companies staying away from rpg gamers

Erik Mona said:

No, it's not going to happen until that tiny niche hobby can bring numbers that mean anything to producers shipping product that sells orders of magnitude higher than even the best-selling RPG products. It has almost exactly nothing to do with who has been perma-banned on RPG.net because they said something mean about Exalted, who wore the same T-shirt three days in a row at Origins, or what some dude posted on his RPG blog.

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Obviously, my post should have been beneath your notice.

eyebeams said:

I already said that I don't think vocal communities like this are wholly representative of gamers. Draw your own conclusions from there.

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I can remember people saying that en Eric's message boards were all the rage back in 2000. In 01 I think there was a company that asked people at Gen Con if they did any gaming on line or heard of the big gaming sites and a vast majority of people there did not.

As a company if you want to find reasons to ignore sites like EN World, RPG Net, and other on line gaming communities you really don't need a lot of justification. There have been companies that have done this, Fast Forward Entertainment I think ignored the opinions of EN World posters regularly.

GMSkarka said:

What he's talking about is that the WORST elements of the RPG community, as represented online, is sadly defining the segment for people OUTSIDE the community -- even in those areas where RPGers should be valued.

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My only real question w/the article is: how widespread is this perception of role-playing gamers as a, hmmm, difficult market?

It's not that I doubt your/eyebeams' direct professional experience... it's just they're at odds with my own, admittedly, limited, amiable, and non-professional experiences w/people in the hobby. Sure, beards, bulk and black wolf shirts may be overrepresented in the hobby, but is it really true our behavior discourages development, like brownfields littered with big, bearded guys in wolf shirts?

Alan Shutko said:

The US Small Business Administration generally considers any business with fewer than 500 employees a small business.

Why does it matter? If you're targeting your product directly at gamers, it doesn't. It's great to be a small company, because the market is big enough to support your company and you'll be able to thrive.

If you're a larger company, you need to look for a larger market. Sounds like the unnamed company here had a product that could be useful to a bunch of people, including gamers. They decided that of all the possible people to target, gamers weren't worth the hassle of targeting.

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Yup. A small company made of tabletop gamers targeting tabletop gamers is well aware of the issue, but probably has internalized it or decided the problem isn't a big one. It's just the way it is.

There is certainly a percentage of jerkwads amongst Paizo's regular customer base, but I doubt they have very many vocal regular customers left who "hate" the Pathfinder system . . . but there are a decent number of folks who dislike Pathfinder, or dislike Paizo's decision to go from 3.5 to Pathfinder, or the decision not to go 4e . . . and are total jerkwads about it who actively try to drive others away from Paizo's offerings.

This probably isn't a huge problem for Paizo, but I think it is a problem for WotC. WotC needs to attract new gamers and grow the hobby to be successful at the scale of their business, but a disproportionate number of WotC's existing core audience are "toxic jerkwads" who can drive away the normals. And WotC's D&D business is pretty much identical to the ENTIRE RPG community, as we have (almost) all played a version of D&D at some point and probably would again if they just "did it right".

eyebeams said:

I already said that I don't think vocal communities like this are wholly representative of gamers. Draw your own conclusions from there.

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The conclusion I'm drawing right now is that you posted something deliberately incendiary, knowing it would nark off a lot of folks, and are now making strenuous efforts to avoid backing up your incendiary statements with any kind of substance that people could engage. Meanwhile you're responding to your critics with snarky one-liners that remind me uncannily of the sort of person you decried in the original post.

Originally I thought you might have had a legitimate point. I'm now concluding otherwise.

Erik, you're missing the point so spectacularly, its stunning.

Like it or not, Malcolm's experience outside of the game industry mirrors my recent experiences as well, with the various transmedia folks I've been dealing with.

Places like ENWorld and RPGNow may not be places they pay attention to, but they ARE the sort of places that they easily find when doing research into the community. Research that they DO undertake, because it seems a no-brainer that the RPG community is a perfect fit to be early adopters/influencers for a lot of where online entertainment is headed.

Saying that the negative fan segment is more vocal than the positive segment, and that negativity drives away the people and businesses who might be able to elevate the profile of gaming and take it into the future is not "disrespectful of the people paying our salaries" or "blaming the customer."

It simply is saying that we're letting our own worst elements kill the chances we have of having our hobby embraced, growing and evolving with the times, instead of being aimed at an ever-shrinking rump of nostalgia-legacy users.


I'm very happy that Paizo is doing well, and that PaizoCon has been a success for you. But wrapping yourself in the flag of "I'm defending the socially awkward from the jerks" is unwarranted. You're piling on to right a wrong that isn't being committed.

Mallus said:

My only real question w/the article is: how widespread is this perception of role-playing gamers as a, hmmm, difficult market?

It's not that I doubt your/eyebeams' direct professional experience... it's just they're at odds with my own, admittedly, limited, amiable, and non-professional experiences w/people in the hobby. Sure, beards, bulk and black wolf shirts may be overrepresented in the hobby, but is it really true our behavior discourages development, like brownfields littered with big, bearded guys in wolf shirts?

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Well, how many non-tabletop RPG products are targeting tabletop RPG players? How many tabletop RPG based movies have been made over the years by major studios?

MMORPGs are certainly an evolution of both earlier CRPGs and tabletop RPGs, but they do not target tabletop players in their marketing or design, IMO and IME.

The various licensed RPGs from MMOs, or movies, or book series, or other properties were mostly (IMO) started within the RPG community seeking the licenses and not the other way around. How many big companies with important brands have sought out an RPG company to whip up an RPG based on their property? Some individual fantasy authors are certainly friendly to the idea as they were/are gamers themselves (Jim Butcher, GRR Martin, and others), but even then did they actively solicit an RPG licensing partner? Maybe, somebody with more direct experience of the business side of Green Ronin's various licensing projects or the upcoming Dresden Files RPG could correct me . . .

I'm not saying Eyebeams is right . . . but I don't see a lot of evidence to the contrary . . .

The Ghost said:

To be fair, your post could also be poorly written as there are a number of people in this thread who are/were confused about what point you were trying to make. [Edit] Communication is a two-way street.

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Dausuul said:

So just what is it about, then? It's a bit rich to accuse people of "not reading your post thoroughly" given how vague it is. Erik read your post and concluded, quite reasonably, that you were saying any attempt to target the "gamer demographic" as a business plan is doomed to failure. That may not have been what you intended, but it's a fair interpretation of what you actually wrote.

Perhaps you could spell out for us just what Nice Things the gaming community is not getting, or is currently getting but will soon lose, because of the behavior of our more obnoxious element, and how they differ from the Nice Things that Paizo is successfully providing.

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It was pretty clear to me after one reading that Eyebeams was not discussing starting a new RPG company or trying to grow an existing RPG product.

But maybe his post WAS poorly written, and I'm just damn good at reading between the lines . . .

Dire Bare said:

Well, how many non-tabletop RPG products are targeting tabletop RPG players? How many tabletop RPG based movies have been made over the years by major studios?

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Are there any small hobby groups being targeted by movie makers? It's not like we see movies aimed at the Quilting demographic or the stamp collectors either.

Can someone enlighten me as to what exactly is transmedia, and name a few large corporations embracing this concept?