NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 1689426" data-attributes="member: 697">Awards are tricky. For them to have any value, they have to have value with the fans. The absolute worst thing that an award can hear from the public is "I don't recognize many of these games."The problem is that all of the industry awards are Internet based. The 'net has a tremendous leveling effect. It tends to draw out extreme opinions and muffle common ones. It also doesn't take much for a meme to catch hold and roll through a forum, particular since most online RPG discussion boards are dominated by a hardcore of 50 or so users. So, by using the Internet to conduct voting you have a skewed image of what gamers actually use and buy.On top of this, RPG awards have no effect on sales for large or small companies. The typical RPG book sees most of its sales on the first 2 or 3 months. A publisher should expect to move about 75% of his print run in the first month and the rest in the next few months. A few exceptional products continue to sell well over the course of the long term.By the time the award comes out, it's too late. On top of that, chances are that anyone who pays attention to the awards has already been exposed to the product. There's not much of a sales bounce to be found there. For years, the Origins Awards have recognized plenty of small press games. The ENnies have done the same. Yet, those nominees and winners are still decidedly small press or fringe.What RPG awards really come down to is this - they're a chance for creators to feel good about themselves. The small companies with poor sales need them to justify their continued effort with little monetary gain. The big companies have nothing but trouble to gain from taking part in the process. They either win, which is what everyone expected so it doesn't mean anything, or they lose, which makes them look bad.I'm not surprised that WotC didn't take part in the ENnies. I'm curious to see if they enter next year, and I'm very curious to see how this hurts the awards. It's very odd to note that ENnie related threads have drawn more interest on RPG.net than here on EN World. If you compare it to other threads on this site in terms of views and unique users taking part in the discussion, it's very interesting.I am willing to bet, though, that when the average D&D gamer looks at that list of nominees and sees very little that they recognize and nothing from WotC, that they're far more likely to write off the awards than to start hunting down the nominees.</blockquote>

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