When did WotC D&D "Jump the Shark"?

[Hussar]

(1) I am sure D&D 4e/Essentials is profitable.

(2) I am sure that WotC would like it to be more profitable.

(3) I am sure that, if WotC believed re-releasing AD&D 1e next year, one book at a time, would be more profitable than whatever they are currently planning.....we'd be seeing AD&D 1e re-released next year, one book at a time.

(4) I am not a fan of 4e, or the delve format, BUT the only thing that even comes close to potential shark-jumping is the stupidsilly namesmack naming that 4e is rife with.

IMHO.



RC

I can't posrep you for this RC, but, I totally agree with everything you just said here. Even the naming conventions.

 

[BryonD]

Or, take the "evidence" from various FLGS owners. FLGS owner claims, "Game X flies off the shelf but game Y sits and gathers dust". But, again, there's no context given. Let's say that Pathfinder is doing well at the store and 4e isn't. There could be many reasons for this, other than just the popularity of the games. For one, the store could be actively biased for or against a given game and that wouldn't be the first time that's happened. Or, perhaps this store is selling the books, but the store down the street is running Encounters and Gamma World events six days a week and all the 4e buyers go to that other store. That's just two off the top of my head and I'm sure there are many other reasons that could be just as true as "Game X is more popular that Game Y".

The point is frequently made that when 3E was new, "all the same complaints were made against it". And yet these localized bias-driven gaps in sales did not emerge.

What is the difference?

So, yes, IMO, anyone who comes to any sort of conclusion based on the flimsiest of evidence that we have presented here is holding the tail of an elephant and claiming it's a snake.

Declaring all the evidence flimsy does not make the totality of it actually be flimsy.


Quite simply, even saying you don't know it is a huge concession.
Three years into 3E no one was saying we don't know. People who didn't like 3E were actively complaining about how much it had taken over and was stifling innovation. There was no question.

Why is there even a question now?

What is the difference?

And, it was you, personally, Hussar, who with great confidence assured me that all of this would blow over by the end of the first summer because that was how long it would take for everyone to finish their current games and then switch to 4E.

You've gone from absolute certainty of one thing to hand waving and smoke screens against the opposite.

And, for the record, I have seen people comment on liking 4E but having a hard time finding groups....

Even your own example presumes it is not hard to find stores in which "Pathfinder is doing well" and "4e isn't". That alone says that the D&D brand has come down more than a notch.

No one is complaining about 4E stifling anything. That is because it is different now.

 

[Mercurius]

Hrm, how to reconcile these two points of view? Both pretty much entirely based on anecdotes with no context. On one hand, syaing that WOTC's fan base got smaller is a complete assumption with no factual backing, but, on the other hand, "tons of people have a DDI subscription" isn't exactly scientific either.

Guess it's back to the three blind men and an elephant time again.

Not quite. I think too much is made of places like EN World not being representative of the larger fanbase. Sure, a poll on EN World only means something on EN World (if even that), but what you can get a sense of is the general tone of fandom of a given edition - how happy people are with the game, how many people moved to another edition, and so forth. This isn't cold hard data but it is "listening to the people" (which WotC could do more of and evidently is doing, to some extent, through Mearls' articles).

And also remember that it is the diehard fanbase that is, while a small minority of overall D&D players, the engine that moves the vehicle of the hobby. It is well known that a small percentage of active, regular D&D players, is responsible for the majority of D&D sales.

My game group is a good example: in our group of six I own a huge bookshelf of a few hundred (400?) different game books. My guess is that the other five guys own maybe 20 between them, and some of them are old attic-dwelling copies of 1E books they haven't played in 25 years. So in my group, 17% of the group (me) is responsible for 95% of the product.

I know this is purely anecdotal but I've heard variations of this story time and time again. Even if we reduce the numbers a bit and say that 20% of D&D players are responsible for 80% of the product, we still have to recognize that it is very important to keep that 20% happy. Even if half are OK with only minor gripes and a quarter grumble but keep on spending, you still have 5% who are in danger of not buying anything--which is 20% of the product. And then you have that other 5% that is teetering between sucking it up and entering full-out disgruntlement.

The point being, if a business wants to have long-term success then it needs to care not only about sales figures but customer satisfaction, and lasting customer satisfaction. Plenty of people buy 4E books but my guess is that customer satisfaction is lower than any other edition only three years into the cycle. People loved 3E in 2003; well, there was the 3.5 debacle but that was just a blip on the radar. All was well in 1992, three years after 2E came out, in heart of the "Golden Age of Settings." And of course the 1980-82 era (three years after the various 1E core hardcovers were published) was the peak of D&D interest.

So I don't think it is erroneous to say that, at the least, something is iffy, if not completely rotten, in Denmark. It doesn't matter what the exact numbers are; what is important is the general tenor of the community, which is problematic to say the least, and certainly not improving.

 

[Hussar]

Declaring all the evidence flimsy does not make the totality of it actually be flimsy.


Quite simply, even saying you don't know it is a huge concession.
Three years into 3E no one was saying we don't know. People who didn't like 3E were actively complaining about how much it had taken over and was stifling innovation. There was no question.

Why is there even a question now?

What is the difference?

Is 4e as popular as d20 was at the height of the d20 bubble (which is about 3 years into 3e)? No, of course not. No one would argue that. But, then again, D&D throughout its history has rarely been as popular as it was for those three or four years.

Of course, not being as popular as D&D was during the bubble is not the same as failing.

See the difference?

And, it was you, personally, Hussar, who with great confidence assured me that all of this would blow over by the end of the first summer because that was how long it would take for everyone to finish their current games and then switch to 4E.

I would point out that I was hardly the only one saying that. Erik Mona said the same thing as well, yet I don't see you pointing to that over and over again.

But, in any case, I'll freely admit that I was mistaken. Then again, I was basing that totally on gut reaction without any evidence.

Kinda like you're doing now.

You've gone from absolute certainty of one thing to hand waving and smoke screens against the opposite.

And, for the record, I have seen people comment on liking 4E but having a hard time finding groups....

Even your own example presumes it is not hard to find stores in which "Pathfinder is doing well" and "4e isn't". That alone says that the D&D brand has come down more than a notch.

No one is complaining about 4E stifling anything. That is because it is different now.

No smoke screens. I'm going to repeat myself ONE MORE TIME.

WE DON'T KNOW.

You could be right. It's quite possible that you are. Unfortunately, without any supporting evidence, there's just no way to tell. You keep making claims that you are absolutely right, that 4e is floundering, that it's lost fan base, and whatnot, without a shred of actual real evidence.

Again, you could be right.

Again, you don't know.

Say it with me, strings of unsupported, obviously biased anecdotes do not lead to anything resembling an informed conclusion.

 

[Beginning of the End]

So what do you think? When did WotC D&D jump the shark?

2003.

The premature release of 3.5 marked a shift in both the management and predominant design ethos at the company. The new management didn't understand what had made 2000 successful and overcompensated in reaction to mistakes (both perceived and real). The new design ethos was buying hard into the My Perfect Encounters(TM) school of design and allowing the CharOp tail to wag the dog.

 

[Hussar]

Not quite. I think too much is made of places like EN World not being representative of the larger fanbase. Sure, a poll on EN World only means something on EN World (if even that), but what you can get a sense of is the general tone of fandom of a given edition - how happy people are with the game, how many people moved to another edition, and so forth. This isn't cold hard data but it is "listening to the people" (which WotC could do more of and evidently is doing, to some extent, through Mearls' articles).

If I spent lots of time on the Paizo boards, I would think that 4e is the worst game ever written, right up there with FATAL and that WOTC employees regularly serve small furry animals live with their lunch.

Never mind that WOTC has done more gamer outreach in the past couple of years than anyone's done in the past couple of decades with things like the D&D Encounters and Gamma World, which apparently gets completely overlooked when people on chat boards talk about "listening to the people".

And also remember that it is the diehard fanbase that is, while a small minority of overall D&D players, the engine that moves the vehicle of the hobby. It is well known that a small percentage of active, regular D&D players, is responsible for the majority of D&D sales.

Really? This is well known? Or is it just commonly assumed without any actual facts backing it up. I thought it was sales of PHB's that were the majority of D&D sales. Those aren't hardcore fans buying typically. Those are the casual players who only buy one or two books ever and probably outnumber the hardcore players a hundred to one.

My game group is a good example: in our group of six I own a huge bookshelf of a few hundred (400?) different game books. My guess is that the other five guys own maybe 20 between them, and some of them are old attic-dwelling copies of 1E books they haven't played in 25 years. So in my group, 17% of the group (me) is responsible for 95% of the product.

Whereas in the groups I've typically played with, generally everyone had at least the PHB (of whatever edition) as well as a couple of other books.

Whose anecdote wins?

I know this is purely anecdotal but I've heard variations of this story time and time again. Even if we reduce the numbers a bit and say that 20% of D&D players are responsible for 80% of the product, we still have to recognize that it is very important to keep that 20% happy. Even if half are OK with only minor gripes and a quarter grumble but keep on spending, you still have 5% who are in danger of not buying anything--which is 20% of the product. And then you have that other 5% that is teetering between sucking it up and entering full-out disgruntlement.

But your numbers here are completely fabricated based on your own experiences and not based on anything resembling a fact. You have no idea how many groups play with one player with a large library or if groups spread out the costs.

For example, every group I've ever played with has included multiple DM's. Every single one. Therefore, just about every group has had multiple copies of a number of books.

Might I ask how many times you've changed groups?

The point being, if a business wants to have long-term success then it needs to care not only about sales figures but customer satisfaction, and lasting customer satisfaction. Plenty of people buy 4E books but my guess is that customer satisfaction is lower than any other edition only three years into the cycle. People loved 3E in 2003; well, there was the 3.5 debacle but that was just a blip on the radar. All was well in 1992, three years after 2E came out, in heart of the "Golden Age of Settings." And of course the 1980-82 era (three years after the various 1E core hardcovers were published) was the peak of D&D interest.

A blip on the radar? I'm sure there are rather a large number of d20 publishers that don't think 3e to 3.5 was a blip on the radar. For most publishers, that was the death knell of their publishing in D&D.

3 years after publishing 2e, according to some claims by people here, D&D had lost almost HALF of its player base. It had certainly lost a great deal by all accounts. 3 years after publishing 2e, D&D was in SECOND PLACE to Vampire in sales (at least briefly).

4e was briefly in second place to another D&D game - Pathfinder. It would be more worrying if it had been a non-d20, non-D&D game. But, it wasn't. A game that leveraged the D&D name and a great deal of really, really excellent marketing (and I won't deny for a moment that Paizo is WAY better at marketting its game to existing D&D players) managed to briefly pull ahead of 4e D&D. We'll see how things go a few years down the road.

So I don't think it is erroneous to say that, at the least, something is iffy, if not completely rotten, in Denmark. It doesn't matter what the exact numbers are; what is important is the general tenor of the community, which is problematic to say the least, and certainly not improving.

I think it's the general tenor of a small, but EXTREMELY vocal segment of the community.

 

[Tuft]

So what do you think? When did WotC D&D jump the shark?

When they used an apparently hefty initial advertising budget from Hasbro to commission a commercial where they dumped dragon dung on previous fans.


I'm sure they now wish they had spent that money on something that could be reused down the line to promote the game in a positive manner, instead of something so personally petty.

 

[delericho]

Uhm... actually we don't know this objectively. There have been some weird anomalies discovered about the numbers concerning this group, between the numbers for "Listed Members" and the actual number of members listed under member list, here's the thread... it starts around page 16, post 151.

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Here's the relevant quote...

Very interesting. But... does the page listing with the avatars include people who haven't selected an avatar at all? That would explain the 'missing' 13,000 people.

Of course, it would also be trivial to set up the count to increment when people join, but fail to decrement when people leave. And since there is a certain incentive to inflate the numbers of subscribers...

I have to agree - the number of members quoted for that group is not a good indication of the number of subscribers. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the actual number turned out to be anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000. (Although, even at the lowest bounds, I'd still consider that 'a lot'. How it stacks up against WotC's predictions at the start of the DDI project, though...)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Very interesting. But... does the page listing with the avatars include people who haven't selected an avatar at all? That would explain the 'missing' 13,000 people.

Of course, it would also be trivial to set up the count to increment when people join, but fail to decrement when people leave. And since there is a certain incentive to inflate the numbers of subscribers...

I have to agree - the number of members quoted for that group is not a good indication of the number of subscribers. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the actual number turned out to be anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000. (Although, even at the lowest bounds, I'd still consider that 'a lot'. How it stacks up against WotC's predictions at the start of the DDI project, though...)

Well, THIS is absolutely true, that if you have a community account and you are a DDI subscriber you are added to the DDI group, and if you lapse your subscription you're removed from the DDI group. In EVERY OTHER GROUP on the community the count reflects the actual number of users who have joined that group. The numbers in the DDI group are too large to prove if that is true there and you can leave that group to test the theory anyway AFAIK.

So, yes, it is POSSIBLE that the group member count in the DDI group is an evil conspiracy by WotC to deceive us all about DDI subscription numbers, but frankly that seems rather ridiculous to me. The 13k missing avatars? It COULD indicate that the group membership count includes people without community accounts, in which case it is an absolute count of actual active DDI subscribers. I can believe that's possible. I fail to believe the count never decrements since in every other respect the DDI group is just another group (WotC rents the whole community platform, it isn't like they built it specifically for their needs anyway).

The point is frequently made that when 3E was new, "all the same complaints were made against it". And yet these localized bias-driven gaps in sales did not emerge.

What is the difference?

There is a HUGE difference. First of all 2e was deader than a doornail in 1999. The books were off the shelves and long since gathering dust in the bargain bins around here. Anecdotally around here it was a has-been game. Yes, you could find the die-hard core of 2e AD&D fans online etc but the game was dated, the producer was moribund, the market had been flooded for several years with badly written garbage. It was by far the low point of D&D in my experience. ANY new edition was entering a green field. Of course people welcomed 3e, it was the first sign that D&D was still alive.

Contrast this with the introduction of 4e, very different. 3.5 never suffered from a deficit of support, etc.

Declaring all the evidence flimsy does not make the totality of it actually be flimsy.

No, it makes relying on it an exercise in piling one flimsiness on top of another. It isn't even a matter of flimsiness either. It is a matter of there is NO OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER to support the conclusion that 4e isn't quite successful.

The popularity of PF is notable, but even that doesn't indicate a whole lot about 4e. 2/3 of the people I play with play other versions of D&D as well as 4e. It seems logical that PF sales detract from 4e sales in some fashion, but we don't really know to what extent that is true. In fact if you know a bit about markets and marketing you'd be very hesitant to draw that conclusion hastily. Many people buy both. They might spend more on one if the other didn't exist, but they may also buy more overall since there's more to choose from. Many of the people buying PF stuff might not be playing at all if PF didn't exist, and those people may STILL buy a 4e product now and then. The opposite is true as well, I doubt PF would be doing as well if 4e didn't exist personally.

The point is, your 'evidence' isn't flimsy, it is non-existent.

Quite simply, even saying you don't know it is a huge concession.
Three years into 3E no one was saying we don't know. People who didn't like 3E were actively complaining about how much it had taken over and was stifling innovation. There was no question.

Why is there even a question now?

What is the difference?

Again, what other choice of game systems did people have? 2e was DEAD DEAD DEAD dust covered bargain-bin fodder. The question wasn't between 2e and 3e, it was whether or not D&D was going to survive at all or if more modern games were finally going to kill it off (IIRC V:tM was doing quite well at the time of the 3e launch). Obviously 3 years in that question was answered, D&D lived and thrived, but 3.x WAS D&D.

So, again, the difference today is only that 3.5 was far from dead when 4e was launched, and on top of that we have D&D zombie stepchild, PF, out there as well.

Beyond that though I think there is a deeper underlying issue. The TT RPG hobby as a whole is dying. Objectively the whole hobby has aged drastically. There were VERY few adults playing D&D 30 years ago. Today it is largely a hobby made up of people who picked it up 10+ years ago and half the demographic is 40+ and a good chunk are past that. This is no secret. Heck, half the justification that WotC had for releasing 4e and then Essentials, not to mention Encounters, was to bring new people into the hobby. It is a shrinking pie. It is simply a different world than it was 10 years ago.

And, it was you, personally, Hussar, who with great confidence assured me that all of this would blow over by the end of the first summer because that was how long it would take for everyone to finish their current games and then switch to 4E.

You've gone from absolute certainty of one thing to hand waving and smoke screens against the opposite.

And, for the record, I have seen people comment on liking 4E but having a hard time finding groups....

Even your own example presumes it is not hard to find stores in which "Pathfinder is doing well" and "4e isn't". That alone says that the D&D brand has come down more than a notch.

No one is complaining about 4E stifling anything. That is because it is different now.

I'm not having trouble finding groups. The groups I find are older (by far) than they were 20 years ago, but there are plenty of people around to play with and I've run 4e continuously since it was released without any shortage of players.

You're taking Hussar's words and twisting them. He simply made an example where he used the names of two games to illustrate a point and you're trying to warp it into some kind of evidence for your position. Personally I find that indicates either a huge deep seated bias or a rather thin rhetorical trick that does nothing for your arguments.

I think we CAN agree that things are different in 2011 than they were in 2003. It is a very different market. The world is changing fast, and frankly one of the major factors in the RPG market is that WOTC created the competition for its own product. Not to take anything from Paizo at all, but they didn't make 3.5 what it was, and PF wouldn't exist at all if it wasn't for 3.5. I really don't believe that ANY conceivable 4e that was anything beyond a mild refresh of 3.5 would be in any different market position than 4e is now. It is a good game, and frankly I think it is doing quite well. Times may be tough and PF may, or may not, be biting into its market, but even so the game is obviously pretty successful. The alternate theory being what, that Hasbro is so dumb they published 35+ 4e books before figuring out they can't sell it? I'm skeptical...

 

[delericho]

So, yes, it is POSSIBLE that the group member count in the DDI group is an evil conspiracy by WotC to deceive us all about DDI subscription numbers, but frankly that seems rather ridiculous to me...

I'm inclined to agree. Sadly, though, we simply can't know, and that's enough for me to consider the 45,000 figure doubtful.

No, it makes relying on it an exercise in piling one flimsiness on top of another. It isn't even a matter of flimsiness either. It is a matter of there is NO OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER to support the conclusion that 4e isn't quite successful.

I have to agree with you here. For any company other than WotC/Hasbro, 4e would be considered a phenomenal success. The only real questions, as far as I can tell, are "is it as successful as 3e?" and "is it successful enough for WotC/Hasbro?"