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Yes? That’s what I was referring to. I don’t think the retailer in question was referring just to sales since the lockdown. He’s talking about his impression of DnD’s products for quite some time. This I disagree with. The ‘core’ hobby are the ones more likely to pick up everything. It’s the...

Possibly it sold really well, just not noticeably so at retailers.

As long as you’ve actually run adventures from published materials before, you should be able to gauge the quality of an adventure from a read-through. I know I certainly can. It’s not that complicated - the adventure either provides what you need, or it doesn’t. I’ve never been half way through...

It certainly doesn’t have anywhere near as much as it did at its height, but still has one of the biggest market shares in the industry. It has a lot to lose.

I think they also look at character sheets, though I’m not 100% on that. If so, then that 14% probably doesn’t include many DnD games, or of the other popular systems, as those would usually be run with one of the available sheets.

That’s precisely my point. I was responding to Hussar’s comment about 1000 players. 1000 people playing on VTT doesn’t equal 1000 paying customers. And even if you manage to get enough players that it’d include 1000 paying customers, they probably wouldn’t qualify for the ‘true fan’ theory (IIRC...

Sure, it’s quite possible PF2 is failing badly, I just don’t think you can rely on these Roll20 figures to deduce that. They tell us nothing about how well (or badly) the launch went, just that there are fewer PF2 games than PF1 on Roll20. And we were comparing PF2 to PF1, not 5ed. I don’t think...

Perhaps, but I think it’s probably just a sort of ‘incumbent’ advantage. Someone running an existing PF campaign on Roll20 is unlikely to switch over, so it’ll take a while for those numbers to drop. And someone who has previously run a PF1 campaign on Roll20 might decide to stick with the...

And the answer is ‘it isn’t worth it.’ Firstly, because the amount of effort the publisher would have to put in to VTT to build that community is high. Small publisher’s don’t have the resources to spare for such an effort. And secondly, even if you succeed in creating such a community, you...

Game designers aren't just 'chucking the book into the wild.' They're setting up kickstarter campaigns, drumming up support, putting up pages with previews of upcoming books etc. They all have an 'online community.' But that's not the same thing as having a VTT community. And lacking 'geographic...

Problem is that simply creating a better VTT option won’t create that community. It’ll barely make a dent. The time spent on VTT support is better spent on producing more books, which will do better to increase your community than having a tiny number of people playing VTT. And VTT just isn’t...

This is clearly not the case for a lot of people. DnD is bringing more people into the hobby. Sure, some of them might find they don’t actually like it when the dice start rolling, but I think that would be true no matter what game they ended up playing. Meanwhile, many are loving it, driving up...

As you said, it’s a lot of work, but also it’s questionable whether the pay off would be worth it. If you’re a small publisher, then you have a small fan base. Of that small fan base, only a fraction will be interested in VTT. Of those, some will be people who were going to play anyway, they...

I believe it’s cases where the game can’t be identified by Roll20, as opposed to ‘other games,’ which Roll20 can identify, but their % are too low to bother listing individually.

Not really. At those percentages, there’s just very few people playing the game on Roll20, which means a handful of people starting or ending campaigns can result in a comparatively large change in the %, while saying little to nothing about the relative popularity about the game.

No, the man is thoroughly incompetent. He has screwed up multiple deals, poured money down the drain, screwed his customers and business partners over, and had to beg his fans for charity to keep the lights on. That the man still has money is down to an initial success that he then squandered...

Ah, but that’s the thing: they’re already big companies. They can afford to do that. You need to build up to the point where you can do that, then you can throw people under the bus.

Yeah, while Rifts looks dated now, at the time it came out it was a big deal. It just hasn't aged well. But for a while it had a large following (by RPG standards). The game has clung to existence for the past 30 years because its original fanbase was so big that even the small percentage that...

Besides, it’s precisely the ‘better bigots’ that tend to get caught out by these campaigns. It’s not the loud ‘n proud naughty words who get called out (because everyone knows who they are), it’s the more subtle ones. Someone points out that what they’ve said or done is problematic, and they go nuts...

I think you’re vastly underestimating the appeal his books had with some people. Sure, it was off putting for many (myself included), but others love the body horror aesthetic he used. I suspect the real hammer to his finances was Covid. Sounds like a huge number of his sales came from cons.