Interesting Ryan Dancey comment on "lite" RPGs

[RyanD]

The fact that WotC products are far more available than other RPG products, and the name recognition that goes with "Dungeons and Dragons", were probably significant factors in determining d20's current position in the RPG market

In 1999, sales of the core books for D&D had dropped to around 25,000 units, or roughly 10% of their historical high points (to that time), and had been declining precipitously for nearly five years.

Furthermore, at the beginning of this period of RPG decline ('94-'99), book stores had not begun their contraction (from 5-6000 stores mostly in malls, to 2-3000 stores mostly big box), comics had not experienced their biggest dieback (from an estimated 15,000 stores to 5,000 stores, a significant percentage of which stocked RPGs). And the economy as a whole during this period was more robust than it had been in a generation, with customers in the core target demographic experiencing a five or ten fold increase in available disposable income.

Note that this decline took place in a market where RPG sales were a larger "slice" of the gaming industry than it is now, large enough to be material to the ability of retailers to surive in the business, so be strict economic rationalism, this slide should have been perceived as extremely dangerous to everyone involved in the industry, and an assumption could be made that people on all levels of the system were working hard to reverse the trend.

During this time, the D&D publisher (TSR) produced an immense amount of product, aimed at all segements of the audience, including innovative new player acquisition products, new core rules material, numerous campaign settings, and large amount of "varient" gaming materials to stretch the envelope of what "D&D" meant.

If "more available" and "name recognition" were the factors that drove RPG sales, then D&D would show a continuous upward sales trend. It did (and does) not exhibit that trend.

If the hobby gaming industry (that is, people who play complex tabletop games for fun) showed sales cycles where all games declined and all games rose as a group, then you could plot RPGs on that cycle and attempt to say that changes in the overall sales of D&D are cyclic. It does not. In fact, during the time the RPG segment collapsed (from a height of approximately $50 million in annual publisher revenues to less than $10 million), one new and one old segment of the US hobby game market exploded (CCGs from $0 to $50 million, and tabletop miniatures from $10 million to $30 million).

(In fact, had CCGs and Warhammer not exploded, hobby gaming would be a dead industry right now - the retailers and the distributors could not have survived on RPGs and wargame sales.)

So the view that D&D will and did succeed due to factors beyond the control of its publisher is clearly just unsupportable.

 

[Akrasia]

... So the view that D&D will and did succeed due to factors beyond the control of its publisher is clearly just unsupportable.

I never claimed that, and refer you back to what I originally said (including an important caveat that you conveniently left out):

The fact that WotC products are far more available than other RPG products, and the name recognition that goes with "Dungeons and Dragons", were probably significant factors in determining d20's current position in the RPG market. (Not the only factors, to be sure, but I think it's rather simplistic to assume that d20's popularity is simply because people judged it to be 'better'.)

Please note that "significant factors" does *not* mean "exclusive factors" or even "primary factors".

 

[Ourph]

I'm not saying that people who played WHFRP are inferior or that their game is inferior. What I am saying is that people who played WHFRP are outnumbered by those who've played D&D. Not everyone who has played D&D played WHFRP (I never did), but I imagine most, if not all, of those who played WHFRP had some D&D experience.

Is it just that people who play D&D/d20 can't stomach a publisher choosing to target an audience that might not include them? Is that it? Catering to the majority is NOT the only way to make money in the RPG business, especially if you're producing a great product that easily stands on its own merits.

Well, in a market economy - yes. It is, in fact, the only objective standard we have.

Marketshare reflects marketshare, not quality. Quality may be a factor, but there's no way to extrapolate it from marketshare because it's lumped in with too many other factors.

Since the success of a game comes down to "do people like it," the only non-elitist approach is to make several different games and let people decide for themseves what they want to play (and therefore buy).

But how can that happen if the default assumption is that every new or revised game should use the same system. If there are no competing systems, there isn't any opportunity for people to make a choice based on system (as opposed to fluff, core story, whatever).

I must have missed it when they handed down the verdict that declared d20 the epitome of game design and that no further competition in the arena of better rules was necessary or allowed.

 

[Akrasia]

...
Now maybe you believe most of your sales are going to be to the people who preferred WHFRP to D&D, in which case retaining those customers is your goal. But that means that you've abandoned a significant fraction of your potential market, and instead chosen to serve a particular niche.

Niches can still be quite large. They are defined in business as being a smaller, more targeted piece of a larger market.

I really think that you are ignoring the fact that WFRP is trying to appeal to people *unfamiliar* with WFRP. The long-time WFRP fans can be taken for granted, to some extent (the new edition is 'close enough' to the old edition that it doesn't have to worry about alienating them). But my impression is that BI/GR is trying very hard to attract *new* players to WFRP.

The d20 market is already saturated -- hence the big 'die off' of d20 publishers over the past two years. By selling itself as the 'non-d20 FRPG', WFRP might appeal to a segment of the market that is just looking for something different (in addition to old WFRP players, players familiar with WFB, etc.)

 

[romp]

If the hobby gaming industry (that is, people who play complex tabletop games for fun) showed sales cycles where all games declined and all games rose as a group, then you could plot RPGs on that cycle and attempt to say that changes in the overall sales of D&D are cyclic. It does not. In fact, during the time the RPG segment collapsed (from a height of approximately $50 million in annual publisher revenues to less than $10 million), one new and one old segment of the US hobby game market exploded (CCGs from $0 to $50 million, and tabletop miniatures from $10 million to $30 million).

(In fact, had CCGs and Warhammer not exploded, hobby gaming would be a dead industry right now - the retailers and the distributors could not have survived on RPGs and wargame sales.)

So the view that D&D will and did succeed due to factors beyond the control of its publisher is clearly just unsupportable.

See, it is this type of astute observation that make Ryan the one person in the hobby that I would most like to have lunch with. I love talking about the business aspect of the hobby and although I disagree with him on a few topics, but when he brings up something and backs it up that I appreciate his candor, which is lacking in the "industry". D&D brand recognition had somewhat died in the 90's and 3ed./d20 brought it back along witha lift from WH/WH40K and CCGs. It certainly help a lot of gamestores that would have gone under without the steady sales from minis and CCGs. How much is also true of the CMG craze lately. Are they helping to keep a lot of the hobby stores afloat and thereby carrying RPGs on their back(s)?

 

[The Shaman]

So the view that D&D will and did succeed due to factors beyond the control of its publisher is clearly just unsupportable.

Have you accounted for the possible effects of market saturation as part of the business slow-down? Or the changing demographics of the core audience for RPGs?

Mr. Dancey, this is all sounding like so much pseudo-science to me - more and more it looks like you have a conclusion you want to reach and you selectively pull data (some of which you even admit is coarse at best) which supports it, a conclusion that I find is based on the ultimately specious premise that higher sales and market penetration are directly related to the quality of the product.

 

[JohnSnow]

No, what they said is that d20 is a better system because it sells better - that's a akin to saying that Big Macs are better than prime rib because there are more Big Macs sold in a day than there are prime rib dinners.

The only thing that sales can reliably tell you is what sells better - whether that can be attributed to the quality of the product, the number of venues in which it sells, the marketing and advertising budget, or any of a number of other factos it doesn't say. This is as hollow an argument as they come.

No it's not. It's just one that product elitists don't like to hear. All other things being equal (price, availability, and so forth), superior products win out. Marketing can help one product, of comparably equal quality, outsell another with less marketing. However, marketing can't sell garbage or make people buy things they don't want. It just doesn't work - the public isn't that stupid. Well, some of them are, but not most.

What you're saying reminds me of all the film critics railing that "Hollywood blockbusters are terrible movies" and then being astounded when they actually do well at the box office. The general public doesn't care about your subjective quality standard. They care about theirs. And for lots of people, an elitist's idea of "terrible" is "good enough" or, more accurately "what they want."

I grant D&D benefits from having less expensive books (economies of scale) and superior access to the supply chain and marketplace. On the other hand, it got its vaunted position somehow, and TSR wasn't exactly a moneybags company with lots of cash to devote to marketing. It was YEARS before you could buy D&D books at general bookstores. Obviously, with as many books as it has, D&D's not exactly trying to compete on price.

The Big Mac/Prime Rib analogy is false because there's a price differentiator in addition to one of taste. I, personally, don't happen to like Big Macs, so I don't buy them - matter of taste. Assuming Big Macs and Prime Rib were equally priced, I'd expect Prime Rib to outsell Big Macs, but maybe people actually prefer hamburgers to slabs of beef. RPGs have no such price differentiator, and even if they do, it favors single book games - not D&D. So yes, given comparable price, or a pricing structure that skews towards its competition, one must conclude that either D&D is considered "better" than its competition by the majority of its target market or that it has superior access to said market.

Generally speaking, high-quality products with broad appeal eventually increase their sales. If they don't, they're either being mismanaged, or they're actually niche products. There can be perfectly viable niche products, but that doesn't mean they serve the needs of the majority of the market.

All subjective content has to be judged this way. It's the only objective standard available. Insider Awards are about labelling "best" from a quality point of view by combining lots of people's subjective standards about "quality" and trying to come up with a consensus. For artistic efforts, this is commendable.

 

[RyanD]

No, what they said is that d20 is a better system because it sells better

To be clear: This is not my argument.

My argument (and this applies to all hobby games) is that games that are played more often than other games in the same category are inherently more valuable to the players than games that are played less, by fewer people. This value is often an indicator (sometimes the only indicator) of relative "quality" (a term I hate to use in gaming because it is essentially useless barring a reasonably widespread definition. But I'll use it in this post because most of those people who read it will interpret my use of the word in the way I intend it to be understood).

There are no "poor quality" games that have large player networks. They just don't exist. You can't induce people to keep playing a "bad game" when "good game" options are available. (In fact, if you read my recent posts here and on Mearls' blog, you'll see that I'm advocating from the position that D&D (and D20) have a lot of room for improvement - I'm not at all suggesting they're perfected products).

The hobby gaming industry does not reward "poor games" with continuous, long term sales. It does, however, ruthlessly weed out "poor games". Such product lines do not generate sales over any significant amount of time, regardless of external factors like brand, availability, clever marketing, etc.

Nobody can give me an example of a "bad quality" game that suceeded over time (let us say a minimum of 12 months) because it was backed by great marketing or a fantastically popular license.

Some might make the argument that I'm arguing the point in reverse: If I define a "good game" as one with long term sales & a large player network, then regardless of the intrinsic quality of a game, it will fit my defintion of "good". My response to that criticism is that there are observable, neutral tests that can be applied to a game to determine its fitness (or lack thereof), reasonable, common sense things that most game designers and industry professionals (and many players) intuitively grasp, which can be used to separate games into broad categories of "good" and "bad", regardless of the specific individual's definitions of those words. And there are no games that would be identified as "bad" that demonstrate long term success vs. "good" competition. None.

That's what makes hobby gaming different from fashion, food, and pop culture, and why using arguments about the relationship between financial success and quality in those markets is an unfair, and misleading argument when discussing that relationship in the hobby gaming market.

In order to generate long term sales (what I call "evergreen" sales), a game must attract and keep a sizable network of active players. Those networks form because the people in them are willing to invest time, money, and attention to an entertainment pursuit. With so many competing ways to spend that time, money and attention, only "great games" are able to survive and thrive over the long term.

Thus, "sales" are not an DETERMINATOR of "quality". Sales are, over an extended period of time, an INDICATOR of quality - they represent a series of decisions made independently by a large number of people that the game is worth investment of limited resources - that it is, in fact, "better" in the opinion of the players, with both intrinsic and external factors fully valued than its competition.

The issue of not using D20 (or any other game system) is not necessarily an issue of instrinsic "quality". Sure, the Warhammer RPG (or any other RPG) may be mechanically sound, interesting, and fun to play. However, if the "cost" to potential players to engage with that game is high enough (compared to the option to learn and play a game similar to one they already know), then the actual value to those players - regardless of intrinsic features of the new game - may be less than the "similar game" option - and thus that game will not generate as many sales or as large a long term player network as it might otherwise have done.

The question each publisher has to ask themselves when they create an RPG in the post-OGL/D20 world is this: Is my game so much better than an OGL/D20 option that I want to force my customers & players to pay a tax to play that game, and will those people perceive the value I'm offering and voluntarily submit to that taxation?

My opinion is that for most games, that answer is usually "no". Which is not the same thing as saying "Ryan says no other games should be published" or "Ryan thinks D20 is the only viable game" or even "Ryan thinks all RPGs should be D20". It would be fair to say that my opinion is that "RPGs that feature parties of characters who band together and seek challenges and be rewarded with increased power, sold through the traditional hobby gaming market, and designed to be played by hobby gaming players, will sell better and be more popular if they are OGL/D20 games than if they are not."

 

[JohnSnow]

I really think that you are ignoring the fact that WFRP is trying to appeal to people *unfamiliar* with WFRP. The long-time WFRP fans can be taken for granted, to some extent (the new edition is 'close enough' to the old edition that it doesn't have to worry about alienating them). But my impression is that BI/GR is trying very hard to attract *new* players to WFRP.

The d20 market is already saturated -- hence the big 'die off' of d20 publishers over the past two years. By selling itself as the 'non-d20 FRPG', WFRP might appeal to a segment of the market that is just looking for something different (in addition to old WFRP players, players familiar with WFB, etc.)

But what you're talking about here is a niche. BI/GR is trying to attract "existing RPG players interested in a non-d20 product set in the Warhammer universe." That's a smaller market than "anyone who's ever played a d20 RPG" or even "anyone who plays Warhammer and has played a d20 RPG." Both games (revised classic WHFRP and d20 WHFRP) would appeal equally to the "anyone who's ever played Warhammer" & "general public" categories.

All I'm saying is that their market strategy is targeting a niche (non-d20 gamers), whatever their hopes are.

 

[Turjan]

Well, in a market economy - yes. It is, in fact, the only objective standard we have. Alternatively, we could appoint some blue-ribbon panel of "gaming experts" to determine what kind of game we should all play. Of course, they might pick a game the majority of people didn't like. Since the success of a game comes down to "do people like it," the only non-elitist approach is to make several different games and let people decide for themseves what they want to play (and therefore buy). If more people want to play something, it's safe to say that as far as the majority is concerned, that game is "better."

This is not the whole of economics. You should factor the influence of monopols and critical mass into your equation. The current increase of the D&D market share is mostly driven by that influence, I'd guess. Niche games hardly have a chance with the switch of RPG distribution from LGS to large book and other retail chains (BN, Borders, amazon, even Walmart). They hardly ever make it there. This means that potential buyers will never hear of these games and, therefore, never have the ability to try them out. This also means that a quality difference between these games and D&D does not matter in the slightest! The sole factor for D&D's sales figures is the quality of D&D itself, which influences whether people buy D&D or don't buy D&D. Such a market is completely blind to alternatives.