another rpg industry doomsday article (merged: all 3 "Mishler Rant" threads)

[Fifth Element]

I like the "thinking we know better" part in Stackpole's article. Indeed.

 

[Maggan]

It's also interesting to see a 1999 perspective that TSR was losing its way because of a lack of focus on WORLDS.

"Worlds sell games" was the dominating school of thought among many game designers at the time, myself included.

I'm still not sure that is totally wrong, as I believe not many roleplaying games could sell strictly on rules even today, unless they are D&D or linked to D&D somehow (e.g. by being a retro-clone or Pathfinder).

So IMO World is still important for many games, but maybe not so much for D&D.

/M

 

[xechnao]

Oh, I think having the brand "Dungeons & Dragons" to put on a product might help just a teensy bit....

Your quote is out of context. I am talking about the principal perspectives of the gaming market. Brand name is a value, but the entertainment and creative markets are by their nature volatile. D&D has remained relevant in the market so far only by trying to keep reinventing parts of itself but this cant go on for ever. In fact, 4e being a more focused and less versatile game shows that the cycle of the business model D&D has had so far has been closing as a long living entity of a certain traditional identity.

 

[Hussar]

"Worlds sell games" was the dominating school of thought among many game designers at the time, myself included.

I'm still not sure that is totally wrong, as I believe not many roleplaying games could sell strictly on rules even today, unless they are D&D or linked to D&D somehow (e.g. by being a retro-clone or Pathfinder).

So IMO World is still important for many games, but maybe not so much for D&D.

/M

I don't know. Savage Worlds, for example, is worldless by design and seems to be doing pretty healthily.

I get what you're saying, but, I think the market is big enough that generic games can chug along as well.

 

[stuart]

GURPS is still around and doing well isn't it? (I've never played it myself, but I see a lot of people talking about it online)

 

[malkav666]

Wait a second....

Did this guy not trash Paizo in the first post for lowering the price of the their PDF version of the PFRPG to 10 bucks? (I mean "Pathfinder Effect" en wot?)

Then in the final post he lowers the price of one of his core PDFs to 1.80$
from 9$?

That is the exact same price cut ratio he was crying about Paizo using. Seems silly to me. I think this guys is crying just to hear the sound of his voice. There is some insight to be found hidden between the garbage in the post. But most of it reads to me as anger over the state of his own affairs, rather than industry insight. Comparing his small shop to large players and assuming that he knows about how they work or should be working based on his experience with very small shops, seems to me like a berry farmer assuming that he knows everything about growing melons because they are both fruit.

love,

malkav

 

[kenmarable]

And here we go, it's still online too, here

Here's my favorite bit I think, though there's so much fail here.

That is very funny!

The second paragraph you quoted basically boils down to "I think you will make crappy products, and if you do make crappy products they will fail." Well, technically, the second part of that is correct. If D&D 3.0 was unintelligible garbage, I'm pretty sure it would have tanked. Doesn't take any insider knowledge to guess that horribly bad products won't sell well.

The third paragraph is typical narrow-vision punditry. The more and more I read "insider opinions" the more I think they are probably not worth nearly as much as we think they are. It seems to be VERY common to view everyone else's companies through the lens of your own experience. That's like newspapers printing movie reviews from competing directors. Or even worse, having someone who makes PBS documentaries commenting on the viability of the latest Hollywood blockbuster or vice versa. Although they can be a mixed bag of usefulness, at least with movies there is a group of commentators outside of the film industry. Here in RPGs, we have to put up with publishers telling other publishers "If you did everything my way, you wouldn't fail!" or even just taking their own experiences and extrapolating to the entire industry. Thankfully, some are smart enough to merely claim "This is my experience, your mileage may vary."

But, going out of order, I really like that first paragraph the most. It is so very funny that someone who otherwise has a decent idea what he is doing can be so remarkably wrong. Anytime anyone claims to predict what will happen to the industry or claim to know what is best for another publisher should be made to write that paragraph out 100 times on the chalkboard. That is a classic!

 

[Vigilance]

"Worlds sell games" was the dominating school of thought among many game designers at the time, myself included.

I'm still not sure that is totally wrong, as I believe not many roleplaying games could sell strictly on rules even today, unless they are D&D or linked to D&D somehow (e.g. by being a retro-clone or Pathfinder).

So IMO World is still important for many games, but maybe not so much for D&D.

/M

I'm not sure that was ever true, at least, not in the way that people thought it was true.

D&D existed before Greyhawk and it existed for quite awhile before Forgotten Realms showed up.

The Dragonlance modules didn't even have a PRIMER of the world until DL 4 or DL 5 as I recall, having been buying them religiously as they were released.

I found the tantalizing hints of the world from the short stories and previews in Dragon magazine exciting and they added a lot of color to the modules, but the modules clearly didn't need the world supplement to be successful.

In fact, what the WORLD of Dragonlance sold was the novels.

Which is great- it was a huge discovery of a new gaming business model, to use game worlds to feed novels, which then feed back into game worlds.

It made TSR a lot of money, as well as companies who also used this business model, like FASA, which coincidentally got Mike Stackpole his start as a novel writer, writing Battletech novels.

But I really don't think the game has ever NEEDED published game worlds. They're a nice, optional game supplement, like splatbooks and modules.

Handy? Yes. Entertaining? Sure. Necessary? Nope.

 

[seskis281]

Your quote is out of context. I am talking about the principal perspectives of the gaming market. Brand name is a value, but the entertainment and creative markets are by their nature volatile. D&D has remained relevant in the market so far only by trying to keep reinventing parts of itself but this cant go on for ever. In fact, 4e being a more focused and less versatile game shows that the cycle of the business model D&D has had so far has been closing as a long living entity of a certain traditional identity.

Dude - being tongue-in-cheek there....

(This is where I wish ENWORLD had more emoticons sometimes)

On the serious side, I think the value is pretty high - so much so that I catch wind on many of the boards dedicated to the OSR, where people are happy with the "alternative channels" for retro-clone successes, yet even when happy there's always the wistful wish "wouldn't be great if OFFICIAL D&D just went back and reprinted the the 1e, the 2e, OD&D, etc. rules...." - the want for that brand name to be on top of one's favorite rules set is pretty strong, and leads to really amazing amounts of animosity between gamers.

Of course that could derail thread into another "what IS 'D&D'?" which I promise I don't want to do

 

[Fifth Element]

Wait a second....

Did this guy not trash Paizo in the first post for lowering the price of the their PDF version of the PFRPG to 10 bucks? (I mean "Pathfinder Effect" en wot?)

Then in the final post he lowers the price of one of his core PDFs to 1.80$
from 9$?

That is the exact same price cut ratio he was crying about Paizo using. Seems silly to me.

He could try to pass it off as "Argh! See what Paizo is forcing me to do because they sell for so low!"