companies staying away from rpg gamers

rogueattorney · Jun 22, 2010

The producer-consumer dynamic within the rpg hobby is beyond dysfunctional, but placing that entirely at the feet of the "mean" consumer is only seeing half the picture.

Essentially - to borrow an analogy made in the comments to the article - rpg companies are trying to sell a bunch of finished paintings to a bunch of painters instead of trying to sell brushes and paints. When the painters complain, the general reply from the company is, "Your paintings suck, use ours instead." So, a big portion of the hobby thinks that their own paintings do indeed suck, another portion reacts to every new painting as if they're personally insulted, and another big portion paints over small bits of the producers' pictures and puts the end result up on the Internet with varying reactions from the producers.

The truth is, there is a much more blurry line between rpg game makers and rpg game consumers than between, say comic book makers and readers, or video game makers and players, or movie producers and watchers. Failure to admit so puts the producer at risk of alienating one's customers, while admitting so underlines the producers' own lack of importance to the hobby.

Personally, on the consumer side of things, I think that there is way too much of a conception within our hobby that in order to support the hobby, we need to support the industry by buying product. Rather, I believe gamers' resources will often be much more well-spent by contributing to community building "products" (game clubs, cons, web-sites like this one, etc.) that make the hobby more available to the community. (And I fully realize that this final point is not contrary to, and in some ways agrees with, the article in the original post.)

Dire Bare · Jun 22, 2010

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.

It was pretty clear to me after one read. But maybe I'm just good at reading between the lines, as it were.

Dausuul said:
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.

Please. If he wanted to be incendiary, he would have started a thread here on ENWorld or on RPGNet and used harsher language. Notice Eyebeam's post was linked to in the OP (Eyebeams isn't the OP), and the post linked to is on his personal blog relating his personal experiences and opinions.

With the reaction we've seen right in this very thread, I'm starting to lean towards agreeing with Eyebeams that we have way too many "visible" jerkwads who scare away the normals. Heck, it's one of the reasons I have many friends who love D&D, but stay away from the online community. I've also personally seen plenty of this behavior in game stores over the years, and my non-gamer friends have had many negative experiences when checking out the local game store for a board game or to see what's it's all about.

thecasualoblivion · Jun 22, 2010

[No message]

ggroy · Jun 22, 2010

thecasualoblivion said:
the toxic section of the D&D community comes from outside WotC's current customer base, or at most is a reaction to toxic people outside the WotC community.

A "guilty by association" problem, in the eyes of outsider "normals".

Dausuul · Jun 22, 2010

Dire Bare said:
Please. If he wanted to be incendiary, he would have started a thread here on ENWorld or on RPGNet and used harsher language. Notice Eyebeam's post was linked to in the OP (Eyebeams isn't the OP), and the post linked to is on his personal blog relating his personal experiences and opinions.

Personal blog or not, it has a bunch of readers to judge by the number of comments posted (even before the post was linked from here). And the rest of the site is obviously related to his professional work. It's not like this is some guy posting to a handful of friends on his LJ account.

And "harsher language?" That post contains words that would make it impossible to re-post on ENWorld uncensored; but in any case it's not profanity that makes something incendiary. Profanity is just style. Content is what starts fires.

Like I said, I started out sympathetic to his point of view but wanting clarification on a number of things. After reading his comments on the blog post and in this thread, though... well, let's just say I'm not so sympathetic any more.

The Ghost · Jun 22, 2010

Dire Bare said:
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 . . .

Maybe. What I do know is that I understand your posts defending his position better than I understand his posts defending his position.

IronWolf · Jun 22, 2010

Dire Bare said:
Please. If he wanted to be incendiary, he would have started a thread here on ENWorld or on RPGNet and used harsher language. Notice Eyebeam's post was linked to in the OP (Eyebeams isn't the OP), and the post linked to is on his personal blog relating his personal experiences and opinions.

His post comes out shooting and lumping all gamers in one pot. He called gamers vulgar names by the second paragraph. He lists five negative points still being attributed to gamers as a whole. Then by the fifth or sixth paragraph he calls millions of gamers of no benefit and a pox on growth. That's an incendiary start. And it worked! He has lots of people reading and discussing that post now.

It wasn't until the next paragraph that he clarifies just a bit that this doesn't apply to *all* gamers, just a subset. At which point he narrows it down to just the ones with a strong online presence.

And then immediately falls back to more incendiary rules which may or may not be directed at the gamer culture as a whole or just this gamer with a strong online presence.

Perhaps if he'd started by clarifying just who he was talking about before trying to clarify a third of the way into his diatribe reactions would be different.

eyebeams · Jun 22, 2010

I really do love gamers and tabletop RPGs. (Running a homebrew supers game tonight!) I don't go to conventions often, but I always meet good people when I do. None of what I said changes that, but I'm not going to back down from my opinion either.

I'd like RPG folks to be in the thick of things because I believe we have cool ideas and ways of doing things that fit perfectly with evolving trends, and work better than what's being developed by companies looking for IP-backed social networks, transmedia and such. RPGs have already been instrumental behind the scenes of some really big stuff. But the last time I sat in a boardroom fretting about a 50K+ user base target it was pretty painful to have to share this stuff while tiptoeing around examples they could Google, because it might hose the whole thing.

Currently, work in games and media is a hobby as I'm busy with a local charity I really love. I don't monetize my site beyond some links to games and such. There's no Adsense, no Amazon affiliate links, no branded RPGNow store. My opinion is as unrelated to economic outcomes as you're gonna get. Maybe that's why it sounds so mean. Who knows?

If you decide I'm full of it and that gamers are just too sly for the Man, you can do everything as you've done it and events will play out accordingly. If not, and you think there's something to be done -- some way our community can have a critical backbone without being mean-spirited and wipe away some of the practiced jaded attitudes that I think infest our popular representation, I'd love to exchange ideas.

Age of Fable · Jun 22, 2010

The original article seems to me to come close to saying "the product was fine, there was something wrong with the customers."

Which, combined with zero information about the product, doesn't make me very interested in the product or confident in the salesman.

It also reminds me of members of some other subcultures who see themselves as unpopular (eg Trotskyists, Christians or goths), and take the line of "those other Trotskyists/Christians/goths are a*holes. Ha ha, right on. But we're not like that though."

This never seems to work, if only because emotionally-fraught infighting is precisely the image they're trying to distance themselves from.

fanboy2000 · Jun 22, 2010

I gotta say, I can why, if your product is aimed at a wide audience, you may not want to target a specific group that resists spending money on it.

If I've read Malcolm's article correctly, he's not talking about a tabletop rpg company upset with it's customers, he's talking about a non-tabletop rpg company wanting to market to tabletop rpg players. Thus Pazio wouldn't be applicable to what he's talking about.

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

Transmedia would be a product spread out over several mediums. If you're making a movie for example, you could make the movie and promote it with an Alternate Reality game, a book, a comic, a game, etc. Essentially, tie-in product that's a little more tied-in. (I.e., it's all there in the manual.)

The Matrix Trilogy is a good example. If you want to understand every thing the sequels, you might want to watch the Animatrix, and play Enter the Matrix.