Is D&D Entering a New Golden Age?

Sales of the hobby game market are on the rise, with tabletop role-playing games increasing along with other tabletop games. With a new Wizards of the Coast CEO in place who values Dungeons & Dragons as much as Magic: The Gathering and a movie on the horizon, we're starting to see signs that D&D is doing very well indeed. Picture courtesy of Unsplash. The Hobby Market is Doing Well ICv2...

Sales of the hobby game market are on the rise, with tabletop role-playing games increasing along with other tabletop games. With a new Wizards of the Coast CEO in place who values Dungeons & Dragons as much as Magic: The Gathering and a movie on the horizon, we're starting to see signs that D&D is doing very well indeed.

golddice.jpg

Picture courtesy of Unsplash.​

The Hobby Market is Doing Well​

ICv2 reported that the hobby market is hitting eye-popping numbers:
Sales of hobby games in the U.S. and Canada topped $1.4 billion in 2016, reaching $1.44 billion, according to a new estimate compiled by ICv2 and reported in Internal Correspondence #92. That’s a 21% total growth rate over 2015, with rates of change ranging from 17% for the slowest-growing category to 29% for the fastest-growing. Growth rates were pulled higher by more rapid growth of hobby games in the mass channel, especially in collectible, board, and card & dice games.
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Of those categories, collectible games grew the most, followed by hobby board games and role-playing games. Role-playing games increased the most, by 29%, from $35 million to $45 million. Of the top five RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition and Pathfinder retained their first and second position, respectively.

Ancillary RPG markets are doing well too, like non-collectible miniatures. Non-collectible miniature sales were up from $175 million to $205 million, a 17% increase. Star Wars X-Wing led the charge, followed by Warhammer 40K and D&D's Nolzur's Marvels Minis, high-quality unpainted miniatures produced by Wizkids.

Unsurprisingly, Hasbro is benefiting from this bump.

Hasbro's Games Are Doing Well​

Hasbro topped $5 billion in revenue for the first time:
Net revenues for the full-year 2016 increased 13% to $5.02 billion versus $4.45 billion in 2015. Excluding a negative $61.0 million impact from foreign exchange, 2016 revenues increased 14%. As reported net earnings for the full-year 2016 increased 22% to $551.4 million, or $4.34 per diluted share, compared to $451.8 million, or $3.57 per diluted share in 2015. Adjusted net earnings for the full-year 2016 were $566.1 million, or $4.46 per diluted share. Adjusted 2016 earnings exclude a pre-tax $32.9 million, or $0.12 per diluted share, non-cash fourth quarter goodwill impairment charge related to Backflip Studios. Adjusted full-year 2016 net earnings compares to 2015 adjusted net earnings of $445.0 million, or $3.51 per diluted share, which exclude a pre-tax gain of $9.6 million from the sale of the Company's manufacturing operations in East Longmeadow, MA and Waterford, Ireland.
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Hasbro gaming increased by 23%, reflecting the hobby games market trends:
Hasbro's total gaming category, including all gaming revenue, most notably MAGIC: THE GATHERING and MONOPOLY, totaled $518.7 million for the fourth quarter 2016, up 11%, and $1,387.1 million, up 9%, for the full year 2016. Hasbro believes its gaming portfolio is a competitive differentiator and views it in its entirety.
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Note that last sentence. Hasbro experienced a decline in Magic: The Gathering sales, and it's likely the leadership team was eager to share other good news in its gaming segment. That would turn out to be beneficial for D&D.

D&D is Doing Well​

Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner did something unusual -- he mentioned Dungeons & Dragons on an investor call. For years, D&D has been overshadowed by Magic: The Gathering's success when Hasbro reported out Wizards of the Coast's wins to investors. The shout-out alone on the Q1 investor call says something about D&D's success:
I also am very happy to see very strong growth for brands like DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and Duel Masters. So, the team at (46:34) has gone to a new storytelling modality for MAGIC and, obviously, impacted the quarter. But they've also done some very good work around DUNGEONS and storytelling and in engagement with that audience. So overall, I would expect that our face-to-face gaming business will continue to perform at a high level and the team's done an absolutely stellar job at both the social media oriented games, as well as some more of our classic games.
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Hasbro seems to have a renewed interest in what they term "face-to-face" and "social" games, thanks to its launch of the Hasbro Gaming Crate that focuses on getting people to play together -- a staple of D&D. This is of course Wizards of the Coast's specialty. Investors are noticing.

Jim Cramer on Mad Money led the segment with an old D&D commercial and mentioned the RPG along with Star Wars as brands that allow Hasbro to "bring imagination to life." Cramer interviewed Goldner, who had some nice things to say about D&D:
...and our games business, a raft of great games. Dungeons & Dragons up 50%, Monopoly was of course up, and then of course Magic: The Gathering was up. So great strength in games, 6% growth, 20% growth in the gaming category overall...both Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons are on our Twitch programming... Dungeons & Dragons did a very special Twitch channel that they launched with the fans. We've had millions of views on Twitch around Dungeons & Dragons. We're seeing the brand really in resurgence.
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So what does this mean for the future of D&D?

The Future of D&D​

D&D's demographics have shifted, according to the Daily News, with more female and older players:
While Wizards of the Coast, which manages the D&D franchise, won't share sales figures, reps tell the Daily News that Millennials (ages 25 to 34) presently make up the largest group of D&D players, followed closely by those aged 35 to 44 and 18 to 24 — and up to 30% of these gamers are girls.
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The success of Pathfinder, the Old School Renaissance, mainstream fantasy media, and the nostalgia of gamer kids reaching the 35 to 44 age range in creative fields like movies and television is likely a major factor in the renewed interest in D&D. Todd Kenreck explains on Forbes:
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won 11 Oscars in 2004. 16 million people watched the premiere of season 7 of Game of Thrones this year. A serious interest in cinematic fantasy storytelling has steadily reached a fevered pitch and with the game D&D itself seeing a tremendous resurgence, this the perfect time for a Dungeons & Dragons movie or series that puts acting and story first. Like comic books before them, D&D the role-playing game is filled with stories, art, characters and world building that have been largerly left unused by television or film...The game has had impact on so many of the writers, actors, directors and show-runners making television and film today that is might not be a matter of if, but when.
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Will Joe Manganiello pull off a film that does D&D justice? A confluence of events -- the rise of social gaming, nostalgia for D&D, and the increasing accessibility of the D&D brand thanks to live streaming -- might be the perfect time for him to pull it off.
 
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Michael Tresca
talien

Michael Tresca

Mike "Talien" Tresca is the managing editor of the EN World Columnists Program, author of The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, releases daily game-related content on his Patreon, and has over 50 D&D 5E products for sale on DriveThruRPG. He is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. If you like what we do here at EN World please consider supporting our Patreon.
Imaro

Imaro

Legend
shoak1 said:
What????? Are you seriously saying mmorpgs, power gaming, gamist ideals, etc are not dominant? Dude, OF COURSE WoW is not BMOC in 2017 lol - but its not because of D and D bro, its from competition from other peeps attracting the Gamists :)

Seriously, I dont know why I bother..........
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Again ill ask for a link to some actual data that backs this up....
 

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Jester David

Jester David

Hero
shoak1 said:
No Golden Age for D and D 5e.....Its a dinosaur of an edition/game that specifically is built contrary, and as a reaction to, modern Gamist principles - despite its self serving and self proclaimed label as "The Edition for Everyone". Its sloppy, inconsistent, imbalanced, and fluffy.
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These statements are the ones that really jumped out at me.

5e is really only imbalanced when you compare it to 4e. Or games without a lot of moving parts where balance is easy.

And using the term "fluffy" negatively in the same paragraph as saying D&D is a reaction to modern game design boggles the mind. Modern games are super fluffy. That argument is self contradictory...
 

Jester David

Jester David

Hero
shoak1 said:
sigh......no lol....not all games....just geek games.....stuff played at the game cons......

Im guessing you guys didnt start playing d and d in the seventies like me since you seem to be having a hard time understanding what it was like ...........whatever
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Such as???
Name one "geek game" that is currently outselling or outperforming D&D that D&D was beating back in 1984.
 

Jester David

Jester David

Hero
Rygar said:
This is a fairly obvious business strategy here. They have a product line they want to sell, Dungeons and Dragons. The metrics they should be interested in are total customer base size and total revenue for the product line, and whatever gets those two numbers to be bigger is something worth attempting for a company no matter its size. If you can make money selling 5,000 units each of a couple dozen products then make the money, invest those customers, and play the long game of growing your market. It doesn't matter if "Bob's cavern of doom" only contributed $10k to the total revenue if the combined revenue was $10 million, in the end the only thing that matters is that the company made $10 million.
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You make two statements here:
1) D&D should grow the numbers of total customers
2) D&D should sell small products to many existing customers.

The thing is... those might be contradictory.

If you release lots and lots of small products, that floods the market. This makes it harder to tell what products are essential and what to buy first. It makes the expected cost required to play the game seem unnecessarily high. There's also the rules bloat factor. Having too many accessories makes the game unwieldy and harder to learn.
Plus, with more products it's easier & quicker for the game to feel "finished" and people to stop buying and play other games. There's less keeping them coming back on a regular basis. And the fewer people playing, the less buzz there is for the game, which attracts even more new people.

Right now, WotC is trying a different strategy with D&D. They're focusing more on "D&D the brand" than just D&D the roleplaying game. Instead of targeting one small audience with those small selling products, they're spreading them out across multiple platforms. They're doing the Neverwinter video game as well as the board games (both the Delve style like Tomb of Elemental Evil and Tomb of Annihilation but also Against the Giants, and Betrayal at Baldur's Gate). They have the miniature combat game, and the dice game, and the deck building game.

Meanwhile, all those funnel new fans to the small RPG, which is focused on adventures. So people buy an adventure of their choice and the core rulebook. And the players at tables - instead of buying an accessory or splatbook - also end up buying the PHB. All sales are funnelled towards a single book, which is selling a surprising number of copies. And because there are fewer RPG products, when one is released it sells much better than more frequent and less special products; if instead of Volo's Guide to Monsters they released one small 32-page book every two months, they'd probably have sold more total books but fewer of each and made far less money.

That said, they are doing the DLC aspect to some degree. That's the DMsGuild. For every buck spent on the site, they likely make at least a dime, which quickly adds up. ($5 to $10 per month for each major author, for 50 authors, for 18 months... and that's several thousand dollars for doing nothing.)

Rygar said:
That's the difference between companies that are succeeding (Video games) and companies that are setting themselves up for failure (WOTC), companies succeed because they take opportunities to make money wherever possible. Lots of little sales, a few big sales, in the end no one cares so long as they both add up to a big number.
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It's funny how in the above you compare one company (WotC) to an entire industry (video games).
It's extra amusing in that running a video game company is actually a very hard. It's a difficulty industry to make money on with lots of games companies going out of business. And there's no surefire way to be a success. And DLC isn't a magic money making wand, as plenty of companies have tried and failed to make money via that route.

Rygar said:
Right now WOTC is entirely dependent on Magic the Gathering continuing to be popular, D&D could have been their safety net, but they aren't even trying.
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They're dependant on Magic the Gathering because they are the Magic the Gathering company. There's probably more people in janitorial or legal at WotC than there are working for D&D.

The numbers are so large that D&D will never work as a safety net for MtG. That's like saying you should use your kid's babysitting money as a safety net. Magic the Gathering makes so much money, that when they balance the books, D&D's revenue is a rounding error. The difference between a high and low selling quarterly set of MtG cards has more impact on the company than all of fifth edition to date.

Rygar said:
Not to sound snarky, but I believe all the way up to 2002-ish MMO's were a fraction of D&D. MUDS were insignificant in size in the 80's, Neverwinter Nights on AOL topped out at 115k players which is 1/3 of the number of 3rd edition PHB's sold in the first month IIRC, and Everquest topped out at 450,000 in 2003 which *may* have been enough to exceed D&D at the time.
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I believe you're correct here. WoW was the first MMO to really be a mainstream success, and "beat" D&D.
But we're still talking about a subset of video games. It's slightly unfair to pick a new genre or type of video game and use that as a yardstick. "Oh, clearly D&D is doing more poorly now than during 4e, because it was bigger than mobile gaming then, and now it's far, far smaller."
 

Emerikol

Emerikol

Adventurer
Bravesteel said:
Right, economies of scale apply to sales versus business size as easily as to production, however, I think Rygar's point is that TSR produced too much of each product rather than too much product overall.
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All I know is the products in those days were crap. Honestly. After Gygax, you can count on one hand (easily one hand) the number of modules worth anything. Everything in the 1e era was worth buying. I own all those modules. My purchases of 2e stuff dribbled away to nothing. So sure it is quality as well as quantity. It was also the loss of the creative genius behind D&D that didn't help matters.
 

Emerikol

Emerikol

Adventurer
The two greatest era's of D&D may be 1e and 5e sales wise. Both limited how much product went out. There is a saturation level. I do think Paizo is smart with their adventure paths (commercially). A lot of DM's sadly aren't into making a lot of this stuff up. We lack good DM's and we have divergent tastes trying to force fit the game to their desires. So yes selling one book 10000 times is better than selling two books 5000 times each and that is what happens at some point in this process.
 

Jester David

Jester David

Hero
Emerikol said:
All I know is the products in those days were crap. Honestly. After Gygax, you can count on one hand (easily one hand) the number of modules worth anything. Everything in the 1e era was worth buying. I own all those modules. My purchases of 2e stuff dribbled away to nothing. So sure it is quality as well as quantity. It was also the loss of the creative genius behind D&D that didn't help matters.
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I can't help but think nostalgia might be factoring into this *slightly*. There's a lot of flaws and problems in the sixteen or seventeen old Gygax penned modules...
And with well over 100 modules published for 1e or Basic, I'd hardly say they were focusing entirely on "quality not quantity"
 

Emerikol

Emerikol

Adventurer
Jester David said:
I can't help but think nostalgia might be factoring into this *slightly*. There's a lot of flaws and problems in the sixteen or seventeen old Gygax penned modules...
And with well over 100 modules published for 1e or Basic, I'd hardly say they were focusing entirely on "quality not quantity"
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I'm only talking about the 1e AD&D modules. I agree some of the D&D specific modules were not very good. Also I don't know if that was their focus or not. I do think they were better though. Not much in the 2e era to like module/supplement wise. Rules were okay.

Personally I think these are decent or better than decent.
Giants G123
Drow D123
White Plume Mountain
Ghost Tower of Inverness
Hidden Shrine of Tomachan
Tomb of Horrors
Slave Pits
Keep on the Borderlands
Against the Cult of the Reptile God
Ravenloft
Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth
The Saltmarsh Series

The beginning of the downhill slide was the Oasis of the White Palm series. It wasn't an immediate plummet but it was a start.
 

Tony Vargas

Tony Vargas

Legend
shoak1 said:
....rpging is now a small niche...
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To be fair, it's always been a very small niche, even at the height of the fad. Briefly, D&D was outselling Monopoly, for instance, but Monopoly was already in basically every home in America.

MMORPGs, console gaming , ameritrash/eurogaming are kicking D and D's #$@$#....so congratz on selling more 5e stuff than 3.5 stuff 30 years ago lol -
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3.0 only goes back 17 years.
 

H

happyhermit

Adventurer
I am choosing to find half the posts in this thread hilarious rather than lose more faith in the RPG community, in this context it was very enjoyable :)

"We are doing amazing! Our main product has consistently been one of the best selling books on Amazon since launch, and it's doing great in B&M stores. In only a fraction of the time it managed to outsell the last few iterations. We have a successful and profitable business model. We've managed to bring in huge numbers of new players and our demographics look great, and our market is growing. Celebrities are coming out of the woodwork to play our games like never before. Millions are watching and listening to people playing our product, this is amazing!"

"Yeah... and where are the action figures? Failure."
 

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