D&D is an Adult Game?

[Hussar]

Well, sure but there's an element of sarcasm in there too. How exactly do you target D&D marketing to age 30+ crowd? But it in AARPA magazines? Tie-ins with 401(k) and other financial services providers?

I think you're dichotomy between "adults" and "adults, but not adults enough to count for me" is a false one.

My point was that D&D was always marketed to the 25 and younger audience and that was about as far as I wanted to go. When people tell me that earlier editions were marketed to older people, I wasn't thinking the difference between a 17 and a 22 year old. Sure, that's an older person there, but, to me, marketing to an older audience means breaking out of Saturday morning cartoons and comic books.

Heavy Metal magazine would be a good place to look. I had a few HM mags back in the day and more in the 90's, and I don't recall RPG ads in there, but, that's pretty meaningless. How about other venues that appeal to an older audience? Various magazines like Popular Mechanics/ Pop Sci, or places like that? Advertising or TV programing during the evening, or even late night.

Like I said, Vampire had a prime-time (if short lived) TV series. That's marketing to adults, IMO. Dropping pages in the back of Marvel comics is not.

 

[Ariosto]

We made Basic so that it would be more accessible to younger players, thus skewing our market demographic down several years.

One of the primary reasons we made AD&D was to codify the rules to the extent that we could profitably run huge tourneys at cons which were big money makers for us. Linking the modules to the tourneys was a way to guarantee covering the initial printruns at the earlist possible opportunity; we did one at Origins and another at GenCon each year.

Hussar, I think the fundamental problem here is your insistence that it must be EITHER for adults OR for kids.

 

[Ariosto]

How about other venues that appeal to an older audience?

Asimov's
The Courier
Diplomacy World
Fantastic Film
Games
Games & Puzzles
New West
Parade
Peoples Computer Company Newsletter
The Whole Earth Catalog

Whether via advertisements or articles, TSR's games were brought to the attention of readers 25, 30, 40, 50+ years old in a number of venues.

 

[Snoweel]

My point was that D&D was always marketed to the 25 and younger audience

You do seem to be moving the goalposts mate.

There is a huge difference between a 25 year old and a 15 year old. The difference is much bigger than that between a 25 year old and a 35 year old, for example.

Since I was one of the people who claimed 4e is marketed at a younger audience than previous editions (a common criticism of 4e by its detractors, and bear in mind I'm a big 4e fan), I'd like to point out that in my opinion, 3e was marketed at people in their early 20s (my age at the time), while 4e's marketing is aimed at mid-late teens.

But for what it's worth, I'm starting to reconsider my view of 4e's marketing; I think I may be biased by the fact that I'm about a decade older than I was for 3e's release and I may have lost touch with what does and doesn't appeal to younger people.

 

[BryonD]

My point was that D&D was always marketed to the 25 and younger audience and that was about as far as I wanted to go.

So when you said "teens" in the OP, are we to gather that you did not mean to imply the factual definition of someone between 13 and 19, but instead meant to communicate the idea of an opinion spanning up through the age of 25?

Like I said, Vampire had a prime-time (if short lived) TV series. That's marketing to adults, IMO. Dropping pages in the back of Marvel comics is not.

D&D has had fiction for many many years, as has been corrected well upthread, this fiction has (with a few exceptions non-withstanding) been marketed to adults. And with the name "Dungeons and Dragons" right on the cover.
It has been a long time, so maybe my memory is cloudy, but I seem to recall feeling like I was in on a secret with the vampire show. I knew it was the RPG on screen, but they never made any reference to it in the show. It wasn't so much an ad as a stand-alone attempt at a profitable venture.

Now, certainly you could still say that a show about a vampire community IS advertising for a game about being vampires. It certainly can't hurt. But by that standard, Clash of the Titans was a adult targeted ad for D&D.

As far as comics go, your conclusion is simply based on an ill-informed opinion. No question to your right to the opinion; but if the advertisers put them there because it was their opinion that it would reach adults, then the issue of targeting adults becomes a matter of simple fact.
Realizing that they actually reached adults may or may not sway your opinion, but that is beside the fact.

 

[WizarDru]

My point was that D&D was always marketed to the 25 and younger audience and that was about as far as I wanted to go. When people tell me that earlier editions were marketed to older people, I wasn't thinking the difference between a 17 and a 22 year old. Sure, that's an older person there, but, to me, marketing to an older audience means breaking out of Saturday morning cartoons and comic books.

Heavy Metal magazine would be a good place to look. I had a few HM mags back in the day and more in the 90's, and I don't recall RPG ads in there, but, that's pretty meaningless. How about other venues that appeal to an older audience? Various magazines like Popular Mechanics/ Pop Sci, or places like that? Advertising or TV programing during the evening, or even late night.

Like I said, Vampire had a prime-time (if short lived) TV series. That's marketing to adults, IMO. Dropping pages in the back of Marvel comics is not.

OK, let me just drop in a few comments, here.

1) There are no more Saturday Morning Cartoons, at least not as my generation knew them. 24-hour kids networks finished them off after years of declining ratings and media consolidations (non-Disney on ABC? Not after 1995.) beat them down. Fox and the CW gave them up entirely in 2008. Most of the networks use that time for E/I requirements.

2) The idea that PopSci or Heavy Metal are only read by older audiences is flawed, IMHO. One because there's nothing exclusionary in it and the second because I first read HM when I was 13....and it's frequent nudity and mature themes at the time were of great interest, then. I DID see the first advertisement for Macross (later Robotech) from Harmony Gold there, which shows that HM's publisher knew that they were getting a wider audience than just 40-year old Enki Bilal fans.

3) The average age of the comics reader has been going up for decades. It's an industry problem, in fact. Saying that D&D advertised on the back of a comic book doesn't mean that it was exclusively for 13 year-olds. The average reader age these days is estimated at 25. As early as the 1960s, comics were very popular in college campuses. That trend never stopped. See for yourself:

4) I think it's a false dichotomy to assume that there has to adult-specific advertising. What form would this advertising take to signify that it was adult-only? Certainly, D&D advertising has targeted younger gamers...but there was never a need to make older-gamer-only advertising. 30th anniversary ads for D&D ran in most of the popular video game magazines several years back...who's average readership is 35. There has never been 'adult-only' D&D ads, whatever form those might take, because there has never been any need for them.

Put another way: my kids laughed at beer commercials during the superbowl because they were funny...not because they were like beer. I laughed at a commercial for Spongebob, because it was funny and not because it was targeted at me. Advertising targets its demographic, hopefully where they are. So you won't see an ad in GQ or Vanity Fair for D&D...because D&D players generally don't read GQ and Vanity Fair.