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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 5081636" data-attributes="member: 20741">I don't mean to be taken as disagreeing with the view that D&D was marketed to teens. I think it always was. Teenage years are the point of customer acquisition for the hobby. There is a tremendous amount of customer churn as customers leave college, too.But customer acquisition and customer retention are two different things. As for the Dancey comments, they cannot be taken out of context. Dancey's comments were based upon serious market research that examined the market at a particular point in time - that time being the year 2000/2001.Those comments were fair at the time the data was collected. But Dancey assumed that data collected at a fixed point in time remained true over succeeding years, too. And that's where I think he went wrong.That data was collected in 2000 -- ten years ago. I expect that those comments are no longer true. Why? Because the hardcore lifestyle gamer is ten years older now, that's why.The hardcore lifestyle gamers came into the game in the late 70s and early 80s. Most of us were at that time in our early and mid-teens. We were playing a game that was supposedly for "mensa" style geniuses.  Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, Mazes and Monsters and all that.  But we were younger than that -- at the time.We got older and most of us dropped the hobby. But those few of us who did not drop the hobby over the years became their best customers on a revenue per individual basis. Spending ridiculous amounts of money on the game.My point: Ryan Dancey was not lying when he said those things on Fear the Boot (I remember the interview well). But you can mislead yourself if you sample the market at a particular point in time and then project  the same demographic findings ten years later and expect them to say exactly the same thing. I predict those findings won't hold because...D&D was in many respects a generational phenomenon. It had a demographic boom, bust and an echo over the years. Those ripples have moved forward in time along with the fans of the game as we have aged.  To assume otherwise as Dancey has is, imo, potentially dangerously misleading.</blockquote>

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