JoeGKushner said:
Or if someone points out something positive how those are all exceptions and that D&D CANNOT be doing as well as they claim it is and they must, despite saying they're not, be counting the miniatures into their RPG numbers.
I participate in a private industry forum where there are monthly polls on retailer sales. Month after month after month this year, the numbers have been weighted on the downside.
I read Comics & Games Retailer every month, as I have for years. Consistently, the numbers reported by retailers for RPGs have been reflecting declining sales. I'm looking right now at the September 2005 issue. While one must take C&GR's numbers with a grain of salt (due to issues of methodology, sample size, etc.), you can see a pretty clear pattern -- there's a graph of average monthly sales of the reporting stores' best selling RPGs. The month of April 2005 is lower than any previous month on the graph (going back to July 2001), May is lower, and June (the month with the new numbers in this issue) is lower again. Not just down from a peak, but the lowest numbers reported in the past four years; not just for d20, but for all RPGs.
Like I said, there's lots of reason to handle C&GR numbers with caution, but what is reported there is in synch with what I have heard from retailers, distributors, and other publishers.
If you look at the publishing schedules of the major and minor players in RPGs and more particularly in d20, over the past two or three years, there are some patterns to be seen. Maybe these patterns are not at all apparent to the end consumer, who perhaps does not read the distributor catalogs each month and compile a mental graph of who is producing how many titles in which areas over the years. If you walk into a game store, you see a big pile of d20 books, most of which you've probably never seen before; so it must be still booming, right? Ask the retailer what his turn rate on d20 inventory has been this year, versus last year, versus the year before; ask how many titles they pre-order today on a new d20 release from a major publisher, versus one, two, or three years ago; what their average monthly buy is in the RPG category now versus the past.
For a while, I actually charted the number of new d20 products solicited each month in Game Trade Magazine, to understand what was going on. At the same time that retailers and distributors were starting to sound warnings about a glut in product and talking about paring back on their pre-orders, publishers were still increasing the number of releases...it was clear that this was headed for a crash. At the time, some publishers who were churning out the releases were often still claiming that business had never been better, each book sold more than the one before, and so on. At a Christmas party one year, a distributor told me that he had ordered 100 copies of a new book from one well-known d20 publisher...and sold less than 10. So maybe the publishers thought they were doing great, and didn't realize that this distributor was likely to cut his pre-order on their next book by 90%. Eventually, those slashed distributor orders resulted in inevitable consequences: delayed and cancelled books, and reduced production schedules.
If somebody wants to chart this out, here's a simple way to analyze the market situation in an empirical manner: Take the top 10 d20 publishers (to eliminate debates over who might have been just doing it as a hobby rather than a business or whatever else), and total up the number of products they have released each month, going back to August of 2000. Anyone want to take it on? It would not be conclusive, but it would provide an objective set of data that would at least provide insight into publishers' willingness to invest in new RPG titles, which should bear a meaningful relation to how well the category is doing.
The ideal way to do it would be to compile the weekly receiving reports of a major distributor -- that would reflect what actually was delivered to a distributor warehouse and released to the market, as opposed to what was announced and solicited but may never have been published (conversely, in a hot market products sometimes get released without advance solicitation -- a publisher churns something out on short notice and needs orders sooner than the 3-4 month catalog pre-order cycle).
