D&D 5E How to slow the 5E treadmill?

[darjr]

Subscription.

I'd subscribe to a printed magazine of some sort. Or a on going fleshing out of several campaign settings, say a quarterly that useful bits of the Forgotten Realms, or Greyhawk, or planescape, or spelljammer or any of a number of settings. Maybe do a quarterly that keeps adding to a sandbox. Or mix them all up and change it up. Adventures mostly, small and large.

That's what I'd pay for on an ongoing basis.

The goodman games kickstarter style has been successfully making me a customer.... but I don't think that could be sustainable long term.

Really I think the best plan is to bump the RPG with a needed or desired product occasionally, also feed the public play, like encounters, with good quality stuff that is also for sale to others, and use the IP to fuel other products. I'd pay about $3 an adventure for the non-encounters public play portion. Not much, but It could help and help make the adventures better.

For instance a couple more board games could be cool. A coop game building a dungeon would be really cool, maybe a dungeon I could later use in an RPG game. A TV series would be great. A movie would be even better (a good one!). Does the on line game make money? Did the iphone/android game(s?)?

Oh and go to the places that people likely to find D&D interesting and fun and market. Computer conventions, maybe have quick two/one hour little adventures that folks could sit down at and play at things like the hacker cons or even comcast or E3. More gaming presence at PAX and Comic Con. Really help public play at little and large conventions around the country/world, at least as much support, in total, as is spent on encounters. Those cons are always in need of more and would be grateful.

I do think there are a lot of people out there that would enjoy D&D that haven't really been given a chance to try it in a comfortable and inviting setting. Game groups are notoriously hard to boot from scratch and maintain. Supporting folks doing that would be a huge boon. Grow the market this way. Get Will Wheaton or someone as entertaining to put together a youtube channel and produce great shows about and for D&D, not necessarily people playing but little pieces of fiction or art would be amazing.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I'm sure that Mearls & Company are thinking about this, and even have a plan. But what do you think? How can they both keep the creative juices flowing and keep the line financially viable? It seems we know some of the answer already - a more differentiated approach to the brand, for instance, so that the entire D&D line is not married to the well-being of the tabletop RPG.

But what other ideas are out there?

It's abundantly clear to me that the WotC D&D branch is transitioning from a game & world design shop, to a trans-media properties management shop.

My bet is, for the next 10+ years you'll see them dusting off new settings and exploiting them across every form of media they have access to. Any TTRPG-specific work that needs to be done will almost certainly be contracted out.

This dodges the problem of edition treadmills, but sort of begs the question of what their long-term involvement in the TTRPG industry will look like.

 

[Stormonu]

No one is going to buy a second core rulebook just because it has a different cover. So there s no real boost in sales. It's easier to just keep printing regular copies of the rulebook and working to attract new players.

I wouldn't count on that. I can't speak for others, but I bought the 2E black books because I was a completionist, and the black-bound 3.5E PHB, even though I had the originals. I'd also (strongly) considered getting the recent reprints, but ended up I couldn't justify it (did buy the S1-S4 reprint, even though I've got copies from the 80's).

It would be much smarter, however, if any reprints they did incorporated errata or had other minor updates (such as the format layout/artwork change in the 2E books.

 

[Stormonu]

I don't expect Star Frontiers, Gamma World, and the like had enough sales to help really support the health of the company. I don't doubt that was part of the idea, but I don't think they would up with enough players to make it work. This supported by how short the Star Frontiers run with TSR was....

I agree that long term, those games individually would not have carried the company, but short term each was probably enough to allow them to "float" a month or two and possibly skip having to have a big release.

I mean, imagine if they did something where they released only two D&D "hardcover" level splats, but intermixed into the rest of the year three other game system releases - say a D&D Board game one month, Gamma World (or some splat for it) another and an Alterity book as a third. That would take the pressure off having to fill in those slots with D&D releases and risk unnecessary bloat.

 

[Jester David]

First, the publishing industry isn't in a sea of change from digital content. In fact, digital content is proving to be a niche product. Pretty much every magazine that went digital instead of print has died off, especially in the gaming sector. E-books plateaued in 2013 and hardcovers showed growth. While there is certainly a niche that loves the product, it is far from ubiquitous, and currently isn't showing any signs of becoming ubiquitous.

Those reports were based on extremely short term data and also reflected the fact there was no stand out series or book to draw in readers, and there are a number of conflicting data points.
Ebooks are going strong and not going anywhere.

Second, your piracy argument is the same one that video game publishers, the RIAA, and the MPAA had been using. What actually has happened is that people still pay for product in significant numbers. Again in fact, the PC industry is doing so well in revenue it is making more than all three consoles platforms combined. IIRC CD Project Red announced that their sales increased after they removed DRM from one of their games (Witcher 2 IIRC). Piracy is negligible.

Video games are a much, much larger industry than RPGs and there are a lot of complicated factors, such as the existence of consoles versus PCs, the former being much harder on pirated content. PCs have only just surpassed consoles again, with the former previously leading in revenue. Which still means that just under half of the revenue comes from consoles.
And there's so much more internet activity that requires a server, so that it's much harder to pirate games and get the full experience.

The problems you're listing don't exist, 4th edition's issues were the result of the reception of 4th edition, not piracy, not DDI. No other industry has an issue at present, so I fail to see why this is an insurmountable problem when the PC Industry has eclipsed all of the consoles combined, the music industry is making great revenue via Itunes, and Hollywood is seeing numerous movies making so much money in the theaters that they're breaking record after record, all despite piracy.

I disagree with this strongly. Placing the failure of 4th Edition on any one factor is likely a mistake and it was the combination of many things that led to the downfall.

DDI was a huge problem issue for D&D. Initially, it was the equivalent of making a Netflix style program where you could download and keep the content for as long as you wanted. Unsurprisingly, people signed up once every six months, paid $17, got all the content released in the intervening months, then cancelled. It was a huge problem, especially since the vast majority of the books were nothing but crunch, which mean you were getting all the content via DDI but more convenient and vastly cheaper. WotC didn't help themselves by continually to produce errata, which devalued the physical product and made DDI - which incorporated all the errata - more attractive. 4e's design also encouraged the use of the Character Builder, otherwise you ended up looking up powers from dozens of different sources both physical and digital while building a character. WotC was pushing you to the program that took away their money.
There was also the economy which took a sharp dive when 4e was released, leaving people less money and disposable incomes.
Yes, had 4e been better received it would have had the numbers to power through these problems. But that does not mean the problems didn't when even the people who enjoyed the game and were playing were not necessarily buying the books.

The other industries mentioned have made great profit by making it more convenient not to pirate their products. Why hunt for a torrent when I can just go on Netflix, stream from my cable box, search iTunes from my phone, and download from Steam? Steam very likely being a big factor in the growth of PC revenue. (Movies are also making more money through the coincidence that other nations, mostly China, are interested in American films. Lots of films are now only considered a success because of foreign sales. Trends have changed and expect far more movies that feature China in key roles and international cooperation.) And the digital services do not allow owning the content. At any time Stream could pull all your games, and you can't keep a movie after streaming.
D&D does not have the same advantage. Publishers don't have the same ease of streaming content or subscribing making it easier to not pirate. Cheap and affordable PDFs can help, but that does not help offset publishing costs. And, unlike the above media, the format provided for the books is easily pirated and distributed. While all of WotC's 4e products ended up scanned and pirated it always took far longer than Pathfinder's products.

 

[Jester David]

I wouldn't count on that. I can't speak for others, but I bought the 2E black books because I was a completionist, and the black-bound 3.5E PHB, even though I had the originals. I'd also (strongly) considered getting the recent reprints, but ended up I couldn't justify it (did buy the S1-S4 reprint, even though I've got copies from the 80's).

It would be much smarter, however, if any reprints they did incorporated errata or had other minor updates (such as the format layout/artwork change in the 2E books.

To quote Douglas Adams:
“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.”

I have no doubt completionists exist. And I'm sure there's someone out there with six different copies of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook because each printing contains some minor errata.
But this is not the majority. Heck, this is likely not even a large minority. The number is likely so low that it's statistically irrelevant and thus those people don't exist.

But when a reasonable print run is in the 100,000 copy mark knowing that 500 players will auto-buy a copy is not a lot of comfort.
If you can issue a new print run of an existing book at a cost of $0 (plus printing) or you can issue a revision which will cost several thousand dollars and require hundreds of sales to cut even it seems silly to make unneeded changes.

 

[Rygar]

Those reports were based on extremely short term data and also reflected the fact there was no stand out series or book to draw in readers, and there are a number of conflicting data points.
Ebooks are going strong and not going anywhere.

Those are the numbers for E-book sales though Jester...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremyg...dcover-sales-growth-outpacing-ebooks-in-2013/

If E-books require some specific standout title in some specific niche to demonstrate strength, then they're a niche. If E-books were not a niche product, then it wouldn't require some specific title to outsell hardbounds, they would show the same sales pattern.

I'm not arguing that E-books are failing. I'm just stating that they're a niche product, with a relatively low penetration, and designing a business strategy around them is planning to fail. They're a great side-product to cater to that niche which they will appriciate and readily purchase, but they're insufficiently large if the plan is to succeed on a mass market scale.

Video games are a much, much larger industry than RPGs and there are a lot of complicated factors, such as the existence of consoles versus PCs, the former being much harder on pirated content. PCs have only just surpassed consoles again, with the former previously leading in revenue. Which still means that just under half of the revenue comes from consoles.
And there's so much more internet activity that requires a server, so that it's much harder to pirate games and get the full experience.

My point was, the PC's who are subject to piracy are generating more revenue than all of the consoles combined, despite piracy.

I disagree with this strongly. Placing the failure of 4th Edition on any one factor is likely a mistake and it was the combination of many things that led to the downfall.

DDI was a huge problem issue for D&D. Initially, it was the equivalent of making a Netflix style program where you could download and keep the content for as long as you wanted. Unsurprisingly, people signed up once every six months, paid $17, got all the content released in the intervening months, then cancelled. It was a huge problem, especially since the vast majority of the books were nothing but crunch, which mean you were getting all the content via DDI but more convenient and vastly cheaper. WotC didn't help themselves by continually to produce errata, which devalued the physical product and made DDI - which incorporated all the errata - more attractive. 4e's design also encouraged the use of the Character Builder, otherwise you ended up looking up powers from dozens of different sources both physical and digital while building a character. WotC was pushing you to the program that took away their money.
There was also the economy which took a sharp dive when 4e was released, leaving people less money and disposable incomes.
Yes, had 4e been better received it would have had the numbers to power through these problems. But that does not mean the problems didn't when even the people who enjoyed the game and were playing were not necessarily buying the books.

The other industries mentioned have made great profit by making it more convenient not to pirate their products. Why hunt for a torrent when I can just go on Netflix, stream from my cable box, search iTunes from my phone, and download from Steam? Steam very likely being a big factor in the growth of PC revenue. (Movies are also making more money through the coincidence that other nations, mostly China, are interested in American films. Lots of films are now only considered a success because of foreign sales. Trends have changed and expect far more movies that feature China in key roles and international cooperation.) And the digital services do not allow owning the content. At any time Stream could pull all your games, and you can't keep a movie after streaming.
D&D does not have the same advantage. Publishers don't have the same ease of streaming content or subscribing making it easier to not pirate. Cheap and affordable PDFs can help, but that does not help offset publishing costs. And, unlike the above media, the format provided for the books is easily pirated and distributed. While all of WotC's 4e products ended up scanned and pirated it always took far longer than Pathfinder's products.

I'm going to have to disagree with you. 4th edition's issues were a direct result of the number of people rejecting 4th edition, blaming it on anything else is just trying to avoid root cause. Would 4th edition have sold some more units if people hadn't rejected it? Certainly. Would it have changed the outcome? Definitely not. As such, DDI and all other factors are irrelevant, the root cause was sufficiently large enough that even without all of the other problems, the conclusion wouldn't have changed.

The recession is a great example of the many things people point at to justify 4th edition's problems by avoiding the number of people it drove away, during 2008 and 2009, the peak of the recession, console game sales hit their peak. They showed growth for both years despite the recession, so it is extremely unlikely that people were paying $60 a pop for video games that only last 20 hours or so without care, but wouldn't buy 3 books that would last indefinitely. If people weren't buying the books in those years it wasn't because of the recession, it was because they weren't interested in the game.

I also think you're not fully analyzing the revenue from both DDI and books sufficiently. What is the profit margin from the sales of books to one customer over 6 months? Would they have bought every book? Would that number exceed $17 per person? DDI was "Free money", the cost of delivering the content was so low that the revenue is almost all profit. The profit margin on a book is very low. It is entirely possible that people signing up every 6 months yields nearly the same revenue as buying the books they would've bought normally.

I'm a little surprised that you're asserting that the reason why Hollywood is making more money than ever in the theaters is because the country that is historically the piracy capital of the world is going to the theaters. That just demonstrates what I'm saying, if the country that historically has one of the largest piracy rates is happily paying for their content in sufficient numbers to generate huge revenues then piracy obviously cannot be a very big issue.

So in the end, what we're talking about here is the portion of the market interested in E-books, and the portion of that market that will pirate. The number I'm finding for E-books is 20% of the market, so we're talking about a fraction of that. Even if every single one of that 20% pirated 4th edition instead of buying it, 4th edition was still in trouble. For that number to be relevant, the number of people buying 4th edition had to be large enough that the 20% didn't actually matter anyways. If you have 1,000,000 people and 200,000 aren't paying then it would make it difference, but if you have 100,000 people and 20,000 aren't paying, the problem is that you only have 100,000 players, not the 20,000.

 

[Jester David]

Those are the numbers for E-book sales though Jester...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremyg...dcover-sales-growth-outpacing-ebooks-in-2013/

If E-books require some specific standout title in some specific niche to demonstrate strength, then they're a niche. If E-books were not a niche product, then it wouldn't require some specific title to outsell hardbounds, they would show the same sales pattern.

I'm not arguing that E-books are failing. I'm just stating that they're a niche product, with a relatively low penetration, and designing a business strategy around them is planning to fail. They're a great side-product to cater to that niche which they will appriciate and readily purchase, but they're insufficiently large if the plan is to succeed on a mass market scale.

Yes, I remember that from last year, although things have been silent since. ebooks *only* grew by X%, although the exact number seemed to vary by report.
The thing is, Ebook sales reportedly passed hardcovers some years ago, so the latter is more of a niche. (The cited artice mentions the dollar amount of hardcover sales by curiously omits the ebook dollar amount.) And it mentions that the fall's hardcovers just came out, which only boost hardcovers as few people pay hardcover prices for Ebooks; they wait for the paperback.
And all books need a stand out title to boost sales. The article event mentions the lack of a "Hunger Fames" or "50 shades of grey"
The article does not mention if paperback sales dipped as well. So this could be a general slowdown of non-hardcovers being hyped as a drop in Ebooks.

My point was, the PC's who are subject to piracy are generating more revenue than all of the consoles combined, despite piracy.

And I wonder how much of that is the billion dollar PC gaming industry finding ways of using the carrot instead of the stick to combat piracy, by focusing on multiplayer experiences as a way of sneaking in the need to always be online and the like.
And the advantage of cheap games on Steam, which has cemented itself as ubiquitous. When a game I want isn't on Steam it's an oddity and a couple physical games I've bought have loaded Steam to install themselves.

 

[Zardnaar]

Steam has had a funny effect on me similar to RPGnow.com. If I pay more than $20 fpor a game I feel ripped off, same with a D&D adventure as 3rd PP PDF adventures are often $0-$5.

Almost every excuse offered for 4E tanking (economy, DDI, etc) doesn't really stand up to the fact Paizo has been getting 30% annual growth since 2009. The Main problem was the fanbase bailed on 4E in large numbers.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

1. No OGL. From a business perspective, it just doesn't make sense to allow another company to sell books that are 90% your content. All the OGL does is ensure that WOTC keeps making big revisions to the rules, or else they risk Paizo or whoever sapping their profits by selling a shinier 5e a year with the rough edges sanded off.

2. A simpler core. They've achieved this through modularity, I'd say; as it stands, the Basic rules seem about as complex as 3e, but it's much easier to chop off elements like the skill system or spellcasting without major edits to the game as a whole. This allows for much more creative additions (classes, rules modules, etc).