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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Contrarian" data-source="post: 4935426" data-attributes="member: 40585">He're my ultimate "casual gamer" anecdote/factoid:It's about 15 years ago. Gen Con is still in Milwaukee. I'm at a seminar that was scheduled to be "the Gamma World design teams gives you GM advice" but turned out to be "the GAmma World design team announces that Gamma World is cancelled again. So it turns into a post-mortem/what-might-have-been type of discussion.One of the TSR editors, explaining how enthusiastic Gamma World players are, mentions that Gamma World actually had the best "second purchase rate" of any TSR line, but overall sales weren't enought to keep the line going. So, of course, somebody has to ask what a "second purchase rate" is. It's TSR's sales-derived guestimate of how many gamers who bought the core product in a game line went out and bought a second product.Gamma World's "best in the company" second-purchase rate? Fifty percent.Let that sink if for a minute. If 50% was the best number at TSR, that means, for all of its other lines, including AD&D, less than half of TSR's "customers" ever bought a second product. There's a huge number of people out there who never bought anything except a Players Handbook. Those are casual gamers (which includes drop-outs, admittedly), and I'm pretty sure they don't spend much time at Gen Con, or hanging out on discussion boards. There isn't much to discuss when you only own one rulebook.(Me, I'm a science guy. If I had a billion dollars, I'd go ahead and commission a random-sample study of Americans to ask what games they play, and settle all these questions about who the casual gamers are, and how big the Generation of Lost Editions is. I don't have a billion dollars, unfortunately.More realistically, I'd like to have access to sales figures so I could compare accessory sales to core product sales. I'm never going to get those, either, but at least I know the numbers exist somewhere.)Face it, man. We're the hardcore. We represent the core target audience of the hobby (because I assume we're all "second, third, fourth, etc purchase" people), but we're not really like the majority of gamers.</blockquote>

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