Decline of RPG sales

[GVDammerung]

The point is that I don't agree with your point. I neither think that WotC is exclusively about "more of the same, only different" (no more so than any other d20 company, much less RPG publishers in general), and I don't think they are having any demonstrable negative impact on the d20 market as a whole, especially considering they are the primary dirver of that market. You're basically asserting your opinion of their products as irrefutable, and then making an inexplicable leap to citing it as the reason for some perceived qualitative malaise in the d20 market. .

Well, it is my opinion and I'll state it without flinching. I'm not demanding you agree with me, however. Certainly, Wotc reports that things are rosy for them. I'd then expect my opinion would not meet with universal acclaim, if any at all. It remains, however, my opinion.

Unfortunately, this doesn't really make any sense. The "decline" being discussed in this thread has nothing to do with the quality of products being produced, but the sales of the products being produced.

I think there is a connection between the two.

If anything, there's moire amazing product out there than anyone knows what to do with!

I'd like to shop where you do. Seriously, I am not stingy with spending for games (I have a large number) and I just continue to find less I am genuinely interested in.

The time when third-party d20 publishers were aping the choices of WotC and producing derivative drivel that was "more of the same only different" is long past. The oceans of class splats, settings, and umpteen new feats and PrCs are gathering dust in discount bins. If d20 and OGL material is doing anything, it's straying further from the "baseline" of WotC. What we're seeing are d20 games going OGL, and publishers trying to supply what they specifically know WotC will not. At least, the companies that aren't actively trying to go out of business are doing so.

Yes and no. The d20 publishers do not all march in lockstep. Wotc still significantly shapes the market and the d20 folks have to do business in the market so shaped. Wotc is presently sending the message, IMO, "more of the same, only different." This influences expectations in the market, IMO. If Wotc conditions the market to expect A, B can still sell but it is somewhat going against the grain as Wotc's market shaping power is, IMO, considerable as they are far and away the market leader. This is not saying "Wotc can tell customers what to buy." That would not be true. They can, however, exert influence through the management of their brand and the people who follow "officialdom."

TSR failed with its proliferation of settings because it's a flawed business practice. Like adventures, settings have a limited appeal, i.e., to DMs who use published settings and who are not currently satisfied using an existing one. I.e., a tiny slice of their fanbase. An even tinier slice is going to want to actively consume more than one.

No. It is flawed as it was executed by TSR. The fallacy is excluding "as executed by TSR" from the statement If executed well, I believe, multiple settings would expand the market and _thereby_ succeed. TSR had half the puzzle but couldn't draw flies with its settings. The problem was not uniquely the number of settings but also and more importantly their inability to draw new gamers to them. I think everyone would agree if 10 new settings exponentially increased the market, that would be a good thing. The key then is finding the settings that will draw.

The only DMs will buy setting material is another half-truth that ignores (1) how that "setting material" is put together and (2) all the DMs who complain because their players already have and have read the latest supplements. But that is another topic.

The quality of the setting is irrelevant (unless you want to argue that Greyhawk, FR, Planescape, DL, Brithright, Dark Sun, Mystara, and Spelljammer were "more of the same, only different")..

Quality is irrelevant? I think not.

On top of this, creating a setting whole cloth, and then supporting it, requires a great deal of development resources. WotC learned from TSR that they cannot viably sustain 7-10 campiagn settings. To do so would be idiotic. Were WotC to announce yet another campiagn setting, with Eberron out only a few years now, the reaction would likely be a collective groan. No one is interested.

If you have the resources, which I will imagine Hasbro could provide Wotc, there would not be an issue.

If Wotc "learned" that you cannot support more than two settings and nothing more, they didn't learn much. Sorry but the "common wisdom" is overly simplistic, IMO.

The reaction to a new setting would depend on how it was rolled out and what it's its target audience was determined to be and how its content looked to approach the target audience. If they just went, "Here it is. Come get it," sure, it would flop. I would hope for a more thoughtful approach. If it was aimed at Eberron and FR fans, it would also likely tank. Unless the industry is more niche than I imagine, not everyone who might game does game, leaving lots of potential targets out there to be wooed, however.

Whatever the reason for the current state of the industry, the lack of settings from WotC is not it.

Correct. My note in that regard is just that - a note. New settings are not a panacea in and of themselves. They are merely symptomatic of Wotc's "play it creatively safe" model that appears to be doing well enough for them. Incarnum was a good try, even if it failed to fully achieve its promise. I would like to see Wotc try more creative things. That is not what I am seeing, however, and I believe their "play it safe" mode is coloring the market, boring it into a stupor. As goes Wotc, so goes the hobby, 5 times out of 7.

 

[Glyfair]

I do not know how well it is doing but my sense is it is doing fairly well. How much of this is due to it being the only "official" alternative to the Forgotten Realms and how much is do to its own merits that are being pushed, I do not know. I like Eberron for what that may be worth.

I'm speaking as a fan of the setting here. I honestly think the best thing the setting has going for it is Keith Baker. He's as supportive of his setting as he can been since it's not his setting (i.e. not owned by him, and not exclusively developed by him). I really think the Eberron/Keith Baker relationship is very close to the Glorantha/Greg Stafford connection. WotC is certainly necessary for Eberron to have the audience it does, but I also think if it sinks, it will be because of decision made withink WotC.

Someone else said the MtG business unit nixed plans to hook up the two titles in the past; I hope that is no longer the case, if it ever was.

As a former player, I would have liked to have seen a MtG world expansion for D&D. I wonder how much the avoidance of doing so was avoiding the negative reaction such an announcement would make. I remember early comments on Eric's boards about the possibliity being all negative to the idea. Of course, this was from D&D player's perspectives.

Again, I would like to have seen it. I wouldn't have bought it though, unless it was exceptionally well done and had an attraction besides it's connection to MtG.

 

[johnsemlak]

I used to produce a healthy amount of free stuff. I stopped when I realized that only 1 in 1000 people took the time to e-mail a simple "thanks" to me. Even the free stuff I've released this year has generated very, very few "thank you" messages.

I'd like to take this moment to thank Phil Reed for all the free stuff he's made availabel for me, which honestly I can't separate from the stuff I've bought from him over the years.

Thank you Phil!

 

[philreed]

I'd like to take this moment to thank Phil Reed for all the free stuff he's made availabel for me, which honestly I can't separate from the stuff I've bought from him over the years.

Thank you Phil!

You're very welcome. I'm glad you can get use out of the stuff.

 

[SBMC]

New settings spur new ideas - E.g., Birthright, Darksun, Ravenloft etc.. By eschewing new settings, and unable to otherwise match the innovation of the d20 publishers, Wotc lowers the creative and imaginative bar with a desultory effect on the market. Like 'em or not, agree with 'em or not, Wotc is the market leader; they shape the market. And they are, IMO, boring the market to death.

Not everyone wants new stuff – reason – I want to do it myself! What I need is a foundation to start with (Forgotten Realms for example) where I pick and choose what I want out of the setting then do the rest on my lonesome; and if new settings popped out from everywhere then my ideas would probably be a “copy” of some published material and not mine anymore…

You see Hasbro did their research here (a friend of mine took part in a huge marketing operation with them) – look at the products – each supplement has all kinds of stuff – so that folks can pick and choose what they want and the baseline stuff is there so you don’t have to do the actual “work” to start things from scratch.

Market research showed that gamers like – by a wide margin – to create their own settings but at the same time realized that the work of creating that foundation was vast. Thus most of them do and did use an existing one as the base/foundation for their own world; and that foundation is modified as the individual chooses.

That is one primary reason that WoTC does not have more settings – research said people did not want them – you can’t really tell me you can’t run a solid campaign with what WoTC has right now? We use things form FR and Ebberon – names of nations, cities, monsters, political ideas and exclude others – that my friend is what most gamers do and exactly what the research showed.

But do new ideas spur new sales? Apparently not as strongly as you seem to imply, or else much of the d20 market would be thriving much more than it currently is. You seem to imply that WotC has some duty to prop up the market, though I'm not sure how I see what benefit that strategy offers them. Is Ravenloft only good if WotC, and not S&S, publishes it? Is Dragonlance only a proven seller if Wotc, not Soverign Stone, sells it? That seems to imply that the ideas aren't important, but the publisher. .

This points out what I had said earlier – we all know that we need the DMG, PHB and MM (at least) to run a DnD campaign – all by WoTC – and what books go best with WoTC books? If you have “X” dollars to spend; how would you go? With the tried and proven or the little untested guy?

 

[WizarDru]

No. It is flawed as it was executed by TSR. The fallacy is excluding "as executed by TSR" from the statement If executed well, I believe, multiple settings would expand the market and _thereby_ succeed. TSR had half the puzzle but couldn't draw flies with its settings. The problem was not uniquely the number of settings but also and more importantly their inability to draw new gamers to them. I think everyone would agree if 10 new settings exponentially increased the market, that would be a good thing. The key then is finding the settings that will draw.

This seems to advocate the 'if only they did it the RIGHT way, they'd be beating off new gamers with a stick' theory that I often hear advocated, but never substantiated. If attracting new gamers was this simple, it would have been done many times over by now. Attracting new gamers isn't nearly as difficult as RETAINING them. The huge leap in sales from the release of 3.0 and the OGL is owed, in large part, to attracting old gamers back to the brand who had long since left.

TSR's settings were VERY popular within the existing fanbase...the problem was that most consumers could not afford to be fans of more than one or two settings, due to the volume of materials TSR released. TSR's critical mistake was to assume that each settings rabid fanbase would dictate it's sales...but all that happened was that they cannibalized their own sales. TSR was releasing ten times as much material, but selling less than WotC currently does. It wasn't the settings that were the problem, or support for them...it was that most consumers have a relatively fixed budget for gaming products, and TSR was forcing them to choose amongst their products.

A large part of the equation that is ignored is that there are different classes of consumers. During the big wave in the early 80s, many non-gamers purchased the game, tried it perhaps once to see what the fuss was about...and then never played again. This surely happened during the 3.0 release, as well. Many gamers purchase a few core books and then never purchase another...they don't HAVE to. After the core three books, one could play happily ad infinitum. Most gamers purchase occasionally, for either interest or actual need...but more often interest.

I don't see the current decline in sales as much more than the tide going out. For all but the most serious of gamers, their needs have been sated. By being on ENWorld, by definition, you are in a minority. I've been to plenty of smaller cons where most of the RPGA members I meet have heard of ENworld, but never been here. Two years ago, many hadn't even heard of it. Consumer opinions here do not necessarily represent the majority or the average gamer.

 

[Hussar]

Just a little anecdote about the numbers of younger gamers out there.

I play on OpenRPG exclusively. I've been playing in various campaigns for the last three years, both as a DM and occastionally as a player. In that time, I've DM'd about 30 players and played with about a dozen more. Of those forty people, at least 15 have been 20 or under and about 30 have been 25 or under. So, you can figure that about a third of the people I've gamed with on OpenRPG have been teens.

Think about that for a second.

OpenRPG isn't exactly the most accessible medium for playing DnD. People first have to be interested in the game and then submit themselves to the problems and bugs of an open source chat program that is not terribly user friendly. This shows a fair bit of dedication and intestinal fortitude on the part of the players. People who have only a casual interest would not put up with it. Yet, over the last three years, I have consistently seen high school students playing the game over Open.

You'd think that if there was such a drying up of gamers, it would only be old buggers like me playing there. I've got one kid in my game that games four times a week! (Ah to have that kind of time....) Every time I put an ad up for a game, I consistently see that 1/3 number crop up with new gamers.

I wonder if the drop in numbers that people reportedly see has more to do with a change of venue for teen gamers. Instead of playing tabletop, I wonder if more and more teen gamers are playing in PbP games or chat based games with Fantasy Grounds, Ghost Orb or OpenRPG. It certainly seems to me that perhaps it's not a case of less and less gamers getting into the game, but, rather, gamers get into the game in non-traditional means.

 

[The Shaman]

Rhetorically speaking, do you _ever_ come up for air?

GVDammerung, please let me just say that I strongly agree with your take. Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast has adopted an apparently successful business plan, offers perhaps the highest production values, can mount the biggest strategic marketing effort - and so far this year, I purchased one WotC title, because I find most of their products to be bland and rote, "fifty-one flavors of vanilla," not worth the cover price for the two or three bits that I might actually use when I play.

 

[buzz]

I think there is a connection between the two.

I'd like to shop where you do. Seriously, I am not stingy with spending for games (I have a large number) and I just continue to find less I am genuinely interested in.

So, unless your'e trying to objectively prove that there's a lack of good product out there, your hypothesis is: "There's a decline in RPG sales because there's not much out right now that I like."

Yes and no. The d20 publishers do not all march in lockstep. Wotc still significantly shapes the market and the d20 folks have to do business in the market so shaped. Wotc is presently sending the message, IMO, "more of the same, only different." This influences expectations in the market, IMO.

Again, I don't buy this, and I don't think the market reflects it. Show me the trend of publishers making "more of" DMG2, HoB, HoH, WoL, Stormwrack, MoI, Fantastic Locations, and the Spell Compendium. Show me the Eberron and FR clones.

What I'm seeing is:

Atlas Games's Northern Crown
FFG's Midnight
Malhavoc's Iron Heroes, Arcana Evolved and Ptolus
Green Ronin's Thieve's World, Black Company, and Advanced guides
Goodman Games's Power Gamer guides, Blackmoor, and classic adventure series
Necromancer Games's ToH books, Wilderlands setting, and "1st edition feel" adventure series
Mongoose having completely dropped their generic d20 support in favor of Conan, Wars, Starship Troopers, B5, and Paranoia
Ronin Arts prodcuing, in general, products nothing like what WotC provides
Sword & Sorcery Studios focusing on Warcraft and supporting releases of Malhavoc, Necromancer, Goodman, etc.
Privateer Press's Iron Kingdoms setting
Kenzer focusing on HackMaster and card games
AEG dropping d20 RPGs entirely

What I an not seeing is "more of the same" stuff that WotC is doing. The days of Mongoose, S&SS, and FFG pumping out splats is gone.

No. It is flawed as it was executed by TSR. The fallacy is excluding "as executed by TSR" from the statement If executed well, I believe, multiple settings would expand the market and _thereby_ succeed.

Campaign settings do not expand the market. Campiagn settings are only of use to people already in the market. All campiagn settings do is cannibalize sales from other campaign settings.

TSR had half the puzzle but couldn't draw flies with its settings. The problem was not uniquely the number of settings but also and more importantly their inability to draw new gamers to them.

So, it's marketing, not settings, that matter.

I think everyone would agree if 10 new settings exponentially increased the market, that would be a good thing. The key then is finding the settings that will draw.

I think everyone would agree that if Bill Slavicsek praying to an elephant idol increased the market, that would be a good thing. Your second sentence doesn't follow your first. The key is finding out how to increase sales. WotC releasing 10 new settings, based on past precedent and basic knowledge of marketing, would be a phenomenal mistake.

The only DMs will buy setting material is another half-truth that ignores (1) how that "setting material" is put together and (2) all the DMs who complain because their players already have and have read the latest supplements. But that is another topic.

This is anecdotal and illogical. Besides collectors, setting products are of primary appeal to people actually playing in the setting, and of them, of even more appeal to the person running the campaign. A setting-neutral book, like the Spell Compendium appeals to everyone who plays D&D.

Quality is irrelevant? I think not.

It is to your argument. The quality of the various settings certainly didn't keep TSR from going out of business. You were arguing above that it wasn't the quality of the settings that TSR got wrong.

If you have the resources, which I will imagine Hasbro could provide Wotc, there would not be an issue.

If Wotc "learned" that you cannot support more than two settings and nothing more, they didn't learn much. Sorry but the "common wisdom" is overly simplistic, IMO.

It makes more sense than your argument.

WotC is supporting the number of settings for which they have resources to do profitably. If it were profitable or advantageous to support more than they do, they'd be doing it; the bean-counters would be making sure of that. WotC has access to more and better market research and buisness expertise than all other RPG publishers combined. If they're not doing something, there's a damn good reason.

The reaction to a new setting would depend on how it was rolled out and what it's its target audience was determined to be and how its content looked to approach the target audience. If they just went, "Here it is. Come get it," sure, it would flop. I would hope for a more thoughtful approach. If it was aimed at Eberron and FR fans, it would also likely tank. Unless the industry is more niche than I imagine, not everyone who might game does game, leaving lots of potential targets out there to be wooed, however.

So, your'e talking about expanding the hobby as a whole, and you're trying to put forward the idea that more people would play tabletop RPGs if only WotC would heavily market more campign settings? This makes absolutely no sense. People not yet in the hobby don't even know what a campaign setting is.

Heck, in the 2e days when TSR was flooding the marklet with campign settings was when interest in TRPGs was at its lowest.

I'm also still not sure how setting material, i.e., the kind of thing that would never in a million years be open content, is of any benefit to the d20 publishing world.

New settings are not a panacea in and of themselves. They are merely symptomatic of Wotc's "play it creatively safe" model that appears to be doing well enough for them. Incarnum was a good try, even if it failed to fully achieve its promise. I would like to see Wotc try more creative things. That is not what I am seeing, however, and I believe their "play it safe" mode is coloring the market, boring it into a stupor. As goes Wotc, so goes the hobby, 5 times out of 7.

WotC focuses on providing products they believe will appeal to their fanbase. They also heavily promote the D&D brand, which is effectively general promotion of tabletop RPGs as a hobby. These actions make them a profitable business, and apparently provide them with record-breaking years even when the industry as a whole is in a slump.

The notable absence of a "flooding the market with campaign settings" strategy in WotC's business plan is telling. It's a stupid idea, one that's proven to be bad business.

 

[buzz]

I find most of their products to be bland and rote, "fifty-one flavors of vanilla," not worth the cover price for the two or three bits that I might actually use when I play.

Do you find other publishers' material to be "bland and rote"? Do you see them all striving to release producs that are "bland and rote" because that's supposedly what WotC is doing? That's the idea GVD is putting forth.

I'm not seeing it. I also don't agree that everyhting WotC releases is blah, but that's another issue.