Not Reading Ryan Dancy
- Thread starter mythusmage
- Start date
Kaodi
Legend
Actually, after reading through the comments section after the full article, I began to wonder if the problem with gaming stores is that a new successful model costs too much upfront for anyone to really be able to risk it. Mostly from the Cheers comment. It seems like what he is proposing is a business that derives most of its money from activities other than gaming, but driven by the desire to game. I'm no business magnate, but I could see something like that actually working, though perhaps only in the really large markets until the right forumla had been ironed out. The problem is, who has the money for that kind of venture in this hobby? Most of the people who might probably day jobs that pay well that aren't worth giving up.
Kesh said:
XHTML is just HTML with strictly enforced rules, no problem there. No, the iWeb people just have to be fancy with their toys.
Back on topic, my impression is that certain game store owners seem to think that professionalism will make their hair fall out, give them glottal hives, and give slime molds cramps.
RyanD
Adventurer
Mark CMG said:
I've got no horse in this race. The only hobby gaming product I'm actively working on, if brought to market, will be evolutionary, not revolutionary, and it won't have a digital component. Its not even an RPG.
I'd like to have to time to build out all the RPG support services I envison for OrganizedPlay, but at the moment, there is little chance of that happening.
Ryan
JVisgaitis
Explorer
RyanD said:
I'll take you up on that. You mentioned in your overview that WotC would stop production a lot of key products and that they don't have anything in the hopper. In regards to a 4th Edition, do you think that is something coming soon or far off in the distant future?
Heathansson
First Post
Dp you see Mattel picking up an existant rpg, making a new one, or going the trading card route?RyanD said:
Also, do you see rpg manufacturers trying to hybridize with the heroclix and/or trading card market?
JVisgaitis
Explorer
Damn, hit submit too soon... Do you think that 4e whenever it is released will still support the OGL? Not that it matters as if they make 4e incompatible with the current OGL it would probably be so far from D&D that it wouldn't matter anyway.
I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on a full featured and well supported gateway for playing games over the internet via voip. Do you think that would help to grow the D&D base by bringing old players back or would its effectiveness be negligible?
Lastly, just curious if you think the next big thing in gaming will be of the collectable variety or not. Thanks Ryan!
I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on a full featured and well supported gateway for playing games over the internet via voip. Do you think that would help to grow the D&D base by bringing old players back or would its effectiveness be negligible?
Lastly, just curious if you think the next big thing in gaming will be of the collectable variety or not. Thanks Ryan!
RyanD
Adventurer
Varianor Abroad said:I found it a very interesting read. I don't remember how much of his prior predictions turned out true, but I seem to remember he nailed a few trends. Anyone keeping track of the hit ratio?
I wish I had a list.
It would be interesting to look back and track a hit rate. I envy people like Robert Cringely for having the foresight to track predictions.I can try to make a list of the things I remember. The quality of my predictions got better after WotC bought FRPG, and I got access to lots 'real data' (especially the archives of TSR), and has probably gotten worse since leaving, and losing that access.
I predicted that L5R would change the way people looked at the CCG medium, and I think I got that one right. L5R is as much a storytelling vehicle as it is a competitive card game.
I predicted that FRPG would have a shot at equaling WotC's marketshare, and that prediction was wrong. I assumed we could scale up 10 games to $5 million each, and match my perception that WotC was doing $50 million in sales annually. We couldn't scale up even one game to $5 million, and WotC was, and is, doing WAY MORE than $50 million in sales.
I predicted that Legend of the Burning Sands would be bigger than L5R, because we designed it after learning a lot of lessons about game design that aren't and can't be fixed in the core L5R engine. I was way wrong on that prediction.
I predicted that 1998 would be "the year without new collectible card games", carving off an exception for our stuff and other games from WotC, and that was basically right. 1998 was probably the low point for CCG releases as many companies died from the collapse in 1996/1997. There were more than zero releases, but far, far less than in the previous two years -- and the purpose of that projection was in relation to how much advertising dollars would be available to keep various CCG magazines alive, which related to another prediction I made about a lot of those publications failing because the ad revenue was going to vaporize, which it did, and subsequently, so did a bunch of magazines. I'd have to check my notes, but I think Precedence was the other bright light at that time, with the Babylon 5 game.
Around 1998 I predicted that WotC would not develop a game that would make more money than Magic, and so far, I've been right about that. Pokemon was developed in Japan, WotC was just the translator/publisher. This was a point of big contention with certain people inside WotC who felt that I was not a "team player" because I didn't think the ARC System games had upside potential. I lasted longer at WotC than ARC System, but not by much.
I made a series of internal and external predictions about the market once I was asked to take over the RPG business in the fall of 1998.
I predicted that we were splitting consumer dollars into too many small piles due to having too many products in development and that if we produced fewer things we'd generate the same revenue but we'd make more profit by increasing the unit volumes of the things we did produce, and I was right about that.
I predicted that the sale of Alternity games would prove to be unable to support their overhead, and the test was the Dark*Matter product, which was very unsuccessful despite its great design (both game & graphic), and lead directly to a final decision to kill the line.
I predicted that we would repeat the trend seen in 1988/1989 when TSR went from 1st to 2nd Edition, and had a five-fold increase in year-over-year sales of PHBs. I'll call that prediction successful, even though the actual increase was more like 10-fold.
I predicted that 3rd party publishers would be willing to take a chance on the Open Gaming License, and that prediction proved demonstrably correct. I was stunned that many of those publishers were pre-existing game companies -- I fully expected them to be the least interested in the experiment, and that virtually all 3rd party OGL content would come from startups and self-publishers. White Wolf's move with the Sword & Sorcery imprint was totally unexpected.
I predicted that D20 would drive support in the marketplace for non-D20 games to the lowest point possible. Its arguable if that happened or not -- the argument is about the word "possible". Certainly, it forced publishers to defend a decision to make non-D20 games on rationale more compelling than "because we want to", and it did not factor, at all, on the emergence of the web-based PDF RPG industry. What has happened is a dearth of commercially viable RPGs that have enough volume to be sold through a majority of game stores based on a game engine that did not predate D20, which is not D20 or a D20 variant, or a game heavily influenced by the design paradigm established by D20. There have been a number of one-shots, like the Serenity game, which have done well in the short term, but so far, none have created evergreen businesses in the way that Vampire or Shadowrun did. "Based on D20" is becoming a very blurred distinction as well. One could argue that Mongoose's new Rune Quest is "based on" D20, and my opinions about the similarities of GW's Warhammer Fantasy game and D20 are well known. All taken, I think I have to mark this one as a "miss", but give myself an "E" for effort, as D20 did have pretty massive effects on RPGs as a category, and those effects were in line with the prediction.
(before the shouts start: I define RPGs like all the White Wolf Storyteller games, HERO 5th Edition Revised, the new Shadowrun RPG, etc. as having predated D20, because their player networks, in general, see them as "new versions of an existing game" rather than "whole new games".)
I predicted that organized play would become a necessary component of every successful marketing plan for hobby gaming, and I was right.
I predicted I could make a company that would capture & capitalize on that trend, and I was wrong (I made the company, but was never able to make it a de facto standard. It appears that standard may be happening, but my company isn't the one building it.)
I predicted that people would pay to play Living City scenarios, and boy, was I wrong!
I predicted that the RPGA would not capitalize on the interest in Living Greyhawk, and I was wrong again. I also predicted that few people would care much for the RPGA's attempt at a "new" kind of Living Campaign experience (i.e. the Green Regent) and I think I was correct, but don't have the data to be sure.
I predicted that the industry would not suffer a catastrophic meltdown in the way the comic book business did in the late 1990s, or the gaming industry experienced during the CCG collapse of 1996/1997 due to the slowdown in Pokemon sales because WotC had kept the distribution tier on a tight leash, and had gone direct to keep product flowing to game stores no matter how many wannabes tried to clog up the system. I was right on the money with that prediction -- a group of stores that probably existed just to sell Pokemon certainly vanished, but the deflation of the Pokemon bubble was in no way catastrophic.
I predicted that Pokemon was the first of many following products that would go into the mass market and be huge successes. Yu-Gi-Oh! showed up right on schedule.
I predicted annually that we'd have fewer core hobby stores than the previous year, starting in 2000, and I've been right 6 years in a row.
I predicted that ACD would be bought and that Alliance would move to consolidate distribution the way Diamond did in the comic book business. Missed completely. (Recent developments with WizKids though may mean I was just late, not wrong. We'll see.)
I predicted that several mid-tier publishers would go out of business either through bankruptcy or acquisition, and several did. Furthermore, Alderac Entertainment Group and Palladium both had brushes with near-catastrophe. Specifically I made that prediction based on significant declines in revenue as their businesses got smaller in response to the contracting retail tier. In the case of AEG at least, I know that's exactly correct, and I suspect it was also the case at many of the other failed and nearly-failed businesses.
I predicted that Pokemon had opened a pipeline that would cause all future successful collectible game products to flow from the core to the mass with little or no delay, and that the mass would make most of the money from those future games. Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pirates from WizKids, Nauruto, and now World of Warcraft validate that prediction.
I predicted that the flow of new anime properties licensed for games from Japan would slow to a trickle. That wasn't much of a prediction, since it was based on simple logic. For decades, Japanese creators made content that was mostly ignored here in the US. After Pokemon, US companies rushed to Japan and bought the rights to everything available, and brought much of it here as fast as they could. Now, they can only bring new things at the same rate the Japanese market can create new things -- which is about the same rate as the US market can.
I predicted that WotC would not announce 4e in 2006, and I was right.
I predicted that WotC would not have a successful new game in 2006. The jury is still out on Dreamblade, but I think the Star Wars game is a hit. I'll call that a miss.
I'm sure people can Google up other predictions I've made -- it will be interesting to see them.
Ryan
[Edited: Corrected name of Serenity RPG. Sorry MWP!]
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