is the ttrpg market swamped now? could you write a winner?

[Morrus]

Oh sure. I was referring to if you spent and ran your own campaign. Using a service like backer kit can costs a lot more, but it varies on how much you raised. Definitely different beast than a traditional ad campaign of paying per impression or exposure.

No, 40K was the ad spend.

 

[Haiku Elvis]

With the art as long as you have something representative like a cover you can launch the kickstarter to raise funds for the rest of the art. That's what kickstarter is supposed to be for.
The trick is the advertising/interest as to get the money from the kickstarter you have to have the interest but until you have the backers you don't have the money to spend on advertising to get the interest.
Mothership managed it but it had three things going for it.
1 A less crowded genre with no dominant player.
2 the designer did all (or most) his own art
3 three years since launch to build a fanbase.

 

[Blue Orange]

It's tricky--unlike a lot of creative areas (movies, etc.) there's one very dominant player everyone's either imitating, riffing off of, or reacting to.

That's something you'd have to deal with, not sure how.

The network effects are also tricky--people can't play your game unless there are other people who also want to play it. The internet makes geographic proximity less of an issue, but I guess you'd have to spread publicity over twitter or discord.

 

[bennet]

The network effects are also tricky--people can't play your game unless there are other people who also want to play it. The internet makes geographic proximity less of an issue, but I guess you'd have to spread publicity over twitter or discord.

not many discord owners like promotion of other peoples stuff though. twitter is a weird place, even the most famous of celebrities don't get many replies to their tweets. super hard to build a (non bot) audience over there. what I hate most about twitter is that its a bunch of people posting generic questions to #dnd5e for example like "what is your favorite spell" just to get their podcast or whatever promoted.

reddit I think is the most likely place, but /r/dnd mods will kick you off the channel for non-dnd promotions.
idk how it would work

 

[bennet]

With the art as long as you have something representative like a cover you can launch the kickstarter to raise funds for the rest of the art. That's what kickstarter is supposed to be for.
The trick is the advertising/interest as to get the money from the kickstarter you have to have the interest but until you have the backers you don't have the money to spend on advertising to get the interest.
Mothership managed it but it had three things going for it.
1 A less crowded genre with no dominant player.
2 the designer did all (or most) his own art
3 three years since launch to build a fanbase.

thats a really good example, even though sci-fi obviously doesn't directly with D&D. there system seems pretty cool, extremely simple but at first glance looks like fun.

$1.5M raised, but I wonder how much it costs to make the books, maybe 1/2 of that perhaps.

 

[darjr]

With the art as long as you have something representative like a cover you can launch the kickstarter to raise funds for the rest of the art. That's what kickstarter is supposed to be for.
The trick is the advertising/interest as to get the money from the kickstarter you have to have the interest but until you have the backers you don't have the money to spend on advertising to get the interest.
Mothership managed it but it had three things going for it.
1 A less crowded genre with no dominant player.
2 the designer did all (or most) his own art
3 three years since launch to build a fanbase.

Matt Colville showed it on his stream a few times, on youtube to I think. I don't think that was a huge deal but it certainly helped.

Also CR ran it for a one shot just before the kickstarter.

It seems like a great game.

 

[bennet]

Matt Colville showed it on his stream a few times, on youtube to I think. I don't think that was a huge deal but it certainly helped.

Also CR ran it for a one shot just before the kickstarter.

It seems like a great game.

CR is a lot of eyes. Matt Colville is banned from my youtube for doing a movie review pooping on Dune 2021 which still triggers me. The movie was my fav in a long time and to talk about how he didn't care for it... sacrilege to not support my beloved childhood book.

 

[MGibster]

I can only speak from personal experience, but there are far more games out there being made than I can ever hope to play or even read. I don't really keep close tabs on what games are even coming out and am sometimes surprised when i see something that's right up my alley. Is the market swamped? Well, it's more than I can keep track of.

 

[JThursby]

The initial reasoning from the OP sounds like it's running from the assumption that game rules and systems are the selling points, when I think in reality it's IP and story potential that catches people's eyes and gets them to investigate further. D&D is no exception in this case, it commands the strongest brand recognition by a country mile which I would wager accounts for a large part of it's success. Development of a great set of systems is very valuable and gets players to stick around, but I can't think of any examples of games that successfully sold themselves on the premise of using a certain rule set as their primary feature. The sole exceptions are ones that are direct responses to complaints about wherever D&D is at the time, i.e. Pathfinder 1e or Advanced 5e. Lore, setting, tone, genre, IP usage, all of those seem more important to me in terms of getting attention and initial buyers. I think the reason many of those hundreds of games fail is that they successfully do as I described to an extent, but are ultimately shallow (in some cases barely more than a set of guidelines) or don't have rules that facilitate the experience that was promised; I can recall more than a few 5e compatible or d20 OGL games that didn't mesh rules with the story well at all.

 

[Argyle King]

alternative to a D&D game. Like a Tunnels and Trolls or a Mazes and Monsters (I guess thats copywritten)

I'm still not entirely sure how that's being defined.

Would it be something inspired by D&D's mechanical structure or D&D adjacent (like Pathfinder)?

Would a non-d20 game qualify?