Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7647777" data-attributes="member: 82106">As a few other people have commented, I wonder about the whole "we must have the Brick and Mortar stores to live" thing. There are TONS of games produced for game consoles and the mobile market. Most of them have dirt for marketing budgets. Nowadays you can get virtually everything online. There are certainly a lot of game stores around still, but (very analogously with FLGS) they cater almost entirely to existing customers, and to a large extent exist these days more because of their ability to sell highly discounted used games. In fact the game publishers in the long run would probably rather this sales channel went away.Yet, somehow computer games are a huge, growing, and healthy industry. Clearly you don't HAVE to have a retail presence on the ground to have an industry. What you have to have is MIND SHARE. The computer gaming industry has clearly figured out how to attract that mind share. There are dynamics there which don't apply to the TT RPG industry, but there are still lessons to be learned.One thing that the computer gaming industry has done is to coalesce around a small number of online platforms, Steam, for instance is a one-stop-shop where you can instantly purchase and play a vast array of games. Nothing like that exists in the TT RPG industry. As for attracting players, well, I'm sure Ryan has more knowledge on the subject than I do, but I helped set up and run several FLGS back in the 80's, and I can say with pretty good authority that there was almost no such thing as 'walk-in traffic'. Once in a GREAT while you'd get some parent or random walk in person, but they practically never bought stuff. In fact the one really big store we set up was basically a clubhouse. The people that came in were gamers, they bought their games and mostly played them right there at the store (we had like 20 large tables). New customers came in with existing customers. Kids would bring in their friends, soldiers would bring in their buddies, etc. It was all networking. I seriously doubt that a lot of sales happen today any differently than they did back then. People don't randomly drop into stores and say "gosh, look at that RPG, maybe we should try that." Now, bookstores and general merchants MIGHT manage to sell some product that way, but my guess is they mostly sell product to people that again are already gamers and don't (like me) have an FLGS nearby and make an impulse buy. So, yeah, its the outreach that is the thing. Marketing. The best thing TSR ever did was that cartoon. That thing sold more D&D than probably every other marketing campaign ever in the history of gaming. Today, with the way people can and will buy online, you don't even need to have the box in the store so they can actually run out and buy it. Every library should have a set of RPG books and a place to play them (many do actually) and a 'game day' (again, many do, my sister runs one at her library, or has at least off and on). Schools, ditto. I think the industry is dying because the industry was successful. 10 years ago the revival of D&D sparked off a lot of renewed interest in a lot of lapsed gamers and got people playing more. The industry expanded, new people were brought in by the network, things looked good, and I think a lot of the industry forgot about promoting itself. They got so busy pumping out product and spent so many resources competing with each other that they simply dropped the ball on getting out there in the trenches growing the industry. Now things have boomeranged. Revenues inevitably started to shrink as the market saturated and people drifted off to other interests. As the revenue falls the marketing funds dry up and its a spiral. WotC clearly tried to spark a new revival cycle with a new edition, but much like with 2e it was only mildly successful. Again, they focused right off on the existing market because that's low hanging fruit, but they apparently haven't so far been able to really grow the audience. Maybe because they're not the majority of the market anymore, there's just no 900 lb gorilla left that has the resources to do it. I don't know.I'm not so sure the differences between 4e and pre-4e versions of D&D are really that relevant either. They matter within the existing customer base, but I wouldn't be so quick to condemn WotC for refreshing the game in a big way. I think they clearly saw (well Mike Mearls outright stated as much) that just reselling material to the existing audience wasn't going to cut it. They felt they needed a game with more modern sensibilities (and one that is clearly more compatible with digital tools). Maybe the game that they ended up with missed their design goals in some ways (I think they didn't really intend it to be played as a 'skirmish game' for instance). Still, I think it would have been a bigger mistake to have not tried. A LOT of new blood plays 4e. At some point the same old game simply doesn't match modern sensibilities as much as it needs to. They certainly haven't made all the right moves, but there's a reason why you redesign your product.</blockquote>

Verification