Could the D20/OGL end up hurting WoTC?

[Wulf Ratbane]

5) The "Skaff Effect" is itself nothing but an unproven hypothesis. Skaff posited it when talking about the TCG market, which is a pretty different ball of wax. One also has to wonder if he would have come up with the same theory if there had been an "Open Card Game" license promoted by WotC that allowed third party companies to produce TCG expansions 100% compatible with Magic. I doubt it.

LOL... Touché!

 

[Ranger REG]

What I'm arguing is that with increased competition for gaming dollars, the OGL has to affect WoTC's bottom line in some adverse way.

Only if WotC intend to compete against them. But from my observations, not all D&D gamers are flocking toward third-party d20 products. They still want D&D-labeled products, as opposed to d20-labeled products.

And even though they insist they do not look at outside products, I think they do or at least should do, if you're going to make a similar themed product -- be it nautical or mass combat -- in order to make your product better.

Before it wasn't a problem, but now d20 publishers are getting better and I believe more in-sync with WotC's d20 fanbase. Of course, it helps to have ex-employees of WotC -- those who were there during the development of 3e -- to gain insight toward making better products. That should give WotC the incentive to improve upon their products if they want money coming in.

But so far, it look as if they're reaching too far out (e.g., Illumian race) or not in-sync with fanbase.

 

[Turanil]

Of course, all you millionaires will probably post saying, "Oh yeah, way out of line, bc, and can you spare a dime?"

Completely off topic, but I suddenly wonder if there is a millionaire among the Enworld community...

 

[Ranger REG]

What kind of millionaire: Jackpot/Lottery Winner, Silver Spoon, or Rags-to-Riches?

 

[Turanil]

Any kind of millionaire. But in US dollars or euros...

 

[mearls]

Yes, they do, Mike, because people don't have infinite amounts of money. If a guy goes to a game store with $30 and he wants a new book for his D&D game, he's only coming out of that store with one book. It might be a WotC book but it very well might not be. You can pretend that the millions of dollars generated by d20 companies have had no impact on WotC, but I think that's plainly false.

OK, I think this is the basic bone of contention. Looking back at my last posts, I really shouldn't try talking about this stuff in a rational manner when I'm on top of a deadline and am pretty much useless for anything other than finishing the current book of the week.

I don't think that the typical game buyer goes into a store with X dollars to spend. I think that, instead, he goes into the store looking for something interesting and fun to buy. If he sees stuff that he happens to like, he buys it. If he can't afford it, he buys it when he has the money available.

Since RPGs are a luxury, nobody has to spend money on them. By the same token, people don't spend money on them unless they want to. The amount of money that people spend on games is determined by the number of appealing products on the market.

Let's take the Miniatures Handbook as an example, since you brought it up. You contend that WotC would've sold more copies if it had been released earlier, because a bunch of d20 companies released their own mass combat rules.

My contention is that the past releases are irrelevant. The Miniatures Handbook's sales would be determined almost solely by the quality of the rules. If someone bought a mass combat rules system in 2001, they'd still pick up the MHB if the MHB was of sufficiently high quality. If the book was good enough, people would buy it regardless of what they already owned. Again, RPGs are a luxury. I'm not worried about how much I spend on them. I'm only worried that I maximize the enjoyment from the money I put into them.

Of course, consumers don't have infinite amounts of money, but on the other hand they don't have to spend anything on RPGs. This isn't like shopping for food, where you have to spend some minimum amount of money to survive. As everyone in the RPG business knows, you don't have to spend anything to keep playing RPGs.

Since nobody has to spend anything on their games, they're only going to spend money when they really, really want something, or if a product offers a tangible improvement to the game play experience. A gamer doesn't go into a game store with $30 and a burning desire to spend it on something. A gamer determines his budget based on what he sees on the shelves. In the current market, he doesn't see much worth spending his money on.

I don't think that EN World reviews and discussion board talk are a reliable guide to what's actually a well-designed, good product. I think the Internet is a tremendous death magnet, because it's very easy to establish an echo chamber, or for social considerations to dictate what people say they like. I also think that EN World provides a view of the market that is warped in several specific ways - there's a tremendous focus on smaller publishers and PDF products here, as hardcore consumers people take pride in finding smaller, offbeat products to produce, and a cult of personality surrounds several publishers and game lines. In many ways, it's the RPG.net analog for the d20 side of things. (No offense intended, EN World.)

So basically, and man I am up far too late, is that I think you see the market as a bunch of companies trying to woo that $30 from Joe Gamer. In the end, he looks at the products that are out there, picks the best one, and buys it. I see it this way - Joe Gamer has a set of metrics that he uses to measure a product. If a product meets or exceeds those metrics, he buys it. There might be areas of direct competition, like a d20 company releasing a book that covers the same exact topic as a WotC book, in which cases if both exceed his standards he goes for what he sees as the better of the two. But in the vast majority of cases Joe Gamer's standards are high enough that there are very few books that he sees as desirable. For this consumer, WotC's advantages alone are enough to ensure that d20 companies can't even reach him, because he's been trained to see full color interiors, hardcovers, and CCG-level art as stuff he expects from an RPG book.

I think that both consumers exist, and the first guy, the guy who spends money on RPG books and just tries to find the best ones, is far more common on the Internet, but the guy who has his standards and won't buy until they're met is far more common overall.

Man, I hope this all makes sense. Apologies if I came across as dense in my last posts.

Oh, and about millions in sales - I think Chris is talking about the aggregate of d20 companies, not any single outfit. And sales are a far different beast from profit.

 

[pogre]

I think there are consumers with limited budgets who make choices about what to buy. If they pass your product by, they are much less likely to come pick it up later these days. The shelf life on new releases is so short these days that the guy who wanted book "X" three months ago is now enchanted by book "Z". He likely never goes back to book "X".

Then there are consumers more like me who decide they want something for their campaign - like an underwater supplement and they try to pick the best one on the market or maybe even buy several to compare.

WOTC is at least competing for the first guy's dollars, not so for the second guy. SO there is some effect on WOTC sales.

As a D&D consumer I can honestly say the OGL has kept me in the game. I'm not sure I can play another RPG long term without the same kind of open system. I like the idea of being able to share my adventures and gaming ideas without dodging doxens of legal minefields.

 

[woodelf]

Keep also in mind that OGL means that rules that are noticably better can be "stolen" and used by WotC in D&D! So even the mechanics cannot bar WotC from competing in sales. It comes down solely to ideas and packaging, and if WotC can't compete on those fronts, then it's doing something really wrong, because they have the biggest industry pool of talent working for them at any given time than that of any other game company.

Yep, if WotC isn't consistently as good as or better than damn near everyone else, they're doing something wrong. From my POV, the fact that the last thing i bought from WotC was Faeries (for Ars Magica 4), while i've bought a fair number of products on topics that WotC also has products about, means WotC is doing something wrong. Their resistance to incorporating others' rules, and thus using the WotC OGL for their own books, is another example of this. I wish that the official D&D books would be pushing the edge, or at least incorporating the latest innovations, instead of being fairly conservative and constantly "out-done" by others. As is, WotC seems to insist on using internally-created stuff rather than bow to the terms of the WotC OGL, regardless of how good that existing material is.

Or maybe it's just a matter of personal taste--the one WotC book that actually does take significant chunks of existing OGC, and then works with them (Unearthed Arcana, of course), i didn't consider it that impressive. They may just be going for a completely different aesthetic than i am--almost none of the new bits in UA appeal to me, and every one of them that started with existing OGC i consider to be a mangling of the source--i think the UA versions are disimprovements over what they started with.

It could, but that's a different thing from hurting the hobby. In a way, it gives the fans a certain protection by offering alternatives if the designer at WotC can't keep up, hasbro pulls the plug, whatever.

But only to the degree that players actually buy non-WotC books, which isn't nearly enough.

On any given year, the best selling non-WotC product *might* sell as many copies as the worst selling WotC product.

Which may be good for WotC, but is bad for the hobby. Not only are small-publishers' best-selling products probably better than WotC's worst-selling products, but i'd say that many competitors' best-selling products are better than WotC's best-selling products. And yet it doesn't really matter. I lament that RPGs, as a pure luxury good, as nothing more than packaged ideas, and where interoperability isn't an issue (it's not like software, where you have to have an OS and software that matches), don't sell based on merit alone. Even if some of that merit were judged by superficial qualities like the art, it'd be an improvement over judging based on brand name, as appears to go on.

 

[talien]

I think that both consumers exist, and the first guy, the guy who spends money on RPG books and just tries to find the best ones, is far more common on the Internet, but the guy who has his standards and won't buy until they're met is far more common overall.

As usual, I agree with Mike (no, not ME...HIM).

Here, easy experiment: Frost & Fur and Frostburn. D20 publisher vs. Wizards.

There was no contest. There was no contention. Indeed, if anything, Frost & Fur sales were increased by the mere fact that the "little guy was trying to compete with Wizards." Which was patently untrue, as the book was simply delayed long enough for the timing of the two books to be close together.

I've seen a lot of folks stating that they liked Frost & Fur and didn't need to buy Frostburn. But I witnessed even more consumers buying both or, more commonly, completely ignoring Frost & Fur.

In my experience, the majority of non-ENWorld customers can't even CONCEIVE of a d20 industry. They patently refuse to buy third-party publishers who have filled product niches that WOTC has not...to the extent that they will recommend, independently, the exact same product so long as it's produced by WOTC. You could smash them in the face repeatedly with D20 books that are perfect for their needs, and they will pretend you're invisible.

This is a very ego-bruising experience, but it seems to me to be a harsh reality. In fact, I suspect customers who buy third-party products that are sufficiently glossy hardcovers just assume it's made by WOTC somehow, rather than recognizing third-party publishers as independent entities unto themselves.

Taking all this into account, I really don't believe it's an either/or proposition. People bought Frostburn most of the time, either in addition to or as a replacement of Frost & Fur. But the majority of folks patently ignored its existence, as borne out by sales.

This could all just be because "your book sucks, Tresca" but I figured I'd use the experience to illustrate that a third-party publisher with a similar book didn't impact Frostburn much at all.

 

[woodelf]

You are forgetting the network effect:

Yes, you buy AU or GT and you drag a noob into your game and they play and they enjoy it and (MAYBE) buy AU or GT. Eventually you go back to D&D or they find another group and that group plays D&D and lo! and behold that former noob is buying a PHB. Ch-ching. That sale of AU or GT to YOU is a PHB sale to the noob for WotC.

Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but if that new player sticks with RPGs long enough and actually enjoys the D20 based systems, at some point he will find himself in an actual D&D game and the temptation to purchase a PHB will be before him.

And that, right there, is the huge unknown: to what degree, in the real world, does game system matter to gamers? IME, most gamers will play whatever system the people they want to play with want to play. Heck, i'm currently running D20 System, which is way crunchier than 2 of the players (and i, for that matter) prefer, because (1) i fell in love with Arcana Unearthed and (2) it's the sort of game system that the other 2 players "need".

OTOH, proto-gamers transforming into actual gamers seems to depend pretty heavily on the system. That is, if their first experience turns them off specifically because of the mechanics, they are unlikely to understand that the degree of RPG mechanical variance is more like the difference between Settlers of Catan and Bridge than that between variants of Poker.

Finally, gamers, IME, do have mechanical preferences. Sometimes sufficient to trump the desire to game--we've probably all known players who will rearrange their schedule to fit in another D&D, or V:tM, or GURPS game, but would go without before playing other than their preferred game system. Heck, right now, i'd probably pick no weekly game over a D&D3[.5]E game.

How those three factors interact, i have no idea. But understanding that is crucial before we can meaningfully say whether "all RPGs lead to D&D". And it's further complicated, now that i think about it, by the question of how different is "different"? I.e., does the relatively-new gamer see Grim Tales and D&D3.5E as sufficiently more alike than, say, Grim Tales and GURPS 4th to make one transition preferrable to another?