WotC Hasbro gains big time from D&D, Magic, Monopoly, and Baldur's Gate 3

[Snarf Zagyg]

Not just level up. And at FLGS, in person retail across the country. Even some stores running out of stock of pathfinder and the distribution having issues getting more in a timely manner.

But also DCC and even smaller “not D&D” games.

What do you want? Seriously. We are discussing the general population. The general population is not, unfortunately, buying those products. Even a very small increase in demand would cause issues with distribution given the bottlenecks we are having and the fact that they have to do printing runs in advance. Which is entirely in line with a small group of people caring passionately, but the majority of people not caring, or not even knowing.

So let's simplify this- show me how it hurt the sales of D&D products. Overall D&D Beyond Subs, and overall D&D book purchases. Because if it had a real and lasting impact on the average gamer, that's where you would see it.

 

[darjr]

What do you want? Seriously. We are discussing the general population. The general population is not, unfortunately, buying those products. Even a very small increase in demand would cause issues with distribution given the bottlenecks we are having and the fact that they have to do printing runs in advance. Which is entirely in line with a small group of people caring passionately, but the majority of people not caring, or not even knowing.

So let's simplify this- show me how it hurt the sales of D&D products. Overall D&D Beyond Subs, and overall D&D book purchases. Because if it had a real and lasting impact on the average gamer, that's where you would see it.

Again. I’m not saying it hurt sales.

I’m saying it was widely heard about.

The idea mentioned above, that I replied to, said it wasn’t. I think it was and have some evidence that it was.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Again. I’m not saying it hurt sales.

I’m saying it was widely heard about.

The idea mentioned above, that I replied to, said it wasn’t. I think it was and have some evidence that it was.

Given that most players I've seen that play D&D don't even know all of the abilities that their own characters have, I find it ... difficult ... to believe that most D&D players would be able to spell "OGL" if you spotted them the O and the G.

This was an incredibly big deal, but not for the wider population of D&D players.


ETA- to be clear, I think people often don't understand what "most people" know or what is "widely heard about". I still remember learning in 2018 that more than half of all Americans could not name a single Justice on the Supreme Court. Not one. Now, that number might have creeped up in the last five years, but still.

 

[darjr]

Given that most players I've seen that play D&D don't even know all of the abilities that their own characters have, I find it ... difficult ... to believe that most D&D players would be able to spell "OGL" if you spotted them the O and the G.

This was an incredibly big deal, but not for the wider population of D&D players.

You confuse your own experience and this myopic echo chamber for what was going on. It’s why I emphasize the run on sales. It’s an independent fact that shows people heard. Enough to cause a stir among folks selling “not D&D”.

To cause things like people being unable to find pathfinder at their FLGS because they suddenly sold out.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

You confuse your own experience and this myopic echo chamber for what was going on. It’s why I emphasize the run on sales. It’s an independent fact that shows people heard. Enough to cause a stir among folks selling “not D&D”.

To cause things like people being unable to find pathfinder at their FLGS because they suddenly sold out.

With respect, I don't think I am the one in an echo chamber. Just saying.

 

[Parmandur]

To cause things like people being unable to find pathfinder at their FLGS because they suddenly sold out.

I don't disagree with what you are saying here in general, but there are a lot.of factors going on, and in thianinstance Paizo had probavly already stopped printing PF2E first edition so they could make room for the replacement PF2E second edition later this year. Doesn't mean that there wasn't a real rush, but stock was probably at a very low tide.

 

[TwoSix]

No. I think it's more than that, honestly.

Take The Super Mario Bros. Movie. In the months leading up to the release, the majority of on-line discourse about it was primarily a vocal number of people complaining about Chris Pratt.

Or Barbenheimer; the fact that it ended up getting so meme'd was primarily because of the playful juxtaposition of those two movies being released at the same time.* Not because of the content. Which ended up getting real-world coverage. Even so, that just increased real-world awareness; many of the people I know weren't aware of the meme, but were really excited for the Barbie movie. For that matter, I posted about the Barbie movie long before the meme (because of the director and stars) and no one here was that interested.

Yes, movie studios (for example) very much want internet virality ... see, e.g., M3gan. But the reason that they want it is because it increases overall awareness of the property; it is just a ton of free advertising, and does the most important thing of all for a movie; tells people that it will be out at a certain time. But the origins of the virality rarely, if ever, have anything to do with the actual quality of the product.


*And they were only released at the same time because Warner Bros. was being petty after Nolan left.

Yea, but that's kinda my point. The Super Mario Bros. memes were mostly negative, but the narrative around them was "Chris Pratt is kind of a douche and he doesn't sound anything like Mario." It was a slight ding about the overall quality and authenticity of the movie, but the movie turned out to be both a) pretty good and b) sell tickets like hotcakes. The meme narrative was almost entirely unrelated to the actual narrative of what drives tickets sales.

Whereas the Barbiheimer thing became a meme because of the super weird contrast between two movies that were expected to be big, Barbie really shouldn't have been expected to be big! It became so because firstly because of the quality of the director, and secondly the expectations set when both the trailers and articles discussing the movie took pains to hide what the movie might actually be like, which turned the movie into a mystery. Good director + what's going on with a toy movie having a super secret script + strongly positive vibes around the lead (seriously, everyone loves Margot Robbie) built up a relatively quiet narrative of positive hype, and then the Barbiheimer meme turned the release into an actual event, something which people were craving since the Marvel releases are no longer event releases.

Long story short, the amount of internet buzz has no predictive power, but you can sometimes read the narrative driving the buzz to get a sense if something big could cascade into something bigger. But even then, most of that predictive power will only be obvious in hindsight.

 

[Oofta]

People “out there” heard about it en mass.

The run on of every thing from Pathfinder to DCC to even Mörk Borg at everywhere from Amazon to FGLs came from those folks.

Even now Magic live streams get OGL jokers threadcapping along with Pinkerton thread capping.

People heard.

How many additional sales would it take for an FGL to run out? Maybe 2 - 5? How many did Amazon have on stock and what kind of projected sales did Paizo have for after Christmas? For that matter, how many old school D&D players were just looking for an excuse to jump ship and had already decided they weren't buying any more D&D 5E books.

I don't think that anyone on this message boards has the answer to any of these questions. What I do know is that out of the 20 or so people I play with off and on, 3 other people even knew about it and several of the people are relatively well informed. Also anecdotal, of course but most people don't pay attention to what's going on at a corporate level and don't care.

My real question is - when is the statute of limitations up? When will every single freakin' thread about the business side of things be ultimately hijacked by a stupid idea that was never fully implemented? Or will people still bring it up in 20 years when we're in the survival camp fighting over the last can of beans?

 

[TwoSix]

You confuse your own experience and this myopic echo chamber for what was going on. It’s why I emphasize the run on sales. It’s an independent fact that shows people heard. Enough to cause a stir among folks selling “not D&D”.

To cause things like people being unable to find pathfinder at their FLGS because they suddenly sold out.

I would imagine the majority of people who go to game stores to purchase both D&D and non-D&D TTRPG material are among the most plugged in 5-10% of the player base; the ones who are aware of both trends within D&D and the broader TTRPG space.

Anecdotally, I play with 21 other people among my 4 game tables, only 3 of them beyond myself had heard anything about the OGL issue at all. And they span a pretty wide swath of archetypes within nerd/geek space.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

My real question is - when is the statute of limitations up? When will every single freakin' thread about the business side of things be ultimately hijacked by a stupid idea that was never fully implemented? Or will people still bring it up in 20 years when we're in the survival camp fighting over the last can of beans?

I will only share my can of beans with people who can accurately describe the difference between the OGL and the Creative Commons licenses.

You've been warned.