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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4151430" data-attributes="member: 2205">talien; now I see what you're saying; the adventure sells poorly but is the gateway into further purchases.Hmm...That sounds reasonable enough, but is it true, or is it just an armchair strategy?  I guess that's the real nub here; is there any data to support the idea that a consumer with an adventure is likely to buy (and stimulated buys among the rest of this group) further product as a direct result of that adventure?  I doubt any such data exists.  It may be right or it may not be, but we can't speak intelligently about it either way without a fair amount of market research to back it up.  All we can say is that adventures themselves don't sell well; we've got plenty of indicators that that is true.As for the sources you quote; Pyramid may indeed support GURPS via adventures, but can you just walk into a store and buy Pyramid?  I can't recall ever seeing it, and in the days when I hung out with GURPS players, I didn't know anyone who did either.  They bought sourcebooks, which were basically setting books, and that was that.  Star Wars hasn't been supported by adventures in years, and I wouldn't call any of the World of Darkness campaign materials that I read "adventures" even in the loosest sense.  I'm not privvy to sales details, but I've never heard anything to suggest that Cthulhu was a real high power seller, or that it sold well even relative to GURPS, World of Darkness, etc.  And D&D's success compared to the competition still defies explanation; all kinds of ideas have been thrown out, but none really convincingly.  I'm still going with the "network externalities" as the single biggest contribution, combined with the inertia of more casual players.I think looking at the success of D&D vs. the more modest success of CoC and saying that the presence of adventures is the cause of that success is a bit of the tail wagging the dog.:shrug:  In any case; I continue to buy settings that don't have adventures; in fact, I greatly prefer setting that comes without adventures, because I find adventure design relatively easy and not time intensive.  To me, adventures are not a good investiture of resources for a company trying to sell a setting.  Most of my favorite settings do not have adventures, or if they do, I ignore them (Iron Kingdoms and Freeport are different; I bought the Witchfire Trilogy and the Freeport Trilogy at a time when those were the only products available for the setting; if the settings had come first, I would have ignored the adventures.)  So clearly I disagree with the premise of your thread, and at the end of the day, that's really all I'm saying.</blockquote>

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