The Death of Gaming (PC gaming and D&D)

[Dungeoneer]

Yeah, the PC game market has changed profoundly in the last ten years. It's no mystery why PC game sales have plummeted - they aren't making as many PC games anymore. It just makes more economic sense to develop for a stable platform, like a console. It also makes a lot of sense for the consumer, who doesn't have to buy a new video card every six months or become an expert at building their own PC.

Certain kinds of games still make sense for a PC, and so niche markets have flourished (if you want to call World of Warcraft 'niche'). MMOs and strategy games are the PC's forte. For everything else, there's Steam. Steam is a brilliant example of the Long Tail strategy. I buy a bunch of classic and indie games on Steam that I would never have purchased any other way. Thanks to Steam, the Monkey Island series is still making money and that's alright by me!

The fact that the 360 may get the latest and greatest shooter before PC owners bothers me not a whit.

Generally, the point is that what's happening the PC gaming market is specific to PC gaming and probably not applicable to TRPGs generally. I didn't get all the way through the OP, but I would point out that all these supposed numbers remain purely speculative. We have no idea how much money WotC makes, how many subscribers DDI really has, whether net book sales are up or down, or any of that stuff. WotC does a lot of different things with the D&D brand (rightly so) and it's clear they don't measure success simply in terms of books sold (even in that arena they sell books in more places than anybody else, which means even those numbers are difficult to capture).

The main trend I see with WotC is a move towards a more hit-driven model. It definitely seems like they're only interested in pushing books and boxed sets that they know will be big sellers, and that they're cutting out their more niche titles. I don't really see this as a positive trend, but clearly it makes sense for them at this time.

 

[Dungeoneer]

One last thing - I see the early runaway success of 3e brought up quite frequently around here. I don't disagree that 3e was a really big hit the first couple of years. But people forget that it was the first new edition of D&D in a decade and the revival of D&D after the complete dissolution of TSR.

D&D as a game nearly died and then was reborn like a phoenix from the ashes. People were justifiably excited. Sales were high. But this was a pretty unusual scenario and I think it's an unreasonable expectation for every new edition to repeat it. In fact, I'd rather they not try if it means nearly killing the game!

 

[WizarDru]

The OP requires us to accept a lot of stuff on faith. While he recognizes SOME of the issues in play, there are many to deal with.

1) We lack a lot of empirical data. This is true in both the print world, onine world and gaming worlds. We don't know how many copies of 3E was sold, beyond vague references from brand managers. We don't know how well 4E sold. We have guesses and tracking from places like ICv2, but that's we don't even know specifically how detailed their data collection is. Likewise, we don't have any sales figures from Steam/Valve themselves, just from occasional publishers.

2) The OP draws lines of distinction to make his arguments work. I don't necessarily agree with those distinctions. Is Angry Birds a computer game? Is Plants vs. Zombies? Is Farmville? What about games like Breach or Braid, which can be had at the same time across both PC and console platforms? How do you count those?

3) Mass Effect 2 is a TERRIBLE example to use for how DRM doesn't cripple games, IMHO. The introduction of the Cerberus Network Card is an attempt to curb piracy and the first step in adding an additional layer of irritation to the gamer when trying to use/play the game.

4) The OP takes it as a given that PC gaming and PnP gaming are both dying. But we don't really have the numbers to back that up.

5) Like many analyses, there is no allowance made for the rather dramatic change in financial climate (4E launched during the Great Recession, 3E launched on the tail of the Internet Bubble).

6) Paper prices have risen steadily while supply has dropped. Wood is becoming more expensive, while paradoxically in 2009-2010, the demand for paper plummeted (those e-books being a part, online PDFs another and declining periodicals yet another). In summer 2010, the price of paper shoot-up, which is probably a significant factor in WotC's printing schedule.

7) The rise of consoles being sophisticated machines that eliminate many of the problems associated with PC gaming have a LOT to do with the decline of PC gaming's cache. Mass Effect 2 is another bad example, here: it is a console game that has been ported to the PC. Assassin's Creed 2, equipped with some of the worst DRM around, still managed to sell well on the PC...but it too was a port. For that matter, so were several Final Fantasy games.

8) PC gaming has had it's focus shifted from some of the large production houses to smaller ones. Popcap has made themselves huge via casual gaming. Companies like 2D-boy have shown that mom-and-pop developers can still find a market. Steam has games I've never even heard of that look as professional as the big names on the consoles, because they remove many of the costs of releasing a game. DCUO is hard to find at retailers...but it's always available at Steam 24/7. Not to mention that many developers have doubled-down on markets like Android, the iPhone and even the Nintendo DS.

9) If we've learned anything, there are some people who will pirate games NO MATTER HOW INEXPENSIVE A GAME ACTUALLY IS.

10) When Steam/Valve DOES share information, the numbers are pretty impressive. I know the OP wants to disregard their sales out-of-hand, but according to Steam, they have sold amazing numbers.

11. It goes without saying that Blizzard throws many of the numbers in disarray. While piracy may get you a single-player game, how many pirates manage to get on and stay on Battle.net? It is almost a certainty that there are more people playing WoW than are playing D&D (WoW has more than 12 million subscribers as of Oct. 2010. WotC made a presentation recently indicating that their research shows about 1.5 million active players. And that they believe that there are around 24 million 'lapsed' players from the games inception to now....i.e. WoW now has an active subscriber base [gold-farmers and alts included, natch] that matches half of the entire historical base of D&D.

The PC gaming and RPG markets have changed. A LOT. But I don't take it as a given that they are doomed. I think a lot of people expect a level of transparency that WotC and Hasbro have no intention of providing, any more than Valve/Steam provide it. And I haven't yet heard of a compelling argument for WHY they should do so. Certainly their fans would appreciate it, but that isn't really important to their business methodology. I think many people have really unreasonable or artificially inflated ideas of how big the market is or actually ever really was.

 

[WizarDru]

Yeah, the PC game market has changed profoundly in the last ten years. It's no mystery why PC game sales have plummeted - they aren't making as many PC games anymore. It just makes more economic sense to develop for a stable platform, like a console. It also makes a lot of sense for the consumer, who doesn't have to buy a new video card every six months or become an expert at building their own PC.

I'm not really sure they HAVE plummeted, though.

Let's take a look at some numbers:

Highest-selling PC games of All time:

1. The Sims 16 million
2. The Sims 2
3. World of Warcraft
4. Starcraft
5. Half-Life
6. Half-Life 2
7. Guild Wars
8. Roller-Coaster Tycoon
9. Myst
10. Sim City
11. Riven
12. Battlefield 1942 - 4.2 million

You noticing something there? Casual games sell as much as 'hard-core' games. And WoW is the most recent title on there. Some of these don't reflect online sales...but WoW is the most recent game on here...and that started selling years ago.

Computer gaming isn't in a slump...it was never THAT big to begin with.

Halo: CE...released in 2001, has sold 5 million copies. Halo 2 has sold 8. Halo 3 has sold 8 million. Super Mario Brothers 2 sold 10 million. Super Mario Brothers 3 sold 18 MILLION. Hell, even Pac-man on the Atari sold 7.5 million...and it was uniformly terrible, even at the time.

I think people have an artificially inflated view of PC game sales. The NEVER sold on the same level as console games. Most of the big hits of the last five years have sold solid numbers around 3-5 million. The original Doom? Sold 3 million. Dragon Age and Doom 3? 3.5 million. Crysis? 3 Million. Starcraft II and Warcraft III? 3+ million.

In other words, the only games that have manage to crack over 3 million are 'ever-green' games that have become cheaper or lasted for much longer than normal. Recent games are selling on a part with what they've always sold, from what I can tell.