joethelawyer said:
after all these posts regarding potential sales of 4e, and references to marketshare and sales of old editions, i was wondering, does anyone have any cold hard metrics for the rpg industry, or more specifically for wotc's D&D sales of any edition, past or present? does anyone have any idea what wotc is projecting for sales of 4e? or what they are goaled for? does anyone have a breakdown of sales and/or profits on any product wotc has ever put out?
In general, the answer is "No".
Most companies are _extremely_ reluctant to give any kind of numbers regarding sales, units sold, or anything like that. You can sometimes find some small press / indy companies that will say something about their sales, but WotC and the other big ones generally don't. That doesn't stop people from wild speculation and passionate defense of their pet theories.
For a while you could sort of get an idea how things were selling (but no real numbers) from COMICS & GAMES RETAILER a magazine that published the top selling games. The sketchy information was based on various stores self-reporting sales.
The last bit of information from them that I know of is here:
[sblock=a somewhat questionable place]
http://www.therpgsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6959&page=8[/sblock]
I'll note that the site in the spoiler block is a bit... rough ... and there's a good chance that reading posts there will result in the reader being annoyed/upset/offended in some fashion.
The only bits of information that I know of from WotC that might be of any use/interest are the following:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23903817/
MSNBC Article said:
D&D had about six million players worldwide last year, according to a survey by Wizards, though Rouse said the figure may be somewhat inflated. Many of those players probably yield little revenue for the company. The gamers buy books and sometimes miniatures, but only one player in the group needs to own a copy of each book.
Wizards does not reveal sales figures, but Pramas estimates the overall market for traditional role-playing games at $30 million annually.
If you feel like sitting around and doing the math, you could make a bunch of wild guesses about the overall market share of D&D, guess that the 6 million estimated D&D players therefore means that the rpg industry as a whole has [x number more of players in it] and that out of that $30 Million, D&D is worth [market share percentage].
Some _really_ wild speculations. Not that it'll really stop folks though.
The other bit is the survey that WotC did back in 2000. Lots of people like to go on about how it's so out of date as to be worthless, but it's both the most comprehensive survey I know of, and the only "solid" numbers I've seen examining rpgs as a market:
http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/wotcdemo.html
In summary:
You're pretty much out of luck in getting any kind of reasonable information. The bits that you _can_ find out are more useful than some folks make out, but it's not really enough for those folks that want to make themselves out to be some sort of expert on rpg sales to actually have a leg to stand on.
joethelawyer said:
i was also wondering, there are some threads here regarding types of gamers, fluff lovers, crunchers, etc. i have no idea what those terms means, since everyone here seems to have a slightly different definition of them.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the internet.
While there's a fair amount of _general_ consensus about certain terms and their meaning, in general it seems that folks like to argue about the specifics of them. And they also seem to really dislike being categorized. The more they happen to dislike being put into some group or another, the more they're going to argue about those definitions.
[sblock=Types of Gamers]
This whole topic is generally just not worth it. There's all kinds of different "models" that try and group people based on their desires/expectations in a game, and/or how they interact with the game and other players. If you're really interested in it, there can be some useful information gleaned from the different models, but the problem is that you can't really drop most people into one group or another.
People play for a variety of reasons, they may not always be aware of what their reasons are, and their reasons for playing different games can vary depending on the game in question.
If you just _can't_ resist it, you can find a fair amount of the theory that people scream at each other about here:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/
Another somewhat useful way of looking at how/why folks play games is in the Robin Laws book, "Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering". You can buy the pdf here:
http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=SJG30-3009
The book itself isn't bad, and the whole model thing is just a brief mention. There's a lot of decent advice in it, but if you're only interested in the model he puts forward, you can get the gist of it here:
http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/robinslaws.html
The same site also has a nice summary of the main ways that folks have of looking at stuff:
http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/
The Forge really pushed pretty far past what J. Kim briefly touches on. It's also what everyone likes to argue about.[/sblock]
[sblock=fluff lovers]
I haven't heard this or "crunch lovers" as specific terms, but there are folks that profess to love "fluff".
Generally, "fluff" means the non-rules part of a game. Sometimes people use it to mean fiction (stories) that's set within the background, other times it means the background itself.
I first heard and started using the term "fluff" in conjunction with wargames, about... 12 years ago? Specifically playing Warhammer 40k. The folks there were pretty explicit in that "fluff" meant the background. The fiction was part of what helped to establish what the background/premise of the setting is/was.
Some people are extremely scornful of fluff. All they really care about is the game itself, and they consider pages devoted to more than the bare minimum to be a waste.
Others wish that there was more fluff in books, and bemoan the fact that everything has to have a rule and/or stat attached to it.
Arguments between these two groups get more muddled by the fact that some people buy books to read and not for actual use in a game. In fact, there's a larger number of people than you might expect (at least on the internet) that haven't actually played or run a game for a long time, sometimes years.[/sblock]
[sblock=crunchlovers]
Some people are really into "crunch". "Crunch" is generally used to refer to rules. The more rules a game has, the more "crunchy" it is. I've no idea where this started up from, I've only ever seen/heard the term "crunch" used online and by those people that tend to spend large amounts of time cruising the various rpg forums.
A wild guess, but it might be a derivative of "number crunching", although that's really wild speculation on my part.
Folks that are really into crunch tend to not be a fan of fluff. That's not always true, but it does seem to be a tendency. Crunch also tends to sell more than pure fluff books. It's not an accident that almost every supplement for d20 for example, adds in a bunch of classes, feats, and usually some sort of special rules. Phil Reed once mentioned on his blog that the crunch stuff he made consistently sold better than his more fluffy stuff.[/sblock]
In general, I'd be careful using terms. Too often people use them as a way of implying that their way of playing is better (or more "right") than someone else.
If you're going to use a term to describe a game, I'd suggest making sure you add a small explanation along with the description, just so that folks know where you're coming from.
For example, I'd say that Unisystem is a medium crunch system, and that I think it's overall lighter than D&D. I tend to prefer games at the level of Unisystem or lighter, but I do run a modified d20 game.
Some folks might not agree with my assessment, but phrasing it the way I have allows people at least something of a reference and hopefully isn't interpreted as a slam against them or their playstyle. Assuming that the person in question is familiar with Unisystem games.
joethelawyer said:
are there marketing studies anywhere out there of the rpg industry, or of gamers, or of anything else related to either?
To my knowledge, there's just the WotC survey that I linked above.
