D&D (2024) Is There A New Sheriff in Town?

[Paul Farquhar]

The magic formula is MONEY.

Spend money on the best available designers you could find then advertise and market the living HELL out of it.

No, it isn't. The magic formula is luck, getting in first, and establishing a fan base. D&D has never been well designed. Even back in the 80s there were better designed options, such as Runequest. And when the did try designing the hell out of it, they came up with 4e, which people hated.

 

[Minigiant]

maybe it would work, spend 10x to 100x what you have any chance of ever making back, and you probably do have a chance at unseating D&D, for a while at least.


No, WotC could stop marketing / ads tomorrow and nothing would change at all. Their school programs are good for them, their marketing is close to nonexistent.

What keeps them firmly in the center is network effects, not marketing.

The point is you'd have to pay to create your own networks

But almost every TTRPG outside of WOD and CoC channels their promotion via D&D fandom.

 

[Minigiant]

You don't even need the best designers. Just spend enough money on marketing, you'll be #1. The product itself is almost irrelevant to that. The sad truth about the modern world--in any industry--is that marketing matters much more than the actual product quality.

The best designers will have jobs. You just need enough decent designers and flood the media with promotion of your product.

That's why WOTC spends so much on art, because the first purpose of the pictures is ads.

D&D will be #1 until some multimillionaire decides to dumb part of their wealth into promoting their heartbreaker.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Isn't this pretty much exactly what happened in the late 90s/pre-3e era? People keep talking about the 4e/Pathfinder thing, but seem to forget just how dire the situation was a decade before it.

The publisher of D&D was literally going bankrupt, and D&D was very close to dropping off the face of the earth. There was a massive market shift into Magic the Gathering and CCGs. It was exactly the unimaginable apocalypse you describe, and we barely survived it. We don't have good market anaysis from the time, but games like Vampire and Shadowrun were definitely challenging D&D for superiority at the end of the 2e run, and I suspect West End Games would have been as well if they weren't bankrupted by bad shoe sales.

D&D 3e was a dream of Peter Adkinson and an independent WotC, not something that had buy in from a Fortune 100 company like Hasbro. And it was a success in terms of keeping the brand alive and historically significant in giving us the OGL (also, I personally love the rules set). But at the same time, 3e was a period where RPGs were an extremely niche hobby. Sometimes I think that people forget just how niche it was. How niche was it? In 2006, Hasbro saw their new Tooth Tunes line of musical toothbrushes as a bigger growth and profit center than D&D (https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive/h/NYSE_HAS_2006.pdf).

D&D can fail. D&D has failed in the past. Multiple times. It's only in the past ~6 years that we've had this happly little spot of major attention and growth. There is no assurance it will last.

The point wasn't that D&D can't fail... it was that D&D can't fail and have some other game take its place.

If D&D is dying out... its means all RPGs are dying out as well.

 

[DEFCON 1]

D&D will be #1 until some multimillionaire decides to dumb part of their wealth into promoting their heartbreaker.

Heh... I know it was just a typing mistake... but I very much like the Freudian slip you put in here. Yes, it absolutely would be DUMB for a multimillionaire to throw their wealth into some fantasy heartbreaker to try and surpass D&D.

 

[mamba]

The point is you'd have to pay to create your own networks

hence the spend 10-100 times what you may be making back… part of that is just getting there, part of it is so you can stay there without that level of spending having to go on forever

The ‘problem’ is no one is interested in spending this much for that little return

 

[mamba]

Heh... I know it was just a typing mistake... but I very much like the Freudian slip you put in here. Yes, it absolutely would be DUMB for a multimillionaire to throw their wealth into some fantasy heartbreaker to try and surpass D&D.

so, Elon?

 

[Umbran]

What do you guys think? Gaining Crawford, Perkins and whoever else comes over, does Daggerheart have a realistic shot at taking D&D down as the #1 TTRPG?

You wanna know if a game that releases one month ago has a "realistic shot" at taking down a game that's been top dog for 50 years?

How about you come back in a couple of years, and let's see if Daggerheart is a going concern, before we have that other discussion, hm?

 

[overgeeked]

I think Professor DM said it best...

 

[Cruentus]

Nah, this will likely not move the needle.

Look at tabletop wargaming, and the big names of designers there - Andy Chambers, Jervis Johnson, Alessio Cavatore, etc. who all left Games Workshop 20, 4, and 14 years ago respectively, joined other game companies, started other game companies, moved to computer games, etc., and not a one has come anywhere close to Warhammer/Games Workshop in terms of market share or size. Heck, one of those games is a passion project by a wealthy person who is pouring money into plastic miniatures and rules, etc., and as far as I can tell, Warhammer is still what everyone plays.

Like others have mentioned, 90% or more of DnD players don't know who Crawford, et al are. Heck, I didn't know until the pandemic when our group picked up 5e to play, and I didn't know who anyone was who was in charge (aside from Gygax's name, and maybe Greenwood's name), in the 40+ years I've played DnD. Really, I didn't know, and didn't care who was making the game. They made the game, I paid them money if what they offered was worth it to me.

The game and the name will continue.