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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 9241382" data-attributes="member: 697">I'm not sure I'd slice it that way.First, most people don't buy anything. I mean anything at all. They borrow books and might not even take their character sheet home. If they are online, they might use free resources.To those people, that's the game. It's like playing pick up basketball with their friends. They don't buy a ball, or a hoop. They just show up at place X and time Y to play.The next ring out are people who buy a PHB. They don't buy anything else. They don't see the need. To extend our basketball metaphor, this group might buy a specific pair of sneakers they wear to play basketball. If they showed up with more equipment, they literally couldn't use it. There's no opportunity to use a second pair of shoes or a hoop that you brought to the game.From there, an even smaller group buys stuff beyond the PHB. These are DMs, and even they rarely venture beyond the core rulebooks. In basketball world, they buy a basketball and follow the schedule at the local gym so they can reserve court time to play. No one else in the group needs to duplicate this effort because they have a game schedule and can't play beyond their current time commitment.From there, we have a relatively tiny group that collects TTRPG books. This group varies a lot, but I think the three big components are:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People who collect D&D books made by whoever is making D&D at the time (Hasbro, TSR)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People who collect books from a specific group of publishers (or a single one)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People who collect books across a variety of publishers based on their tastes</li> </ul>I think it all comes down to bandwidth. People only have so much time to put into TTRPGs, so they develop a sorting mechanism to help them figure out what to buy. It looks really weird to high bandwidth people (like me!) that other people have seemingly arbitrary habits when it comes to buying or using stuff.The good news is that the TTRPG business has grown enormously in the past few years. Especially with crowdfunding, what was once a marginal business is much more viable. I think users and publishers just need to avoid expecting to match a global, multi-billion dollar conglomerate's market reach.However, that doesn't mean games can't succeed and grow. You just need to understand how people interact with the product and what you need to do as a publisher to get your game in the right hands.</blockquote>

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