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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 1951037" data-attributes="member: 697">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.</blockquote>

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