging for generic D20/OGL products, your brand is worthless. In fact, most people are afraid to test this and find out how much their brand is actually worth, for fear that they'll be dissapointed.
When we priced the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting at $40, I received a call from a distributor who will remain unnamed. That distributor told me that because of the pricing decision, his buyers were told to cut their orders for the book in half. $40, you see, was simply too expensive for an RPG product. $30 was the correct price. If I would change the price to $30, he would restore his order to its full amount.
I explained to this person that the Forgotten Realms brand had equity which was in addition to the D&D equity. If the price for a Realms product was the same as the price for a D&D product, then I was saying that the Realms was a worthless brand. Since I knew that was not true, my pricing for that product had to reflect the equity. I would not be lowering the price of the book.
Of course after the fact, when the 100K units of the FRCS were sold, I was proven right and this distributor was proven wrong. But his attitude is pervasive in the industry and most people don't have the ability to tell the channel to go themselves over pricing issues. Most companies need those pre-orders and they need distributor support to sell their products. If this was one guy at one company it would be a problem that could be worked around. But this attitude that prices are "too high" and RPG products are "too expensive" is just all-pervasive in the RPG segment of the industry. And so RPG publsihers voluntarily cripple themselves on price.
So it seems that, at least according to the logic put forth by Ryan Dancey, a person Mishler at least refuses to say has no right to an opinion, Mishler has placed his product (an adventure that in no way intrinsicly sells other adventure-based product other than on a brand-recognition basis) at what Ryan Dancey would say is "not worth anything".
__________________ "Welcome to the Honorable Temple of Tiamat. Survivors of the monster attack will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Donations gladly accepted."
99% of edition conflict boils down to "For me, there are a lot of things that [Edition] can not do in the way I want them done nearly as well as other systems can."
There is no existing fallacy among gaming professionals, from independent operators like James Mishler to brand managers and major corporations like Scott Rouse, that "if it were good it will sell as well as D&D." Anyone with an even basic understanding of the RPG industry knows that _no_ pen and paper RPG will sell as well as D&D. It would take a CATASTROPHIC failure of game design, distribution, and probably the economy overall for the D&D business to falter to the point at which another company can even contemplate selling in the sort of numbers that Wizards sells.
Actually I didn't think there was amongst the publishing side - so my amends if that came across that way - but it does keep coming up around the various online communities amongst posters, and I've definitely seen it thrown as an argument against C&C, True20, etc., so I was just pointing it out as something that irks me....
Quote:
Most gaming stores, if they carry RPGs at all, carry only Dungeons & Dragons. No, I'm not talking about good stores, but ALL stores that carry RPGs, which vastly outnumber the good stores. When Paizo was publishing 3.5 products with production values and quality equal to or exceeding that of Wizards of the Coast, we continually ran into retailers who refused to carry our line (or the products of any other publisher), because it "wasn't D&D". This is even though we published 100% official D&D in the form of Dragon and Dungeon magazines for FIVE YEARS. Many of the same stores that ordered a few copies of Dragon a month didn't bother to check out our stuff, and still haven't.
Well, you'll be happy to hear that locally Gnome Games in Green Bay has Pathfinder stuff in their "prime" rpg shelves, along with D&D on the top shelf and C&C (which makes me happy) in between the two.
Quote:
Companies that are basically one dude with some desktop publishing software working out of his basement, or who only do PDFs, or who can't get the interest and attention of honest-to-god hobby distributors like Alliance or ACD are completely screwed out of participation in the "industry," and frankly aren't really a part of it.
Ah but here I have to disagree, if for nothing else than this:
The tradition of D&D back to the early days you mentioned.... was Gary and his kids and a few others sitting with a typewriter in his kitchen, putting product together by hand.
And while that's not a good "business" model for long term, it represents a tradition of creativity and passion that really wants for and needs the lone guy (or gal!) sitting at the computer making a pdf.... and whether you call it a part of the "industry" or not, it is a part of the hobby and, IMHOP, a part of the heart of it too...
I do thank you for your response here.
__________________ John Maddog Wright
"In the Immortal Words of Socrates.... I Drank What!?"
The tradition of D&D back to the early days you mentioned.... was Gary and his kids and a few others sitting with a typewriter in his kitchen, putting product together by hand.
And while that's not a good "business" model for long term, it represents a tradition of creativity and passion that really wants for and needs the lone guy sitting at his computer making a pdf.... and whether you call it a part of the "industry" or not, it is a part of the hobby and, IMHOP, a part of the heart of it too...
I agree with this statement. I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting that the tabletop RPG _hobby_ is in danger of dying out in the short (or even medium) term. Lots of factors are actually making hobby businesses more lucrative than at any time in the history of tabletop RPGs.
The only trouble is, most of these do an end-run around the retail and distribution sides of the business. They are, in effect, operating parallel to the traditional RPG "industry," and aren't so much a part of it in the way that publishers were part of the RPG "industry" 10 or 20 years ago. If everyone shifted to a direct-to-consumer business model like patronage or PDF sales, for example, the local game stores would die out, which would mean the distributors would die out, which would mean the trade shows would be gone, and then just about all of the traditional trappings of the "industry" are gone.
But the hobby? It's like a cockroach. We'll be here forever.
I get cranky when I start hearing things from their sillier fans when they start putting Pathfinder on the pedestal of "Edition War Savior" more than anything.
Why are they silly? Because you, a 4E fan, don't see anything to be saved from? An in-print 3E clone does represent saviour from the 4E game for some, make no mistake.
__________________ "They've taken all the fun out of slaying things and stealing treasure!" - Bolt
Copy, paste and redesign your way to your own ideal custom game with the Swords & Wizardry.doc file. Renovate the elf, build a rogue or thief, and make all your favourite rules and splat core.
Didn't he earlier assert that there is an industry-wide trend toward lowering the price of PDFs when there, in fact, isnt't?
Yes, in fact he said there was a "PDF price war" going on that was a "race to zero".
Neither of which are true in my experience.
There's some short term downward pressure on prices, cause the economy is crap, so there's going to be more sales, or more products created with a value in mind.
And of course, some folks might strategically price a PDF lower for some reason, like if they want a big base of core books to give them a bigger pool to sell supplements to.
But there's zero evidence that there's any sort of consistent downward pressure heading toward zero.
Since I spent a lot of time that should have been spent proofreading the Pathfinder Bestiary to write my response to Mishler's latest post, I figure I might as well get extra mileage out of it by reposting it here:
James, you're probably correct to predict that the tabletop RPG industry in its current form is living on borrowed time, but even giving it 10 to 20 years is like kicking the ball so far down the field that you can't even see it anymore.
Think about the different between the RPG market 10 years ago. D&D2 was at the bottom of a long decline, with non-core books selling in the four digits and almost all of the steam out of the thing. The industry had survived the TSR implosion circa 1996, and 3E was in playtesting, with an uncertain future.
In the large break room at Wizards of the Coast, Ryan Dancey and Cindi Rice were holding bi-weekly "brand/category interface" meetings at which they attempted to explain the concept of Open Gaming and the d20 License to a largely incredulous design staff, but word of a D&D licensing operation had hardly escaped Renton.
There was no such thing as a "PDF Market" for games. White Wolf was ascendant. Pokemon was just gearing up, building on a trend started by Magic and radically changing the way hobby stores stocked their shelves, managed their cashflow, and balanced their product. And, frankly, the way distributors serviced their publishers and retail clients, managed their preorders and inventory, and set the bar for success.
Wizards of the Coast had a national chain of retail stores. They were also running Gen Con and Origins, having recently acquired Andon Unlimited.
Game designers and company men, for the first time since Gygax, were becoming millionaires.
Anyone making any kind of prediction around that time frame of where the business was headed in 10 years (or a "prophecy," if you will) would have probably failed to have predicted the following major market forces that have significantly shaped how games are bought and sold in today's industry:
1. Successful launch of third edition reinvigorates core RPG business.
2. OGL triggers an initially successful product boom that founds or firmly establishes companies like Green Ronin and Fantasy Flight, and briefly pulls companies like Atlas, Pinnacle, and Chaosium into its orbit.
3. Pokemon surges strong, then fades. TCG market continues to shake out "dabbler" companies too numerous to mention.
4. Monte Cook proves electronic PDF products viable, essentially creating a parallel distribution channel that cuts out traditional distributors and retailers, allowing semi-profitable boutique publishing operations.
5. Wizards of the Coast diaspora that founds companies like Paizo, Hidden City, Sabretooth, and Privateer Press.
6. Establishment of online retailers like RPG Now/DriveThru and Paizo.
7. Wizards undercuts online retailers by pulling extensive PDF catalog of the most popular gaming brand in history from all online retailers, removing the most reliable and profitable spine of the PDF "industry".
8. WizKids invents and exploits affordable pre-painted miniatures.
9. Wizards does it better, creating a new sub-category for retailers and a healthy revenue stream for itself.
10. WizKids flames out spectacularly.
11. InQuest, Dragon, Dungeon, Comics & Games Retailer, Scrye: DEAD.
12. Blackhawk Distributors: DEAD.
13. WotC gets out of the retail, magazine, and convention business.
14. Peter saves Gen Con.
15. Peter almost loses Gen Con.
16. WotC releases 4th edition, a major revision of the most popular brand in the industry. It does OK, but for a variety of reasons fails to re-ignite the fire of 3e's launch.
17. WotC doesn't release 4e under the OGL, creating a host of interesting dilemmas for a lot of companies, who react in a host of interesting ways.
18. White Wolf releases a lackluster revision of their core RPG, then gets bought by a hugely capitalized Icelandic MMO company.
19. Global economic recession.
20. New technologies such as iPhone apps, virtual tabletops, and augmented reality hint at major paradigm shifts to come.
In 1999, the most talented prognosticator and industry expert could not have guessed a fifth of those things, no matter how many years they had spent writing a column for a gaming magazine, running a store, or even publishing RPGs.
Ryan Dancey probably would have come closest, and that's only because he was at ground zero of about a third of the things on the list.
If the RPG industry as it is today has 10 or 20 years of gas left in the tank, it's going to be around for changes like the ones listed above that none of us have even thought of yet.
P.S. One more thing I just remembered.
I seem to recall it was your old magazine, Comics & Games Retailer, but it may have been another that ran a column by Mike Stackpole that lamented how Wizards of the Coast was mis-managing the Dungeons & Dragons brand, offering $1 million to buy the brand with no questions asked.
That was about a year before 3e came out. I remember it because someone, I think Ryan Dancey, was so bemused by the idea that he pinned the article to the corkboard outside the D&D R&D department.
That was about 1999, which goes to show how reliable decade-out predictions are in this business.
Thoughts of the Arch Chancellor - My weblog on EN World - containing game related material, like: house rules, design theories, reviews, play reports, adventure ideas
Secret Member of <Think we would just hide our secret with a spoiler tag, eh?>
Linear Mode
And yet another word from our sponsors
