Wierd Pete's lament in KODT #116 - is it true???

Reynard

Legend
Supporter
Silver Moon said:
One of my best friends manages a comic book and gaming shop. His quote: "The industry is drying up, comics and gaming stuff is getting too expensive for the average collector and gamer. Too many people are switching over to video games for entertainment. I'm guessing we may go out of business this year." He said that back in 1992, and has pretty much been saying the same thing every year since. So I'd say Weird Pete is an accurate description of the store owner, although history has proven him (and my friend) wrong.

Bold is mine to make a point. Gaming rigs, consoles, video games and all the associated stuff are so much more expensive than TRPGs that this argument is almost laughable. Now, that isn't to say that video games don't have something on TRPGs, but it sure as hell ain't cost.
 

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The_Gunslinger658

First Post
Hi-

Well, as a birthday gift, my sister bought Warcraft the online game for me, I tried it and thought to myself, what a crashing bore this game is, all you do is go around killing stuff, the same stuff, over and over and over and over again.

I ended up taking the game out of my hard drive and deemed it a waste of my valuble time.

Give me table top, FtF RPG'ing anyday.


Scott
 

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero
Scott_Holst said:
Well, as a birthday gift, my sister bought Warcraft the online game for me, I tried it and thought to myself, what a crashing bore this game is, all you do is go around killing stuff, the same stuff, over and over and over and over again.
Huh. :\

WoW has many faults, but the game, especially at the lower levels, has a LOT of quests with a LOT of variety. The human storyline starting in Northshire Abbey and running through the Deadmines (and later on picking back up and leading to the first great dragon in MMORPGs) is especially story-driven.

I also think the tauren and dwarf starting storylines are extremely compelling, and the undead storyline does a good job of showing what an evil society would be like from the inside, IMO.

It's certainly possible to play the game and not do any quests, but I'm not sure why anyone would.
 

mearls

Legend
I think that whenever a new type of games shows up, people will point to it as hurting what came before. The same thing happened with Magic.

WoW is the first really successful MMO. It dwarfs all the other ones. I played it for a short time. It was fun, but not more fun than painting miniatures or any of the console games I bought, so I'm not a convert. However, I know tons of people who play.

I don't think it's cut and dry clear that MMOs have had a big impact on tabletop gaming sales. Since 3e came out, RPG publishers have been hurting. A few rode the d20 bubble for a while, but that came crashing down for reasons too numerous to list here.

RPGs suffer from a weird, collective delusion that things were so much better 20 years ago. It's true that there were far more mid-tier companies back then, but nobody made a lot of money off RPGs even in the 1980s. I've read interviews with people like Greg Stafford who state that, even at the "height" of RPG mania, they were still making subsistence level wages.

We don't have companies like West End, ICE, or FASA who make only RPGs anymore. I think d20 had a big impact on that, and I also think that the rise of Euro boardgames has also had a huge effect. If you look at gamestores that have opened in the past two years, they tend to have CCGs, miniatures games, a small section of RPGs, and a boardgame display that is bigger than all the rest of the sales areas put together.

Boardgames are great for retailers because they cost $30 or more, the average person off the street can come in, buy one, and play it, and a boardgamer can buy 2 or 3 new games a month and still play everything he buys.

On top of all this, we don't have a fad product like Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh to keep retailers afloat. We had an unprecented run of 6 years where the latest kiddie fad was on sale that the FLGS that otherwise sold games to people like you and me.
 


Okay, you've been flamed. ;)

I agree with Mike on this (although I think Evercrack ...er... quest was the first REALLY successful MMORPG). Who knows what the future holds? 20 years ago they said D&D was a fad, a year later it exploded into BIG BUSINESS - cartoons, candy, toys, books, etc. Twelve years ago it was said that it was all over, see a fad, then it was ressurected from the dead and boom, BIG BUSINESS again... Will the hobby die out, never, I feel safe in saying that, will it ever be the flavor of the month again, maybe, who knows, will the hobby suffer financially, at some point absolutely.

As a member of the music community all I have to say is that the same argument has been raging for 50+ years about rock n' roll. If something can survive past 15 years in this pop culture world, its life expectancy becomes much greater - so as for RPGs, the outlook is long lived at least, if not spry and lively.
 


Infernal Teddy said:
Do tell me more
Check out the Off Topic threads - look for anything music related - I've posted enough stuff I'm sure my history is there somewhere. :) - Besides - I will not derail this thread (see Piratecat - I'm being good. :) )
 

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero
Thunderfoot said:
I agree with Mike on this (although I think Evercrack ...er... quest was the first REALLY successful MMORPG).
Yes and no. It never broke the big psychological benchmark of 1 million concurrent subscribers (it got to about half that at its peak, IIRC), which WoW has done six times over at this point. But yeah, WoW definitely built on the successes (and learned from the failures) of EQ1.
 

VirgilCaine

First Post
Silver Moon said:
One of my best friends manages a comic book and gaming shop. His quote: "The industry is drying up, comics and gaming stuff is getting too expensive for the average collector and gamer. Too many people are switching over to video games for entertainment. I'm guessing we may go out of business this year." He said that back in 1992, and has pretty much been saying the same thing every year since. So I'd say Weird Pete is an accurate description of the store owner, although history has proven him (and my friend) wrong.

People have been saying revolvers are obselete for years, if not decades.
 

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