D&D 5E Alphastream - Why No RPG Company Truly Competes with Wizards of the Coast

[Micah Sweet]

Well, both of these can be more or less true at once; that its hard to make a licensed product, even one with a big footprint work for you (though I'd always heard that the original WEG Star Wars did pretty well by itself at the time), and that the whole industry just doesn't have that much yield unless you're absolutely at the top of it.

Gods know, this will be, what, the fifth time someone has tried a Marvel RPG, with limited success all four prior times.

The TSR version had a good long run, and is still heavily supported by the fans.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's always been interesting to me that licensed RPGs never make the top echelon of games. I suspect part of that is that often lack longevity. Certainly the IP itself (Star Wars, Marvel, etc.) is of an order of magnitude bigger than D&D.

I'm sure it's the difficulty on keeping the IP owners happy. That being said, FF Star Wars was very well thought of at the peak of its run, and technically it's still active.

 

[Micah Sweet]

TOR never had amazing sales, but it remains the best rpg version of Tolkien's legenadarium ever made, and just came out with a 2nd edition.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The TSR version had a good long run, and is still heavily supported by the fans.

Yeah, but I suspect if you asked Marvel at the time they wouldn't have considered it a particularly great success, and that was the best of how well those did, and probably when Marvel had the least expectations..

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, but I suspect if you asked Marvel at the time they wouldn't have considered it a particularly great success, and that was the best of how well those did, and probably when Marvel had the least expectations..

Yeah, I have no expectations that the new Marvel RPG will be successful, no matter how good it is. Marvel doesn't the business of RPGs; the other fish they have to fry are so much bigger.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, I have no expectations that the new Marvel RPG will be successful, no matter how good it is. Marvel doesn't the business of RPGs; the other fish they have to fry are so much bigger.

That's part of it, but you also have licensers who just have, well, strange idea of how the RPG hobby works in general. Even ones that are closer in scale will sometimes get into expectations that just don't entirely work.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's part of it, but you also have licensers who just have, well, strange idea of how the RPG hobby works in general. Even ones that are closer in scale will sometimes get into expectations that just don't entirely work.

Something being popular doesn't always translate into a dump truck full of money.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Something being popular doesn't always translate into a dump truck full of money.

You can have simple things about how a game is expected to be designed that through them off, too.

I mean there's at least three different reasons someone may want to play a game in a licensed setting:

1. They want to play the actual characters from that setting.
2. They want to interact with characters from that setting.
3. They want to play in the setting with its conceits and expectations, but don't necessarily care about interacting with the characters.

There have been games that automatically assumed the first was the case.

 

[wizard71]

I don't know about other markets, but apparently when someone here in Sweden wanted to translate AD&D, they were told they had to translate BECMI first. Unfortunately, the company folded after publishing the Expert rules so we never got an AD&D translation. I wonder if TSR had a similar requirement for other markets.

I am surprised that is the case as I view AD&D as the means for Gary Gygax to cut Dave Arneson out of the profits. Gary had to pay Dave royalties for D&D BECMI but not AD&D. The articles I read said Gary would always run BECMI but had rules for AD&D for profit reasons

 

[JEB]

Yeah, but I suspect if you asked Marvel at the time they wouldn't have considered it a particularly great success, and that was the best of how well those did, and probably when Marvel had the least expectations..

In the same vein, Marvel's own self-published RPG (Marvel Universe RPG) from the 2000s supposedly did well... but it didn't do as well as D&D or Marvel's top-selling comics, so they considered it a failure. (This is "citation needed" on Wikipedia, though.)