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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 6002800" data-attributes="member: 151">I think you underestimate how small RPGs are in the market.  Let's start with <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/315800-4-hours-w-rsd-escapist-bonus-column.html" target="_blank">this essay by Ryan Dancey</a>.  Regardless of whether or not I agree with all of his conclusions, he brings some relevant data to the conversation.  WotC has spent years trying to find marketing that works and that is market efficient.  One thing Dancey highlights, which should be obvious, is that D&D has a much tougher market to work with; expecting D&D to expand it's audience as easily and dramatically now as it did in the 1970s and early 1980s simply isn't realistic in a world with so many choices, when I can play an RPG on my phone or run a WoW raid with 60 other people.  Further, the market has radically changed: fewer distributors, fewer stores and now online vendors who offer deeper discounts but with no network externalities that Dancey mentions.  D&D remains the flagship product of the RPG industry.  Pathfinder is currently beating it in sales from quarter-to-quarter, but I believe that it's never enjoyed positions on the NYT bestseller lists, while 4E has.  The problem here is not advertising for brand awareness.  D&D HAS that.  Here's a demonstration for you.  If I go to Toys 'R' Us, with 1500 stores globally and more than 14 Billion US dollars in revenue and enter the following terms:<a href="http://www.toysrus.com/search/index.jsp?kwCatId=&kw=dungeons%20and%20dragons&origkw=dungeons+and+dragons&f=Taxonomy/TRUS/2254197&sr=1" target="_blank">Dungeons and Dragons</a><a href="http://www.toysrus.com/search/index.jsp?kwCatId=&kw=pathfinder&origkw=Pathfinder&f=Taxonomy/TRUS/2254197&sr=1" target="_blank">Pathfinder</a><a href="http://www.toysrus.com/search/index.jsp?kwCatId=&kw=cthulhu&origkw=cthulhu&f=Taxonomy/TRUS/2254197&sr=1" target="_blank">Cthulhu</a>TL;DR version:  D&D has several hits, Pathfinder has non-RPG hits for some baby equipment and Cthulhu has two hits, one for a cell-phone holder and another for Cthulhu Munchkin.  You may notice that for D&D, THE ACTUAL RPG IS NOT LISTED THERE.  Instead they list Ravenloft, an anthology of the old 'Gold Box' games and the D&D-themed Heroscape supplement.  Again, because the D&D brand is stronger than the actual game.  Cthulhu has more recognition by this metric, which honesty isn't a great one, but it's illustrative for our purposes here.Here's another point for you:  what happens when we enter <a href="http://www.toysrus.com/search/index.jsp?kwCatId=&kw=role%20playing%20game&origkw=role+playing+game&f=Taxonomy/TRUS/2254197&sr=1" target="_blank">Role-Playing Game</a>?  We find where all those potential players have gone, perhaps.  Who do you think has a bigger advertising budget in the Seattle-Tacoma game area?  WotC or Nintendo?  [quick hint: the one of them was bought in the last decade by a large toy company has the smaller one]  The problem here is that D&D has competition from a lot of other venues for gamers and is no longer winning that fight.WotC has spent advertising on their products before: to little benefit in terms of sales.  Conventional advertising doesn't push sales in many cases, because most of the potential customers KNOW about D&D.  They simply don't choose to play it based on the advertising.  I've seen ads in comic books, gaming magazines and even on television.  None of these generated an ROI that was worth the tiny margins that D&D operates under.  From what some WotC employees have posted here on ENW, it's clear that M:tG has always been the big cash cow for the company...and traditional advertising had only marginal games for that.  The problem is not reaching their intended audience, perhaps, but convincing that audience that D&D is a game they should spend time and money on in favor of other, often more convenient choices.Understand I think that WotC NEEDS to grow the hobby, for reasons Hobo already explained up-thread.  The market leader benefits the most...and getting more D&D players helps the hobby.  Most gamers I know started with D&D and moved outwards to smaller games...or were brought into the hobby by those who had.  But I have no great ideas how WotC can do that, short of releasing a good game and promoting it through a variety of specialized channels.  I'd wager that the Pax Prime Penny-Arcade gaming podcast sessions probably did more to sell D&D 4E than the sum total of their print advertising, though I have no way to gauge that.The long and short of it is that D&D and Pathfinder together don't sell huge numbers in the grand scheme of things.  They have dedicated customers, but they are a niche market like comic books.  Take a look at <a href="http://www.acaeum.com/library/printrun.html" target="_blank">some of these numbers from Acaeum</a>.  D&D, at its height, was never clearing huge numbers of books and certainly aren't doing so now.I think a large misunderstanding from many fans is overestimating the size of the RPG market and WotC's budget to increase it.</blockquote>

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