Decline of RPG sales

[MerricB]

What I've also seen in these types of threads recently are repeated claims that Wizards and Mongoose must be lying when they say that they're doing well, because as other publishers aren't, no-one can be doing well.

From John Nephew's comments, I get the impression that d20 System products are not selling well for him - or perhaps, profitably enough. That sounds accurate.

Producing RPGs is hard at the best of times. It's a lot harder if you're not Wizards with control of the D&D brand and the PHB. In fact, it's so hard that making a living from RPGs (as opposed to keeping it a hobby) is downright difficult.

Clark Peterson's still a practising lawyer, isn't he?

It is worth noting that in the fiction field, an author needs several books that continue to sell (and thus be paid continuing royalties) to make a living from it. The difference from novels to RPGs is likely several orders of magnitude!

Cheers!

 

[BryonD]

I've definitely never tried to say that now is a bad time to be a gamer. Now is a great time to be a gamer. What I mean -- and this may be bugging me because it is the same few people -- is that every time a publisher comes out and says sales are bad a fan jumps in to say sales have to be better than ever.

In this thread alone we see sarcastic comments regarding sales. People insisting again and again that sales can't be bad when they have no information. I -- and many, many others that contribute to the discussions here -- have facts from other publishers, distributors, and retailers, and the facts say that sales are bad right now.

I understand.

Like I said, it is point of view.

Even you said that you don't actually know how the overall industry total revenue compares to the past. The people you are talking to here are the ones still spending the money. The ones who have stopped spending are predominately no longer reading ENWorld (if they ever were).

You are talking to gamers who see themselves still spending money and see a lot of money going into the overall industry. They don't have any yardstick that will tell them this is great, or this sucks. They just see what to them is a lot.

Do you actually have data to show that WotC is not honest when they say their sales are very good? Conclusively?
Same for Mongoose?
It seems quite feasible to me that a decline from the massive boom of 2000 - 2003 combined with a consolidation into a few top players (no quality comment inplied) could be misinterpreted as a bust at an industry level that isn't really there.

Do I know this is an accurate assessment? Hell no.
But I think this assessment is just as reasonable based on the truly available fact as the assessment of bad times.
The difference is much more in the bias than in the numbers.
I believe it is simply human nature that publishers having a hard time will use that as a basis to extrapolate limited data they have beyond what they really know.

So my bottom line point is that despite all your data, other points of view that contradict your conclusion may still be completely valid.

 

[Justin Bacon]

Actually, it's because you and your players have decided that you don't want to play a universal, gritty system. At no point did D&D sell itself to you on its ability to do what GURPS does. You did decide you wanted to play a superhero game. At no point did you agonize over whether D&D or Mutants and Masterminds was the best out of book choice for playing superheroes.

None of which changes the fact that these products are competing with each other.

You're admitting that consumers are choosing between one or the other, but pretending it doesn't "count" somehow because of the particular criteria they're using to make their choice.

Which is, of course, a completely absurd thing to do.

Justin Alexander Bacon
http://www.thealexandrian.net

 

[eyebeams]

None of which changes the fact that these products are competing with each other.

You're admitting that consumers are choosing between one or the other, but pretending it doesn't "count" somehow because of the particular criteria they're using to make their choice.

Which is, of course, a completely absurd thing to do.

Justin Alexander Bacon
http://www.thealexandrian.net

Of course, by the standard you put forth, comic books and, er, bacon both compete with RPGs. People make choices between many things because they only have so much money. It does not necessarily follow that these things are in any meaningful competition with each other.

Of course, you could talk about how other media competes with RPGs, and the funny thing is, of course, that you must if claiming that the top few systems are in meaningful competition. What I mean is that you can argue that D&D competes with WoW at least as much as it does with the World of Darkness.

The trouble is that discussion on this scale is not actually the same as talking about whether major *roleplaying* games compete with each other. They don't. At least, they don't compete with each other much more significantly than with other media. As I noted (in what I actually wrote, mind. I have no idea what you *read*), there are exceptions where the leading systems do compete, such as in genre books. All the same, people don't get GURPS just because they want to replicate the D&D experience, and claiming that they do is self-evidently shallow analysis. This is true even though the system has a supported fantasy setting.

Plus, of course, there are second and third tier systems that want a slice of what WoD or whatever has, but, as what I wrote made abundantly clear, I wasn't talking about them.

 

[eyebeams]

What I've also seen in these types of threads recently are repeated claims that Wizards and Mongoose must be lying when they say that they're doing well, because as other publishers aren't, no-one can be doing well.

Uh, no.

In WotC's case, Charles Ryan represents a brand name owned by a large publically traded company. If he says anything damaging to the brand, he would not only lose his job, shareholders and licensors could actually take legal action.

This stricture does not mean he's lying. It means he's duty bound to promote as much confidence in the brand as possible.

As for Mongoose -- well, no comment, actually.

 

[BryonD]

If he says anything damaging to the brand, he would not only lose his job, shareholders and licensors could actually take legal action.

As they also could if he over-represented the value of the brand.

 

[eyebeams]

As they also could if he over-represented the value of the brand.

To shareholders, investors and licensors -- not gamers.

 

[Mark CMG]

To shareholders, investors and licensors -- not gamers.

By your own logic, that can't be right. I would have to assume he couldn't mislead people anywhere in public view. There's no way to know if some of those gamers might happen to also be shareholders, investors and/or licensors. I've no doubt you must be mistaken.

 

[eyebeams]

By your own logic, that can't be right. I would have to assume he couldn't mislead people anywhere in public view. There's no way to know if some of those gamers might happen to also be shareholders, investors and/or licensors. I've no doubt you must be mistaken.

No. There's a difference between someone saying, "D&D is doing better than ever!" as PR and telling shareholders that net revenue in a product line increased in a quarter when it did not, or saying that there were so many SKUs sold when they were not, and so on. One is not a statement of fact in an actionable sense and the other is.

However, if someone says, This brand is a lame duck and after a recent spurt of growth, will most likely decline," to <i>consumers</i>, then they are damaging the brand in the eyes of consumers.

 

[Mark CMG]

No. There's a diff-.

Nice try but nope. Misleading is misleading. A court is unlikely to to see any difference.