mearls said:
This is one of the most persistent death magnets in gaming - the rumor that Underground sold 10,000+ copies and was considered a failure.
If Underground really did sell that many, the margins on RPG books are big enough that the book itself must have been so expensive to produce that they needed to sell more than that to turn a profit. That points to a failure in vision, budgeting, and planning, not a sales failure. Considering that the book was published in a binder, I could see that as a possibility. I can only attribute it to the self-deluded design precepts of the 1990s that a game like Underground could be considered a viable game.
UNDERGROUND did, in fact, sell 15,000 copies within its first six months of life. And no, it wasn't published "in a binder" (one of its supporting products was).
It's also true that at just 15,000 copies sold, we were a little disappointed in UNDERGROUND. Instead of the SHADOWRUN-sized hit we were hoping for, it was just a DARK CONSPIRACY-sized hit. In those days, sales of 15,000 (over the course of a year) were only "okay" for a core game book. The year that UNDERGROUND was released, for instance, MAGE sold its initial print run of 25,000 copies in two weeks. The fact that UNDERGROUND was essentially put out to pasture a year or so after its debut wasn't a direct result of its sales, which were certainly high enough to keep the line running -- there were other factors at work.
No one ever said that UNDERGROUND wasn't profitable (the core book anyway), though it wasn't nearly as profitable as Mike Mearls believes it must have been. The world has changed substantially since the early 90s: 1) new technology has made it *much* cheaper to produce full-color books; but most importantly, 2) the standard RPG publishing operation is a lot leaner these days, reducing overhead. Back in those days, Mayfair -- a mid-tier RPG publisher, probably akin to a Green Ronin today -- had twenty full-time employees plus (relatively) spacious offices and its own warehouse. That wasn't exorbitant or uncommon in those days. Today, most mid-tier RPG publishers run on a relative shoestring. In some cases, again, better technology has made this possible.
In any case, the meta-point--that sales of an "average" RPG product are much lower today than they were in the early (pre-M:tG) 90s--is certainly true. I don't think there are any "old timers" with first-hand knowledge of both eras who would dispute it.
mearls said:
Personally, I think 2e killed TSR. It took a few years, but I think the player network slowly crumbled and gamers slowly converted from active purchasers to hobbyists who spent nothing on RPGs.
That's a pretty eccentric theory. I did a lot of work for TSR (in both the 1st Edition and 2nd Edition eras) so again, I had something of an inside view.
When the 2nd Edition was launched, it was an enormous hit--every bit as big as the 3E launch. Players loved it; sales were incredible and they stayed that way for years. Five years later, the average mid-list D&D sourcebook was still selling in numbers that WotC would kill for today (and those numbers were significantly better than TSR was racking up at the end of the 1st Edition era). I received royalties on a couple of TSR projects so I had a good idea of exactly how well they sold.
So, what do I believe "killed" TSR? A number of things:
1) Dwindling market. I'm in the camp that believes that the CCG boom *did* have an enormous impact on the RPG market at the distribution, retail and consumer tiers. TSR's numbers were steadily dwindling as the market moved in this direction. TSR's overhead was enormous--the company was built to operate at a relatively high cash flow. As sales started to shrink, they didn't do a good job of managing the transition to a leaner operation.
2) Failed, expensive attempts to reach a broader market. TSR launched a number of very expensive assaults aimed at getting its products into the mass market (DRAGON STRIKE is perhaps the most notorious example; but you can also consider the expensive DL and Buck Rogers board games and even things like the Rocky & Bullwinkle RPG). All of these efforts failed and drained savings that could have been used to weather storms down the road.
3) Failed, expensive attempts to go head-to-head with WotC. (Spellfire, Dragon Dice).
3) Channel mismanagement. TSR's evenutal problems with the book trade are now well known. It should be noted, though, that the book trade was an incredibly lucrative sales channel for TSR for several years before the crash. The problems really arose when sales started to rapidly shrink and TSR couldn't properly adjust.
4) Perhaps most importantly, TSR waited to long to release a new edition of D&D. A high-profile, well-marketed new edition of D&D that continued to modernize the game for a new generation of players might have restarted TSR's economic engine.
mearls said:
IMO, the failure of the industry as a whole can be attributed not to Vampire, but to the legion of designers who slavishly followed the Vampire model of design. The 1990s are a graveyard of dead games that followed the story-first paradigm. It's funny in that a designer can produce a D&D clone and everyone wants to laugh at him or ignore his work. But if he produces a Vampire clone, or throws in vague references to story, foreshadowing, and other literary tools in his work, suddenly he's a visionary.
There, I actually agree with you.
