Alternate History: Magic The Gathering Never Exists. What Changes for D&D?

[RyanD]

While many (most?) of those game/hobby/comic stores might have died off without Magic to prop them up, what makes you say GW would have handled their RPG division differently than they did their presumably more lucrative miniatures business?

Last year, which was one of the best years ever for GW, they did just over $30 million in sales in the US. In the time frame we're talking about, US sales were about $10 million (or less). They were not contributing enough revenue to the overall hobby game retail tier to keep stores open if the RPG category, which accounted for about 60% of all hobby game revenues, were to collapse.

Since GW is not dependent on US sales to remain solvent, they would be able to re-invest profits from the UK and Europe into their own US stores, and since those stores would be selling into a market where their competition was literally vanishing, they'd be very likely to be able to roll out more stores much more quickly than they actually have.

Imagine if your local store shut down, and a new GW store appeared selling Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40K, D&D, and the D&D Campaign settings, in a world where there was no Magic: The Gathering.... it would be an almost insurmountable competitive advantage for GW; no new "indpendent" store would likely appear to compete with it.

Ryan

 

[Nightfall]

Ryan,

I don't have to imagine. I live the nightmare of no gaming stores. Welcome to the end of gaming or as we call it, West Virginia.

 

[LightPhoenix]

We disagree. If you cannot see the correlation between the runaway success that was M:TG and the corresponding nosedive in AD&D sales from 93-96, nothing I say is going to avail.

If you don't agree that AD&D at the time and D&D in general at all times has been the primary feeder game to the RPG hobby, then I think you are just dead wrong and there isn't anybody in the industry who shares that view.

Well, aside from Ryan's quote before about 90-93 experiencing a 50% drop, I can see effect, but I think that it was TSR that set that drop in motion, not MtG.

On the latter point, as I said before, I considered that was untrue and then discarded that line of thought, with regards to reality.

I then went on to postulate, like we're all doing here, that were (read: speculation) the market much more robust and competitive than it is now, ie like sports or automobiles, that it may not be the case.

I apologize if that was unclear.

This in incorrect. BioWare did exist at this time and they were working on BG1. As well, you are mistaken that Interplay had "the rights" to D&D computer games.

Shoulda known better to argue with you on this point.

I'm just going to concede to your knowledge regarding it, since I'm obviously of my bat here.

What the computer brand shows from 1998 onwards is that the demand for a high quality party based computer game using the AD&D brand was a license that was *extremely* valuable and which enjoyed massive sales far beyond what the underlying supposed PnP market was justifying.

Or, that Bioware can make a good game, and just happened to with the D&D ruleset.

I've never seen any instance where there's low demand for high quality things, be it games or what not. In fact, I think the general case is more true - just that there's a demand for high quality games.

You are rewriting history here completely in a way which doesn ot accord with reality. That just is not the way the way it happened at all.

I think that's the whole point of a what-if thread. But yes, I acknowledge I got facts wrong. It does happen from time to time.

This is what leads me to believe that at some point BioWare would have bid for it. That is not to say that they would have got it.

And that was my general theory - Bioware may have gotten it, or may not have.

 

[Nightfall]

*goes back to doing what people in Washington DC do with things they don't want to see, ignore it* Excuse my slight political commentary there please!

 

[darious777]

So, it certainly sounds like RPGs were dropping heavily before 93-96. Did MtG hasten it? Almost certainly at some level (roleplayers were spending more of their money on MtG and less on RPGs). However, it was a trend already in place....

I have to agree. It was stated earlier that without WotC Enworld would not exist. That's true but for a different reason than stated - I still remember when TSR was semi-jokingly referred to as They Sue Regularly (aka T$R). This newfangled internet thing was perceived as a major threat to their IP and TSR sent out voluminous amounts of Cease and Desist letters to websites, causing fan backlash. (I even remember hearing about the TSR chatboards had put in macros so that anyone typing in T$R would instead have something along the lines of The Great TSR show up instead).

Blaming M:TG for the demise of TSR is like blaming the death of a 3-pack-a-day smoker on second hand smoke. Sure - technically there was a contributing percentage - but 99.44% of the damage was self-inflicted.

For one look at the pre-M:TG problems at T$R, you might find value in the 2004 Gamespy articles. http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538848p1.html The end of the Mazes (part II) article starts on the rumored problems and the Wizards and Tyrants (part III) article discuss things rather thoroughly.

Even if you don't buy into the Gamespy version of things, I know that I am not the only one who stopped buying 2nd edition products because they were just... so... bad. And I was the kind of obsessive they-could-do-no-wrong fanboy that would fit right in at any MacWorld conference - but even in rabid loyalty there was only so much I could take.

So.. no M:TG.... no company has the financial ability to soak up the phenomenal amount of financial debt TSR had accumulated. DnD fades away, sold off piecemeal for pennies on the dollar at bankruptcy court, only to become a footnote in a VH1 1980's retrospective.

I could even make an argument that without M:TG saving DnD, game stores themselves would have died out. It basically boils down to the fact that game stores run on a razor thin profit and if you take away their biggest seller not 100% of the sales would translate into other game lines. DnD is, for a lot of people, the ONLY rpg they would play. Permanent loss of sales off of the top + already thin profits = dead store.

Dead stores are not very likely to be replaced by new ones. When a store dies the majority of the customers tend to just.. fade away and spend their discretionary funds on other hobbies. (Take this for what it's worth - just something I "heard" on an industry forum I had brief access to while researching opening my own store - but at least empirically I've certainly seen this to be true).

Fewer game stores = fewer gamers = harder for the remaining retail and manufacturers to achieve sustainable profit margins = fewer game stores. . . etc. etc.
Basically it becomes the death spiral we are in now, only back in 1997 before the internet was ubiquitous enough to reasonably pick up even the portion of the slack it can today.

(reading ahead - I just learned about how GW handles things - the preceding does not take that into account. But GW is a personal blind spot for me. I'm still continuing an old local game store's boycott of GW over it's bypassing-the-distributor and strong-arming-the-retailer tactics.).

Now - I am of an old enough age to greatly appreciate a bit of "The grass was greener/The light was brighter/The taste was sweeter/The nights of wonder" nostalgia.. but I can't follow it through in this case. Long before M:TG came along, TSR was dead from self-inflicted wounds. They were just in the process of bleeding out at the time M:TG came along.


Oh - and according to the Gamespy article - Interplay did have some rights to DnD computer games, along with several other companies.

After SSI, Interplay emerged as the holder of the Forgotten Realms and Planescape licenses, Sierra picked up Birthright, and even Acclaim got into the act, acquiring the rights to Ravenloft. The results of all these licensing arrangements were abysmal. Acclaim tried to attach a license about gothic horror to, of all things, a fighting game for the PlayStation called Iron & Blood. Sierra's 1997 strategy/RPG hybrid, Gorgon's Alliance, is now justly forgotten, and even Interplay didn't distinguish itself out of the gate with the awful Blood & Magic and Descent to Undermountain. If the company was counting on royalties from these games to save itself, that would have made them the final nail in the coffin.

 

[Nightfall]

No M:tG? D&D becomes Naruto.