JoeGKushner said:
In another thread, about the best companies, it was noted that several were leaving the d20 field for greener pastures. With that in mind, is it a good thing?
It's neither good or bad. It's just a neutral development.
The first thing to remember is that for many companies that are getting out of d20, they have an alternative to fall back on. If their sales were this bad before d20, they'd just launch a new game, make a new edition of a current one, or bite the bullet and hope sales bounced back. d20 gives them the luxury of going back to what they used to do. d20 is also utterly alien to most RPG designers - it goes against a lot of what they like to do. Companies are learning the hard way that you need to be a D&D fan to make stuff that D&D players will like. IMO, most of the companies that have had trouble tried to make d20 products that appealed to non-d20 players, or they didn't have much of a marketing strategy, etc.
d20 is also a far different market than non-d20 games. It's much easier to sell a new game than a d20 supplement because there's less competition. d20 gamers have also, with four years of D&D 3 under their belts, acquired a much higher level of system mastery. They're better at spotting stuff that's poorly designed or simply useless to their games. When you get into the non-d20 market, you have a population of buyers that picks up new stuff for the sake of having new stuff. They're a smaller total population of buyers, but they're pretty eager to spread their cash around and aren't as discriminating when it comes to mechanics, as opposed to backgrounds.
(In other words, they're not as concerned with heavy or rigid mechanics as settings. I think there's a sizable number of non-d20 buyers who look at gaming books in the same way as SF fans look at paperbacks. They like to buy a new one or two per month just to read and put on a shelf, never to use it in a game. It's much lower risk, but much lower potential reward.)
The diminishing number of d20 publishers will have no effect on sales for existing companies. Gaming products aren't a necessity - it isn't like people have a minimum amount of money they must spend on gaming products each month.
The interesting thing lies in looking at how we got here. My personal theory is that the market is bifurcated between a very small number high end companies clustered at one end of the market in terms of mind share and brand value, and a lot of smaller companies that aren't very well known. It's hard for a company to move from the lower category to the higher one because so many companies dumped crap products on to the market early in d20's life cycle. Distributors and retailers quickly learned that some companies had product that simply failed to move and became gun shy about working with newbie publishers. There's a natural disinclination to order deep on new or smaller companies. Plus, there really hasn't been a sustained, break out hit from a small company. No one aside from the established publishers has come out with a successful new game or setting. Privateer comes the closest, but I've heard a lot of unhappy grumblings about their main setting book.
I think that within 18 months we'll see a new d20 company release a setting or game that takes off, and the distributors will be a little more willing to delve into the smaller end of the market. Companies that are ready to make the step up will be in a good position to capitalize on that opportunity. OTOH, I think one or two of the acknowledged "big boys" will drop out of d20.
I don't think non-d20 games will see an upsurge in sales, aside from established games that present new editions. If anything, I think d20 has taken a chunk out of the non-d20 population of gamers. In the old days, the D&D rules were so messed up that companies could compete in terms of mechanics and setting. That's no longer the case, especially as d20 companies present new settings and branch out to different genres. I think that, in 5 to 10 years, d20 will pretty much be roleplaying.
The problem with established companies and d20 is that they want to apply the strategies and marketing they use for non-d20 stuff to d20. The old ways don't work - a lot of them don't work for non-d20 stuff, either. The higher level of competition in d20 punishes companies that aren't really sharp and ready to cope with the d20 environment.
