D&D Needs WOW Players, Not Us

[takasi]

I frequently sees complaints about WotC, followed by "well they just lost a loyal customer". Do you ever get the impression though that maybe we're really insignificant in the market? If you look at a game like World of Warcraft, with its 9 million players, and compare that to the size of these boards, don't you feel like we're in the minority?

Who cares if we've been playing since 1st edition? Who cares if we love Greyhawk, or gritty medieval fantasy? Or don't want to see splatbooks? Or spent a fortune on books that are obsolete? Or lost our favorite print magazines?

WoW has built an empire of potential D&D players. My MOM plays WoW. (I however, do not.) At work, I know dozens of people who play WoW. In fact, when I talk to some of them, they even have an interest in D&D. However, they can't make it to my table games (and it's not like we're starving for players). A few of them, however, have started playing on MapTool. If it weren't for an online medium, there is no way these people could play.

D&D is changing. It has the potential to grow and earn revenue from millions of adult gamers who've never rolled a d20 in their life. I think WotC knows this.

Does anyone else feel like their voice doesn't really matter?

And does anyone else feel like their opinion, if listened to, might actually alienate potential players? Do calls for the hobby to "return to its roots" and cater to the FLGS make it harder to attract fresh blood?

 

[DragonLancer]

Does anyone else feel like their voice doesn't really matter?

All the time. They don't care what the rest of us want or think would be a good material.

And does anyone else feel like their opinion, if listened to, might actually alienate potential players? Do calls for the hobby to "return to its roots" and cater to the FLGS make it harder to attract fresh blood?

Yes. Unfortunately to generate money companies like WotC need to cater to the majority, which in this case is the online games community (like WoW as you mention). This IMO takes the game in completely the wrong the direction.

Its a sad time for the D&D game.

 

[RFisher]

I think people tend to see it like this:

Moves to attract new players who like D&D as it exists wouldn't alienate existing players. Moves that alienate lots of existing players suggest trying to attract new players by changing the game into something different. People think this is bad because you'd be better off either:

Sticking to what you do well instead of trying to beat someone else at their own game.

Or...coming out with a different product to attract these new customers rather than throwing the baby (your loyal customers) out with the bathwater.

Plus, there's the fact that new customers sometimes talk to old customers. A bad rep with loyal customers can make it harder to attract new customers.

Now, I won't speculate on how much any of that holds water, but I think that explains the loyal customer rant.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I agree with Ryan Dancey 100% on this point: chasing the WoW dollar is a sucker's game. WoW provides a constant game that its players can enjoy at any time, to whatever extent they enjoy it. It provides a very challenging tactical experience at high levels and a variety of other gameplay enticements throughout its levels, and it does so with the backing of development team that is legendary in the vastly larger electronic game market.

WotC cannot go head to head with Blizzard and expect to end up anything other than buried. No company that has ever tried has even come close.

On the other hand, there are ONLY 9 million WoW players out of a population of billions (the 9 mil is an international figure). More people a) watched the LotR movies, b) watched the first Narnia movie, c) watch the Harry Potter movies, d) played Final Fantasy 7, e) played Final Fantasy 8, f) played D&D over the years, g) read Harry Potter, h) read LotR - and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if more people have read Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels than have played World of Warcraft. And that's limiting things JUST to straight-up fantasy, ignoring the popularity of other sci-fi, space opera and space fantasy IPs.

Targeting the (considerably larger at least at its peak, by the way) OFFLINE electronic RPG player, who has to wait 2-4 years between Final Fantasies and 6-12 months between any prominent release in his genre, makes a great deal more sense. THAT player has large swathes of open time in which he cannot game except via replays or second- or third-tier entries in the genre. THAT player is generally used to turn-based systems and significant amounts of dialog.

Which is not to disagree with the second half of the thread title - what WotC needs, always, is new players to buy core books. They probably should be targeting the game in large part to people who have never played D&D at all, which means modern fantasy aesthetics, fast play, ease of system mastery, etc.

 

[RFisher]

Yes. Unfortunately to generate money companies like WotC need to cater to the majority, which in this case is the online games community (like WoW as you mention).

You can find thousands of companies out there doing very, very well serving a niche market. The majority of successful companies aren't catering to the majority.

Although, depending upon what you mean by "like WotC", I may have misunderstood you.

 

[Maggan]

Does anyone else feel like their voice doesn't really matter?

I feel that my voice matters to WotC.

But my "voice" is one of millions playing this game. One of many, many, many other voices.

It is this collective voice that WotC need to listen to and consider, and I think they do, to a certain extent. They both "listen" as in read what people write on boards, and use sales data to see what people like and what they buy.

And that collective voice is saying something that I can't hear, because I don't have the same tools as WotC. It could appear that it is saying, eg., "rerelease AD&D1st FTW!", but that might just be the loudest voices. The more quiet voices could be saying "Bo9S was cool, more stuff like that, please". And I would never know, because I can't listen in on that collective voice in the same manner as can WotC.

This collective voice might not be saying what I as an individual human is saying, but that is ok by me.

/M

 

[Virel]

WotC cares about making money, it's natural because it's part of publicly held company. They'd like to make the old gamers happy, the current crop of 3e ones, and get some new gamers too. If the game gets a solid influx of new players, it doesn't matter if the players come from WoW or not.

Advertising to support the game.

Marketing to make D&D cool again like it briefly was in the late 70's and early 80's.

Materials actually worth buying for a change.

A new approach to allowing flexiable DMing, where the players and DM unfold events together. Some DM's understand this and do it naturally, but this needs to be elaborated on.

Reach out to the older edition players (like me), who pretty much hate WotC for what they did with 3e. We tend to have jobs and make money and spend as we see fit. We have the $$$ that WotC seeks, if you motivate us. We have the $$$ to give our kids for WotC products, if we like WotC, it's to their benefit.

Make the game play, quicker, easier to pick up and DM.

It's all a tall order, maybe WotC will deliver, I'll give an honest look at 4e.

 

[ST]

D&D is a powerful brand name. They're going to use it where it does the most good for them in terms of publicity and sales. Of course they're going to recreate it every so often to chase the marketplace.

All the folks saying "D&D is moving away from where it should be" ... join the long list of people who said the same thing when 2e came out, when 3e came out, etc.

If the D&D you like the most has already been published, what's the problem?

Seriously, though, I understand that there's a disconnect between using your favorite rules, and moving to the shiny new version. I had to choose a long time ago, and to be honest the rules that work best for my friends and I in a session are what's going to get used, whether it's D&D 3 or D&D 4 or (usually, for us) something else entirely.

 

[Khairn]

D&D is changing. It has the potential to grow and earn revenue from millions of adult gamers who've never rolled a d20 in their life. I think WotC knows this.

Does anyone else feel like their voice doesn't really matter?

And does anyone else feel like their opinion, if listened to, might actually alienate potential players? Do calls for the hobby to "return to its roots" and cater to the FLGS make it harder to attract fresh blood?

WotC has proven repeatedly that they are not listening to (ignoring) the opinions and needs of a large percentage of their existing player base. And the focused drive to attract the MMORPG players can be easily seen in their recent decisions, the style of the tools they are creating and the advertising they are using.

The question is how many existing D&D players will be willing to change to an MMORPG style of game play and support and how many gamers will WotC's plans drive away?

 

[humble minion]

I think that any minor unfamiliarity with rules minutae is the least of the impediments to getting WoW players into D&D, to be honest. D&D is hard work, at times - someone needs to DM, which means a considerable amount of prep time. A group of players need to be in the same place at the same time, reliably. WoW doesn't need this - you can just get home from work, log on, and round up a few random guildmates you'll never meet again to go beat someone up. Sure, I imagine I'd find this rather unfulfilling after a while (I've never played WoW, myself), but after a couple of years trying to manage a GMing gig and a demanding job I can see the attraction.

Though of course, if WotC isn't throwing bucketfuls of money at Blizzard in order to license the pen-and-paper rights to Azeroth for 4e, then they're idiots. Tabletop RPGing managed to breeze through the LotR craze without a noticable increase in player numbers (largely because of how those twits at Decipher handled the RPG license), and WoW (and less plausible, Harry Potter) is probably the next big opportunity to get new blood into the hobby. I've got no illusions that D&D will ever entice more than a tiny fraction of the WoW userbase into tabletop games, but even 1% of them is a massive number...