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Is it WotC’s responsibility to bring people to the hobby?
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<blockquote data-quote="Rogue Agent" data-source="post: 6002043" data-attributes="member: 6673496"><p>But, again, where's the money coming from for this? In an era where selling 15,000 copies of an RPG over its lifetime makes you a massive success story in the industry, these companies simply have no cash flow for what you're suggesting.</p><p></p><p>For example, here's the <a href="http://www.gameinformer.com/p/printadspecs.aspx" target="_blank">ad rate sheet for Game Informer</a>. Let's go crazy and say that a company is making $5 of pure profit on every copy of the game they sell. (They probably aren't making that, but let's go crazy.) So they take all their profits from their insanely unusual success story with 15,000 copies sold and they spend that $75,000 on... a 1/3rd page B&W ad that runs once.</p><p></p><p>And it is extremely unlikely that such an ad would give you 15,000 new customers so that it would pay for itself. It would have to be one of the most amazing ads in the history of advertising. Direct return rates on print ads are incredibly minuscule. (On the order of 2% if you're giving something away for free.)</p><p></p><p>These companies simply don't have the capital to fund the kind of advertising campaigns you're talking about. WotC as a company probably does (although it's not clear if the D&D division does). Paizo as a company might, but probably doesn't.</p><p></p><p>Even if these companies did have, say, the $1.2 million lying around that would be necessary to run a year long campaign of 1/2 page full color ads in Game Informer, they'd almost certainly see better returns and better results by investing that money into establishing an organization for organized play.</p><p></p><p>(To put that in a different perspective: $1.2 million would mean selling 200,000+ books to recoup your costs. Although sales numbers are kept close to the vest, I'm very comfortable saying that Green Ronin isn't selling 200,000 books every year. So you're talking about 12 print ads at least more than doubling Green Ronin's sales. That's absurdly implausible.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Rogue Agent, post: 6002043, member: 6673496"] But, again, where's the money coming from for this? In an era where selling 15,000 copies of an RPG over its lifetime makes you a massive success story in the industry, these companies simply have no cash flow for what you're suggesting. For example, here's the [URL="http://www.gameinformer.com/p/printadspecs.aspx"]ad rate sheet for Game Informer[/URL]. Let's go crazy and say that a company is making $5 of pure profit on every copy of the game they sell. (They probably aren't making that, but let's go crazy.) So they take all their profits from their insanely unusual success story with 15,000 copies sold and they spend that $75,000 on... a 1/3rd page B&W ad that runs once. And it is extremely unlikely that such an ad would give you 15,000 new customers so that it would pay for itself. It would have to be one of the most amazing ads in the history of advertising. Direct return rates on print ads are incredibly minuscule. (On the order of 2% if you're giving something away for free.) These companies simply don't have the capital to fund the kind of advertising campaigns you're talking about. WotC as a company probably does (although it's not clear if the D&D division does). Paizo as a company might, but probably doesn't. Even if these companies did have, say, the $1.2 million lying around that would be necessary to run a year long campaign of 1/2 page full color ads in Game Informer, they'd almost certainly see better returns and better results by investing that money into establishing an organization for organized play. (To put that in a different perspective: $1.2 million would mean selling 200,000+ books to recoup your costs. Although sales numbers are kept close to the vest, I'm very comfortable saying that Green Ronin isn't selling 200,000 books every year. So you're talking about 12 print ads at least more than doubling Green Ronin's sales. That's absurdly implausible.) [/QUOTE]
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