Robin Laws posts a column about the industry that's actually salient and sane

I think RPG industry troubles are merely symptoms of a larger issue- the entire entertainment industry is shifting. It's not just games, it's also movies, music, and books in general. The Internet has made it so anything that can be expressed purely as information no longer needs traditional distribution channels or retail to reach customers, and as a result the distributors and retailers are slowly but surely dying out.

The whole flap by the record companies over MP3s was just a case of distributors realizing that they weren't needed anymore and trying to stop the world from leaving them behind, but of course it's doing so anyway. These days, with iTunes and other online stores like them, an artist doesn't have to go to a record company/label to get music or films sold anymore- he/she can just put something up, and people who are interested can buy it. The problem is now getting people interested in the first place, the old "browsability" factor that howandwhy99 and Glyfair pointed out.

Bookstores are already feeling the pinch of online retailers like Amazon, and that's only going to get worse for them as time goes by. It's not just game stores that are closing, from what I've seen- small, independent bookstores and record stores are going the way of the dodo too. The only survivors are the big chains which can actually compete with online retailers price-wise, but I predict that in a few decades even they won't be able to exist in their current form.

I also predict that when somebody makes relatively cheap machines capable of creating more solid items like tools or machine parts, you'll start to see the same thing happen to the auto-parts and machine-parts industries. Their product will suddenly be available to anybody who can get the necessary information to cause the "parts printer" to spit out a copy of the desired item- and as a result the Internet will make the old model of crafter/designer -> distributor -> retailer -> customer unnecessary. After that point your big industries in the traditional sense will be food and drink, and makers of raw materials that the 3-D printers can use to make other stuff.

And lest you think that a machine like that won't happen, I invite you to read this article and see how well you can maintain your skepticism. This is only one article I found after an off-the-cuff Google search- the rapid prototyping and 3-D printing devices have been available since the late 90s, they've just been too expensive for ordinary people to get their hands on. The invention of a "parts printer" without regard to price has already happened.

As I see it, even food and drink industries will undergo a shift like this once somebody invents a "food printer" of some sort. Even restaurants will no longer be needed once that device is ubiquitous.

Infernal Teddy said:

I think it would. Perhaps not stateside, but in the rest of the world. In my corner of the world, for example, one shop does comics and games, and a lot of gamers come from the comics customers. You'd lose people who come into the hobby after accidentally stumble over the books somewhere, which is not as rare as you might think.

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No, I think it applies to the U.S., too. Yes, the internet is huge. However, if you lose the FLGS, you lose the public face of the gaming industry. You lose that visibility, then you lose people coming into gaming and people being reminded and returning to gaming.

Yes, RPGs are bearing the brunt of it right now. However, if we lose the FLGS (or even a bulk of them), the CCG and miniatures games are going to take the bigger hits. A majority of the miniature games are played in stores (name a successful miniatures game that doesn't have some tournament structure right now - I'm not sure it can happen), lose them and the miniatures industry will take a huge hit. We'll have to go back to the days of the wargaming clubs from the 70's without stores to lay in.

Move to the internet, as some suggest, and many of the people who might consider the hobby games won't transfer over. If you are going to play online, why not play the more visually satisfying games like WoW, or even first person shooter games?

KenSeg said:

Baron Opal is correct. I purchased my first D&D material from a hobby store in Glenwood, Illinois back in 1978. They sold models, trains and all kinds of other things. In one glass case was a small selection of weird books from TSR. The rest is history!

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Good point. I, and maybe even most older gamers, started in an age where the FLGS did not exist at all. You'd get your gaming books and dice in a hobby shop that had more shelf-footage devoted to model airplanes than to anything else. A simple shift to "general hobby shop" might well be the thing that survives.

Hussar said:

Whoops, Buzz posted this, not me.

As a question from someone with no marketing/economics background. Would it dramatically hurt the hobby if the FLGS went extinct? I know that sounds cold, but, I'm actually really curious.

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Well, I know I would probably stop, or very seriously curtail, my buying.

I hate shopping for RPG books over the internet. I hate paying electronically, and waiting on the mail to deliver what I want (or paying with a money order and it taking even longer as I have to wait for the money to get there). I want to hand over actual physical cash and walk out with an actual physical book, when I want it, after browsing it on the shelf and seeing what's in it. Not wait days after pushing a button and sight unseen (or maybe a few previews that really don't tell you what you want to know).

I don't buy .pdf's. I don't like buying downloads in general, and a free .pdf might be interesting browsing in downtime, I don't like to have my laptop open when I'm gaming, which defeats much of the purpose. Printing is outrageously expensive because inkjet ink is overpriced like no tomorrow, and copy shops are an unholy mess to deal with because of copyright paranoia (and they still charge so much that I might as well just buy a hardcopy if I can).

I like buying physical books from physical stores. Non specialized bookstores often have a small amount of gaming material, but it's scattered and spotty. They'll have the core-3 books, a few old WotC books they haven't managed to sell, whatever is new this month, and in the bigger places, a handful of White Wolf books (often not the WoD core book, amusingly enough, typically the Vampire: The Requiem core book and a suppliment or two for it), and maybe a Sword & Sorcery d20 book or something. That's it.

The FLGS is a place I go to browse what's new, meet and chat with other gamers, buy used gaming books, find obscure books I would have never heard of otherwise, and just enjoy the entire trip. That's a good FLGS. I don't think the market really can support a large number of them, but it can support one in a fairly large area, but that's business.

Now, about the Robin Laws column, I think that pointing out that RPG's is a niche hobby is an important one. It won't die, just like racing and flight simulation games didn't make RC cars and planes go away, and video games didn't get rid of model trains, it might get small, but it's a niche that will endure. It may get small, but there will be people who want to sell them in their own shop, and there will be people who get their kids to play, or introduce their friends. Will it be The Next Big Thing? Probably not, just like model trains had their spot in the mainstream light decades ago, but they're a hobby niche thing now. All this pessimism about "the industry is dying" is getting stale, I've been hearing it for years, and things may get rough, but it's not going anywhere.

I find the downside to easier entry into the RPG market is that everyone and their brother thinks their material is good enough to publish and stores end up with bookshelves full of crap that shouldn't have been published in the first place.

Varianor Abroad said:

The one thing I saw missing from the article was the vast number of new distribution channels formed by new and old players in the RPG market. ENWorld has the ENWorld Store. Paizo has sales on lots of stuff now. (Dragon never did that once upon a time.) There's RPGNow and DriveThruRPG and virtually everyone with a website has their own store for it too.

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All these sites get mentioned towards the end of the article.

Ogrork the Mighty said:

I find the downside to easier entry into the RPG market is that everyone and their brother thinks their material is good enough to publish and stores end up with bookshelves full of crap that shouldn't have been published in the first place.

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I thought that most of these kinds of products were in the PDF arena, not physical ones carried in stores. Well, at least now that d20 bubble burst. There's also specific mention of the indie scene, which is generally direct-to-gamer distribution, e.g. print-on-demand.

You also have to consider how informed the stores are. Some stock lots of crap (and don't move it) because they don't know any better. Also, I think the article mentions that most stores are over the "stock everything d20!" phase. It's now about keeping the big reliables and releganting others to special orders.

As I understand it. I don't own a store.

As a consumer, I realized last year that I was glutted with RPG material. I still am. A lot of it was old, played material that I sold. Most of what is left is stuff that never got played or only got used once. That is why my new buying is down. I don't have the time or inclination (or the gaming group, frankly) to try very many new games. What I do buy is print, and I try to get it from my FLGS. Otherwise, I'm likely out of the market for good.

The RPG industry hasn't learned something that I think is an important lesson: each RPG book you buy makes it less likely that you will buy another one. You either fill up on content or get fed up with bad content and stop buying. The industry creates stuff too fast for gamers to process it.

mearls said:

The RPG industry hasn't learned something that I think is an important lesson: each RPG book you buy makes it less likely that you will buy another one. You either fill up on content or get fed up with bad content and stop buying. The industry creates stuff too fast for gamers to process it.

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This is also true of the car industry, given that I've only got a fixed lifespan and each car I buy lasts me around five years or so, but the car industry (er, at least the foreign ones) seem to hold on okay.

I take it that the main point is that the car industry doesn't over-produce cars, whereas the RPG industry over-produces books.

I'm not sure how the industry can learn this lesson since the industry isn't a thing -- it's a collection of individuals all making their own individual choices. Individuals learn lessons -- don't publish 3k print runs, try going for that rock star career instead -- your odds are acually better there, and so on.

But then you have plenty of individuals who won't learn the lesson because there's no lesson to be learned. They publish a PDF of their favorite house rules and pocket the small amount of money for use in buying yet more RPGs. That's a perfectly rational choice.

WotC it seems already has learned the lesson, and switched more of its operation to providing RPG tools, like big, colorful maps and collectible minis, which gamers can use with rapid turnover, unlike the typical mega-campaign which sort of negates the need for any more books for 2 years.