Change is in the air in tabletop role-playing games, and it comes not because of a publisher, or a designer. But because of online streaming.
A lot of people have been talking this week about Matthew Colville and his Strongholds & Streaming Kickstarter project. The success of the Kickstarter has been astounding, and fast. At the time of writing, having been live for less than a week, the project is about $75,000 away from becoming the second ever role-playing Kickstarter project to reach a million dollars. Two years ago, nearly exactly, John Wick took the second edition of 7th Sea to Kickstarter and raised $1.3 million dollars over the course of its term. Holding to the current rate of growth, Strongholds & Streaming looks to shatter that record long before it hits the half way point.
The Kickstarter project for the second edition of the 7th Sea role-playing game showed the success of the old ways of the industry. 7th Sea was a popular game of its time, one of the small handfuls of games that managed to make a name for itself outside of Dungeons & Dragons. There was a strong nostalgia element to the project, and it came at the right time economically to make a lot of money. But it was lightning in the bottle, a success that could not be duplicated even by industry powers like Monte Cook Games. Numenera 2: Discovery and Destiny came close, but peaked at $845K. The Kickstarter for 7th Sea had 11,483 backers, while Numenera 2 had only 4,185 backers. That is a staggering number right there: a project with slightly over four thousand backers brought in nearly one million dollars. With just straight division that is just over $200 per backer! Even when you look at the project itself, you can see that, due to the expensive and high level pledges, nearly $30K came from less than forty of the backers of the Numenera project.
That is how the older industry method target's their market and monetizes them: success comes from getting a devoted following and getting them to spend big. You see that in a lot of role-playing game campaigns, particularly ones that push collectable, high end versions of the books. If you compare that to Strongholds & Streaming (at the time that I am writing this column) the backers are spending around $82 each by simple division. The final backer count for 7th Sea is only a few hundred more than where Strongholds & Streaming is at the time of this writing, but 7th Sea had a slightly larger per backer amount: $113 and change.
The interesting thing about this looks to be that the larger numbers of streaming fans seem to be paying less money than what gets labeled as the more traditional gaming demographic, however they spend less money on a project than that established demographic. Is that good or bad? Well, the numbers are obviously good. With less than a week in the campaign, you can't really determine how many more people and money will get piled onto the project. The Kicktraq website is rarely right in these hectic early days of a campaign, and that site is currently trending the project towards $6 million (down dramatically from the early trend of $18 million). My educated guess is that the upper reach of Strongholds & Streaming would only be as high as half of that, but if it continues as strongly as it has been and weathers the inevitable mid-project slump, it will probably beat the total of the 7th Sea project, and hit with a final funding total of around $2 million.
The thing that I have been seeing a lot in online discussions of the Strongholds & Streaming project is that it has come as a complete surprise to many, if not most, of the people who consider themselves part of the established tabletop role-playing demographic. For those people, this is a seismic shift in the industry, but honestly one of the problems with the communities that accumulate around games tend to isolate from each other and have high walls that the inhabitants don't often try to look over, and see what other people are doing. I would say that while this Kickstarter project does represent a sizeable shift in the business of selling games, it is actually at the tail end of a number of shifts. Some of these shifts were more significant than others, but cumulatively over the last fifteen years they have added up to a big change in how gaming as an industry operates.
The first, and probably one of the most significant changes, would have been the Open Gaming License. The reason that this was such a significant change to the industry is because it had a leveling effect upon the playing field of the role-playing industry. Not only did it give every publisher, regardless of how great or small, access to the keys of the car of Dungeons & Dragons, but it also more or less said that all of the material published for it was more or less equal to each other. The big D20 boom and glut in the market demonstrated otherwise, as the brand was tarnished some by the lack of quality control, and it made it harder for the quality to stand out from amongst the drek. However, due to how the OGL works, once this door was opened it could not be closed again. Eventually, this would lead to Paizo challenging the market supremacy of Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons & Dragons with the Pathfinder and now Starfinder game lines. Through the OGL, Wizards of the Coast ended up inadvertently creating their own best competition.
The survivors of the OGL period have also given us industry leaders outside of Paizo. We likely wouldn't have publishers like Green Ronin being as strong as they are today without that early D20 support that the company did. While Monte Cook Games has their Cypher System rules, the reputation of Monte Cook, as a designer and publisher, was made on the basis of his involvement with the creation of D&D 3.x and his prominence as a third party publisher for the D20 system, with settings like Ptolus and supplements like The Book of Eldritch Might and Arcana Unearthed/Evolved through Malhavoc Press.
The next shift to how the industry works came with sites like RPGNow and DriveThruRPG (some may not remember that these two sites were once actually owned by different companies) offering up an easy way to distribute games in PDF format. Eventually this would expand to Print on Demand services as well. Due to the low overhead of being an RPG publisher in PDF format, these sites further democratized the role-playing game market. Building off of the ubiquity of the Open Gaming License, the digital marketplace made it easier for a multitude of publishers whose works would not otherwise be seen by significant numbers of gamers to not only find followings, but to also build them into financially stable and viable businesses. This is what would allow companies like Precis Intermedia to get to a point where it would acquire game lines like Shatterzone and Masterbook from the declining West End Games.
These two shift together had probably the largest seismic shift to the industry of role-playing games. They would also allow the rise of the hobbyist publisher to a degree that was previously unheard of, and groups like the Old School Renaissance would spring up because of these factors. Combined with the rise of social media, the tools of production and marketing were available to publishers in ways that had previously been unheard of. For both good and bad, this meant that tabletop role-playing gamers could find games to a previously unprecedented degree. But, just as important, the shifting of the market to games in PDF format, and eventually into Print on Demand publishing, also meant that would be publishers would not have to put down the financial stake of paying for tens of thousands of copies of books that might not ever sell, because they had no way to find a market for them.
The third shift would be crowdfunding. Kickstarter. Indie-Gogo. Patreon. All of those sites and so much more. I'm not entirely convinced that the shift caused by crowdfunding is as great to the marketplace of role-playing games as the previous two were, but it still represents a fairly significant shift in how games are sold. We have seen great successes like John Wick's 7th Sea, Numenera from Monte Cook Games and the creation of the latest edition of the Fate role-playing game from Evil Hat Productions.
The rise of crowdfunding meant a few different things.
First, it meant that publishers could get their games out without needing to have a significant amount of capital. I know that I have a number of games on my shelves, from the White Wolf/Onyx Path 20th anniversary editions of Werewolf and Vampire to important indie games like Ron Edward's Sorcerer to old school clones like OpenQuest and Blueholme. I don't know that a nearly 500 page book like the 20th anniversary edition of Changeling would have even been viable without crowdfunding or Print on Demand production methods. The industry of role-playing games hasn't entirely shifted to one method or another, however, there are still those companies who are doing traditionally produced and funded books, and they are still being successful at it.
Second, it helps with marketing in ways a traditionally done book doesn't. Do a quick Google search for "Strongholds & Streaming." Now scroll through and see how many sites are talking about this game. There are a lot of them. Even before this article, we have spent a lot of "space" in talking about Colville's project here at E.N. World, and all of that adds up to a lot of free publicity. I would say that this supplement is getting more discussion than the last D&D book, or the last book for either Pathfinder or Starfinder. In cases like Strongholds & Streaming, everything starts to reach a critical mass of attention, and all of that will help to push this project over the top.
Now, one last thing specific to this project that I want to address is the idea that the funding for the streaming part of this project is actually what is putting it over the top, rather than the book itself. That could very well be, but I think that is irrelevant. How much of the money raised by John Wick for 7th Sea went into infrastructure (offices, new hires, general administrative things) rather than just going into producing the books themselves? We aren't going to know that, but the idea that this isn't a gaming success because the money isn't going 100% into the production of a book, or a game, is a silly one. The audiences for gaming streaming are significantly larger even than those who come to sites like this one. Game stores have reported that large numbers of people are coming into their stores and buying D&D books for the first time because they watched the Critical Role streams, and Green Ronin's campaign setting for the D&D campaign that Critical Role's Matt Mercer co-authored was a blockbuster success for the company.
We are on the precipice regarding how people approach and consume role-playing games. A couple of years ago our online group streamed some of our games, and I posted them on YouTube for posterity. It was more of an experiment than anything else, and even our videos have had hundreds of views by complete strangers. I would say that online streaming is probably one of the best tools that we have for introducing new players and GMs to role-playing games, because the games themselves aren't usually great at that. And, as long as the demographic of those new gamers is growing, they are going to continue to have a significant impact on how games are going to be made in the future. This isn't a place that we are going to be retreating from.
I think that the potential influx of new blood is going to be comparable to the people that were introduced to tabletop RPGs by Vampire, and the White Wolf games of the 90s. This is going to be a new demographic, with new interests and backgrounds, with a different way of looking at and interacting with role-playing games. And I think with them will come as significant of a shift on games themselves as the White Wolf fans created back then. We will see over the next few years how all of this shakes out, because it is just too new right now for anyone of us to see the forest from the trees. It will be a shift, but how big of one?
A lot of people have been talking this week about Matthew Colville and his Strongholds & Streaming Kickstarter project. The success of the Kickstarter has been astounding, and fast. At the time of writing, having been live for less than a week, the project is about $75,000 away from becoming the second ever role-playing Kickstarter project to reach a million dollars. Two years ago, nearly exactly, John Wick took the second edition of 7th Sea to Kickstarter and raised $1.3 million dollars over the course of its term. Holding to the current rate of growth, Strongholds & Streaming looks to shatter that record long before it hits the half way point.
The Kickstarter project for the second edition of the 7th Sea role-playing game showed the success of the old ways of the industry. 7th Sea was a popular game of its time, one of the small handfuls of games that managed to make a name for itself outside of Dungeons & Dragons. There was a strong nostalgia element to the project, and it came at the right time economically to make a lot of money. But it was lightning in the bottle, a success that could not be duplicated even by industry powers like Monte Cook Games. Numenera 2: Discovery and Destiny came close, but peaked at $845K. The Kickstarter for 7th Sea had 11,483 backers, while Numenera 2 had only 4,185 backers. That is a staggering number right there: a project with slightly over four thousand backers brought in nearly one million dollars. With just straight division that is just over $200 per backer! Even when you look at the project itself, you can see that, due to the expensive and high level pledges, nearly $30K came from less than forty of the backers of the Numenera project.
That is how the older industry method target's their market and monetizes them: success comes from getting a devoted following and getting them to spend big. You see that in a lot of role-playing game campaigns, particularly ones that push collectable, high end versions of the books. If you compare that to Strongholds & Streaming (at the time that I am writing this column) the backers are spending around $82 each by simple division. The final backer count for 7th Sea is only a few hundred more than where Strongholds & Streaming is at the time of this writing, but 7th Sea had a slightly larger per backer amount: $113 and change.
The interesting thing about this looks to be that the larger numbers of streaming fans seem to be paying less money than what gets labeled as the more traditional gaming demographic, however they spend less money on a project than that established demographic. Is that good or bad? Well, the numbers are obviously good. With less than a week in the campaign, you can't really determine how many more people and money will get piled onto the project. The Kicktraq website is rarely right in these hectic early days of a campaign, and that site is currently trending the project towards $6 million (down dramatically from the early trend of $18 million). My educated guess is that the upper reach of Strongholds & Streaming would only be as high as half of that, but if it continues as strongly as it has been and weathers the inevitable mid-project slump, it will probably beat the total of the 7th Sea project, and hit with a final funding total of around $2 million.
The thing that I have been seeing a lot in online discussions of the Strongholds & Streaming project is that it has come as a complete surprise to many, if not most, of the people who consider themselves part of the established tabletop role-playing demographic. For those people, this is a seismic shift in the industry, but honestly one of the problems with the communities that accumulate around games tend to isolate from each other and have high walls that the inhabitants don't often try to look over, and see what other people are doing. I would say that while this Kickstarter project does represent a sizeable shift in the business of selling games, it is actually at the tail end of a number of shifts. Some of these shifts were more significant than others, but cumulatively over the last fifteen years they have added up to a big change in how gaming as an industry operates.
The first, and probably one of the most significant changes, would have been the Open Gaming License. The reason that this was such a significant change to the industry is because it had a leveling effect upon the playing field of the role-playing industry. Not only did it give every publisher, regardless of how great or small, access to the keys of the car of Dungeons & Dragons, but it also more or less said that all of the material published for it was more or less equal to each other. The big D20 boom and glut in the market demonstrated otherwise, as the brand was tarnished some by the lack of quality control, and it made it harder for the quality to stand out from amongst the drek. However, due to how the OGL works, once this door was opened it could not be closed again. Eventually, this would lead to Paizo challenging the market supremacy of Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons & Dragons with the Pathfinder and now Starfinder game lines. Through the OGL, Wizards of the Coast ended up inadvertently creating their own best competition.
The survivors of the OGL period have also given us industry leaders outside of Paizo. We likely wouldn't have publishers like Green Ronin being as strong as they are today without that early D20 support that the company did. While Monte Cook Games has their Cypher System rules, the reputation of Monte Cook, as a designer and publisher, was made on the basis of his involvement with the creation of D&D 3.x and his prominence as a third party publisher for the D20 system, with settings like Ptolus and supplements like The Book of Eldritch Might and Arcana Unearthed/Evolved through Malhavoc Press.
The next shift to how the industry works came with sites like RPGNow and DriveThruRPG (some may not remember that these two sites were once actually owned by different companies) offering up an easy way to distribute games in PDF format. Eventually this would expand to Print on Demand services as well. Due to the low overhead of being an RPG publisher in PDF format, these sites further democratized the role-playing game market. Building off of the ubiquity of the Open Gaming License, the digital marketplace made it easier for a multitude of publishers whose works would not otherwise be seen by significant numbers of gamers to not only find followings, but to also build them into financially stable and viable businesses. This is what would allow companies like Precis Intermedia to get to a point where it would acquire game lines like Shatterzone and Masterbook from the declining West End Games.
These two shift together had probably the largest seismic shift to the industry of role-playing games. They would also allow the rise of the hobbyist publisher to a degree that was previously unheard of, and groups like the Old School Renaissance would spring up because of these factors. Combined with the rise of social media, the tools of production and marketing were available to publishers in ways that had previously been unheard of. For both good and bad, this meant that tabletop role-playing gamers could find games to a previously unprecedented degree. But, just as important, the shifting of the market to games in PDF format, and eventually into Print on Demand publishing, also meant that would be publishers would not have to put down the financial stake of paying for tens of thousands of copies of books that might not ever sell, because they had no way to find a market for them.
The third shift would be crowdfunding. Kickstarter. Indie-Gogo. Patreon. All of those sites and so much more. I'm not entirely convinced that the shift caused by crowdfunding is as great to the marketplace of role-playing games as the previous two were, but it still represents a fairly significant shift in how games are sold. We have seen great successes like John Wick's 7th Sea, Numenera from Monte Cook Games and the creation of the latest edition of the Fate role-playing game from Evil Hat Productions.
The rise of crowdfunding meant a few different things.
First, it meant that publishers could get their games out without needing to have a significant amount of capital. I know that I have a number of games on my shelves, from the White Wolf/Onyx Path 20th anniversary editions of Werewolf and Vampire to important indie games like Ron Edward's Sorcerer to old school clones like OpenQuest and Blueholme. I don't know that a nearly 500 page book like the 20th anniversary edition of Changeling would have even been viable without crowdfunding or Print on Demand production methods. The industry of role-playing games hasn't entirely shifted to one method or another, however, there are still those companies who are doing traditionally produced and funded books, and they are still being successful at it.
Second, it helps with marketing in ways a traditionally done book doesn't. Do a quick Google search for "Strongholds & Streaming." Now scroll through and see how many sites are talking about this game. There are a lot of them. Even before this article, we have spent a lot of "space" in talking about Colville's project here at E.N. World, and all of that adds up to a lot of free publicity. I would say that this supplement is getting more discussion than the last D&D book, or the last book for either Pathfinder or Starfinder. In cases like Strongholds & Streaming, everything starts to reach a critical mass of attention, and all of that will help to push this project over the top.
Now, one last thing specific to this project that I want to address is the idea that the funding for the streaming part of this project is actually what is putting it over the top, rather than the book itself. That could very well be, but I think that is irrelevant. How much of the money raised by John Wick for 7th Sea went into infrastructure (offices, new hires, general administrative things) rather than just going into producing the books themselves? We aren't going to know that, but the idea that this isn't a gaming success because the money isn't going 100% into the production of a book, or a game, is a silly one. The audiences for gaming streaming are significantly larger even than those who come to sites like this one. Game stores have reported that large numbers of people are coming into their stores and buying D&D books for the first time because they watched the Critical Role streams, and Green Ronin's campaign setting for the D&D campaign that Critical Role's Matt Mercer co-authored was a blockbuster success for the company.
We are on the precipice regarding how people approach and consume role-playing games. A couple of years ago our online group streamed some of our games, and I posted them on YouTube for posterity. It was more of an experiment than anything else, and even our videos have had hundreds of views by complete strangers. I would say that online streaming is probably one of the best tools that we have for introducing new players and GMs to role-playing games, because the games themselves aren't usually great at that. And, as long as the demographic of those new gamers is growing, they are going to continue to have a significant impact on how games are going to be made in the future. This isn't a place that we are going to be retreating from.
I think that the potential influx of new blood is going to be comparable to the people that were introduced to tabletop RPGs by Vampire, and the White Wolf games of the 90s. This is going to be a new demographic, with new interests and backgrounds, with a different way of looking at and interacting with role-playing games. And I think with them will come as significant of a shift on games themselves as the White Wolf fans created back then. We will see over the next few years how all of this shakes out, because it is just too new right now for anyone of us to see the forest from the trees. It will be a shift, but how big of one?
