jedijon said:
I noticed you locked your blog thread--I hope you're still answering questions!
Don't know what you mean - no locking on my blog. Please feel free to post!
I'm puzzled by your insertion of the witticism regarding the king of the blind. I think that overall, your tone doesn't necessarily harken to doom and gloom for the industry. Yet you've taken this as an opportunity to jibe at the leaders of the industry. Is this simply because they let you go from WotC?
I resigned from Wizards of the Coast, I was not fired. They wanted me to stay, but I was not happy there and it was time for me to move on.
I call those 6 companies "one eye'd kings" because they are all tragically flawed, but even so, they have the resources, the brands, and the team to lead the whole industry, to change it (for better or worse), and their actions will have a wider impact than virtually the whole rest of the industry combined.
Wizards of the Coast suffers from Neil Armstrong syndrome. After you walk on the moon, what do you do for an encore? Your company is full of rock stars who have generated hundreds of millions of dollars, bought and sold whole categories of product, and all want to prove they can be the genesis of the "next big thing". As a result, they have a very, very hard time making successful new products; everything they try blows up. If it's a good idea, all the rock stars try to pile in and get their slice of credit. If it challenges the political status quo, it gets strangled in the cradle. And if by some miracle it does start to become successful, the key managers are often pulled off the project to work on something else. More than any other company in gaming, WotC needs a Steve Jobs.
Upper Deck is a company that is in gaming purely for the money. They're a sports card company that is run by sports card guys, and on some level, they've not reconciled themselves to the idea that elves & orcs are making their company successful. You can read all about Upper Deck's executives here:
http://www.amazon.com/Card-Sharks-High-Stakes-Billion-Dollar-Business/dp/0788193813
They have yet to show that they can make a game successful because of its game qualities. Yu-Gi-Oh! was an import/translation deal like Pokemon. World of Warcraft is popular because of MMORPG items. Vs. has a massive pro-tour with cash prizes backing it up. In a lot of ways, at the highest levels, Upper Deck is the company a lot of gamers accuse WotC of being - just focused on the money, with no love for the products.
Games Workshop is the only big company in gaming that built their success, one year after another. They had a laser-like focus, and they just worked hard on their business making it better and better. Then the market changed, and they did not change with it. Now, about five years later, they're decaying rapidly, but they're still strong. Games Workshop is a company that could surprise a lot of people if it had new management and a new vision, and once they clean up their balance sheet. Borrowing money to pay shareholder dividends is a quick route to disaster, and it cannot long continue. Until they have a top-level change, they're unlikely to make progress.
I love Privateer, think Matt Wilson is a rock star, and would buy the company right now if I had the money and the opportunity. Making the transition from 'small company' to 'growth company' is really, really hard. Most entreprenuers who try it fail. Sometimes, success kills. The problems of scope & size that come with growth can overwhelm executives used to having hands on responsibilities for product quality and design. Until we see how Matt and his team handle the stress, we have to assume that its a period of danger for Privateer. I wish them all the luck in the world.
WizKids's fatal flaw is that they're true believers. They want to follow WotC to the top of the mountain along the same trail - up the hobby gaming route. They got a good start, right at the point where that market started to come apart at the seams. 6 years later, they're still battling. I think its a futile fight. As long as they spend valuable resources (time, money & energy) fighting that battle, they're delaying the day of reckoning when they have to switch directions and fight a whole new battle on a new battlefield.
White Wolf grew up. When they were young punks, all living in a big house together, they could live the ethic their products espoused. Now they're all older, wiser, and a little less willing to fail in pursuit of art. And they have a viable exit to the MMORPG world, and they know it. They're smart enough to take it, so I believe they will. Their tragic flaw is that you can't stay young forever, eventually everyone grows up. And grownups just can't relate on that deep, psychic level with the adolescents who are the primary target of the World of Darkness.
Your comments about distributors ect, are of most interest to me and incidentally what I have the least knowledge about. From a pure business sense though isn't this all a GOOD thing?
No distributor makes perfect orders. All of them end up with a little more than they can sell of any given, non-fad product. Those overages add up. As the number of distributors contracts, the overages shrink, which decreases publisher sales.
In the comic book business, a series of moves and countermoves ended with Diamond Comics having monolithic distribution rights for most comics. Its essentially a monopoly. Alliance, the largest hobby distributor, is owned by the same man who owns Diamond. It is very likely that Alliance wants to move into a parallel environment with Diamond - being the monolithic game distributor. Some people (mostly retailers) are worried that this will have disastrous effects on their businesses, and some (especially those who are chronic slow paying accounts) are probably right. Some publishers fear that if Alliance becomes a monopoly that they'll be shut out of the market (and some of them, especially the low end of the low end, are probably right).
My battles with distributors are legendary. I have honest and open relationships with them; no punches are pulled, and I know that some of the best and brightest people in the industry work for some of the distributors. They know I think they need to add value to remain relevant, and I know they think that they're indispensable parts of the market, that things would be much worse without them. It's a constant back & forth, from which I gain a lot of interesting perspective and insight. I don't wish any of them personal harm, but I do hope the distribution tier, as a group, changes to add more value.
then all that remains is to get them the games.
There is a
huge flaw in your logic here. Don't feel bad. The whole gaming industry is based on that flaw. The flaw is this:
Once you give people an open-ended toolbox of a game, and encourage them to make their own content for it, why do they need to keep buying products?
The biggest competitor to 3E wasn't White Wolf, or Palladium, or any other publisher's game. It was 2E, and 1E, and OD&D. Likewise, White Wolf's new World of Darkness games don't have to overcome D20, they have to overcome previous editions of Vampire.
Most people who play RPGs don't buy RPG products once they've found a game and a group they like. Most people who buy RPG products never use most of what they buy to play a game with, because they can't induce a group to try it, or the game turns out to just not be worth playing. That's a horrible disconnect between market & customers.
The CCG and minis categories are successful because they've embedded the meme that you have to keep buying new product to play the games into the minds of their customers. RPGs need a similar meme, but 30 years of history may make it impossible. Or they can shift to a service-based model (like a MMORPG) where you pay a fee to stay within the network. Or some third alternative I haven't thought of yet.
The internet (much lambasted by the store owners of this current generation) seems to be a thriving medium.
The internet is a great medium for making sales. It's a terrible medium for marketing. It does not do a good job of making geographically local communities. It compromises the core value of tabletop RPGs (the tabletop) -- people who are internet active are likely to look for or prefer an internet game. Big games have a long term future on the internet. New games from startups require physical shelf space to catch the eye of browsers who might not otherwise have heard of, or considered purchasing them. The internet is lousy at replicating that experience.
Ryan
