Is Wotc Slipping?

[ggroy]

Observation of someone's habits across multiple threads tends to affect how much weight I give their observations. YMMV.

I generally don't give much weight to stuff I read online or offline.

If I really wanted to know how reliable something is, I would check it out myself.

If I didn't really care one way or the other, I just dropped the subject. Basically an entire huge pile of "maybe, maybe not" stuff in "truthiness".

 

[BryonD]

Amount does not imply accuracy.

I made no claim that accuracy was implied by the quantity. I simply pointed out that it was a large amount he was brushing off. There has been a great deal of discussion on the quality of that data and I didn't presume that needed to be reset from the beginning.

If my friend in Portland tells me about the weather in Portland, I'm likely to just believe him. If he isn't also a climatologist, and starts making claims about global climate, I'm going to ask where his information comes from.

Agreed. And, again, I made this wild presumption that conversations about a wide range of sources of data was already known.

The same doesn't hold for more broad scope. Individuals cannot generally observe global phenomena directly. They must gather data. And then how they get what data becomes very important.

Certainly. But you are doing nothing but generalizing with no effort presented to show how this actually applies to the conversation at hand.

Again, my actual point was the simple irony of a third party (not a "friend in Portland", but an anonymous handle on a website) making a single proclamation and that getting praise from the same audience which defaults to rejecting a variety of insider statements. The idea that I need to defend observing the irony there is itself ironic.

 

[BryonD]

Mind you, if you want to be completely intellectually honest, if you're going to critique your friend, you ought to critique yourself, too.

So you wouldn't suggest someone discard information on one side out of hand while casually giving XP to information on the other side.
You think treating both sides with equal consideration and/or sceptical review is better?
I would agree if this is what you are saying.

 

[MrMyth]

You are casually brushing off a lot of data here.

I don't claim that at all. I have no idea. I'm certainly willing to presume he is right about the facts. Heck, I can even assume he knows more than he said and the connection DOES exist. None of that changes my point.

Fair enough. But my point, at heart, is about the scale. One person experiencing a single event (the closing of a store) and coming to a conclusion based on personal experience (I bet it had to do with poor business decisions made by the owner) remains very different from extrapolating the state of a company from tangential, anecdotal, and incomplete data.

Why does his data get every benefit of the doubt and all the other get presumed false with no option for even consideration?

Didn't you just say you were willing to assume his data is true?

Either way, I'm certainly willing to assume his data is true for him. That's who you were criticizing - ProfessorCirno making a conclusion based on data available to him, while ignoring the data that might imply that WotC is slipping.

For him, let's assume this is true. He has seen firsthand how this owner acts, and that this store closes down. His conclusion is that the practice of discouraging customers from buying some of your products did not work out well for that store owner.

Given that he observed the data firsthand, I'd say that counts as pretty reliable information. That doesn't mean his conclusion tells the whole story - the store could have (and probably did) close for any number of reasons. But assuming that bad business practices didn't help? That hardly seems like an unreasonable assumption to make.

Compare this to the data that some feel indicates WotC is slipping. We have personal anecdotes from various places, often contradicted by anecdotes provided by others about their own stores. It isn't that I don't believe them individually - it is that I don't beleive they add up to a greater picture.

For example, ProfessorCirno recounts this tale about a local game store. I believe him, and I believe that this information can be used to make assumptions about his game store. Similarly, if you tell me that 4E sales are nonexistent at your local game store, I am willing to concede that as evidence that 4E sales are slipping at your locale game store - but not that 4E sales are slipping as a whole.

If we instead are looking at other elements, such as the various sales reports and amazon rankings, those might have a bit more weight - but they tell so little of the overall picture that I don't think you can make any conclusions from them without a much longer lifespan of data.

Heh, that is a wildly charitable interpretation of a sarcastic "paragons of mankind", remove it from the context of both the specific post and the overall conversation and declare it to just mean "silly". So you bend over backwards to distort the xp comment to something unrecognizably passive.

Bend over backwards? That's how I read it! ProfessorCirno recounts a tale about a game store owner who engages in foolish behavior. Dannager awards XP with a comment that seems the equivalent of shaking his head at such foolishness. What in the world do you think he means?

Do you really think Dannager's comment was putting forward a theory that all game store owners act like this, or was some sort of hypothesis on them actually being paragons of mankind?

Or, more likely, was he just recognizing that many game store owners are, unfortunately/fortunately, fans and gamers at heart, and often make decisions based more on personal bias than good business sense?

But one post ago you were going out of your way to warp "slipping" into the major overstatment "failing". You are applying rather stark double standards.

Going out of my way? Like I said above - either, both, it's all the same to me. I've heard both claims made. It really doesn't bother me which one is made. My issue is not with the claim itself, but the evidence it is based on!

What possible double standard is in play here? You're either reading way too much into some of my statements, or going out of your way to find specific quotations in my posts to complain about. I'm inclined to assume the former, since I'm really not all that invested in this debate as a whole.

I just felt it somewhat out of line to claim that someone's objection to using a collection of anecdotes about the industry as a whole meant they weren't allowed to use personal knowledge to come to conclusions about a situation they experienced first hand.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Yes. Which is why I did say "likely" and "barring special circumstances". There's always exceptions.

Mind you, if you want to be completely intellectually honest, if you're going to critique your friend, you ought to critique yourself, too. Ask yourself if you have an agenda of your own, and if you've been properly skeptical of the sources of information that "prove" your friend wrong, and all that.

This is all easy when you're talking about the weather, and there are solid sources of information independent from you or your friends and your possible agendas.

In dichotomy wars, it is a tad more difficult.

All absolutely correct.

The point is, plausibility of evidence has to factor in a lot of things, and some folks are always going to find some evidence more plausible than others. There is always an observer bias, and the best thing you can do is be aware of it.

Which is actually a compliment to your post (the one I quoted), I think, rather than a contradiction of it.

RC

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Good post.

And I too thought Essentials would do well. I think, in hindsight, some of this was wishful thinking. Contrary to the claims of those who think all PF players want WotC to die, I suspect most are like myself to one degree or another. We are sentimentally attached to the brand and want it to succeed even though we have no interest in the current incarnation.

I think if I was going to make an educated guess on why essentials has not done as well as hoped it is because it lacked a large enough, and viable enough, target audience.

1 - Essentials, while welcome, was too little too late for PF players like myself who feel 4e has left behind too many "classic" D&D assumptions. You can't well argue it harkens back to the things people associated with D&D (i.e. magic missile) but is still fully 4e.

2 - Essentials, while appealing to completist, was not needed by core 4e players who were satisfied with their game.

3 - Essentials (and this one is a guess) is too confusing for new players in that it provides an additional gateway into the game on top of the core books already produced. People don't want to buy the same rules twice if they can help it and I suspect half the new buyers will buy the old books and half will buy the new books, as they try to figure out what should be the first book bought.

I guess that this is 6 - Appearance of the Product. The look of the book (and other things ending in 'ook') did not grab buyers. A few may not have purchased it because it was not uniform with the rest of 4e.

Sadly, I know folks who bought PF over 4e and Essentials because it was a better looking product. Me, I played OD&D, with stapled covers and really bad art. Heck, did you ever look at the first edition cover of the AD&D Monster Manual? It looked like, and was, the work of a relative amateur. (Just remember 'Amateur' has a root that means 'Love'. A true amateur does something because he or she loves it.)

But yes, folks buy a good looking product, it very much helped sales of Vampire: the Masquerade.

While I honestly think PF is a better game, for me at the least, I also think that picking a game based solely on how pretty it is ranks as pretty darned silly.

As for turning customers away from 4e... is it possible that some folks are interpreting 'pushing folks towards PF' as 'turning folks away from 4e'? And at which point does one become the other? Back in the 3.5 days I saw a GURPS player physically pull a D&D starter box from the hands of someone who was maybe twelve years old, and tell him not to buy it, and how much better GURPS was. The net result was the kid not buying either.

On the flip side, if someone asks me for a recommendation I am much more likely to describe Pathfinder than 4e, in part because PF is a game that I like, and in part because 4e is not a game that I like. Recommending 4e does not cross my mind. This is part of the reason why the failure of the Essentials Redbox annoys me - there are circumstances where I would have recommended it. I really hope that Pathfinder Basics does a better job - being able to direct a parent to a nice, simple, yet worthwhile gateway drug introductory game would be very nice.

The Auld Grump

 

[TheYeti1775]

Does it really matter.
In the end they will do what the bean counters tell them on both sides of the aisle.

Did Pazio hurt WotC with Pathfinder?
Maybe, it allowed a successfully outlet to those that didn't want 4E.

Far as market shares, if we are talking just RPG book material. Than it's no wonder Paizo has made leaps and bounds over them.
If your talking all RPG material(including online) WotC still has the Silverback's share of it.

But in the end actual numbers don't matter here.
It's a prespective matter especially for those of us on boards that watch it.

You have to remember 3.5E saturated the market with books. Both WotC and 3rd Party.
I dare say I could easily play for another 30 years without using all the material I acquired during the 3E/3.5E days.

WotC is a victim of its own success in that regard.
Many of us sufferred wallet-burnout during those years. $40/month for quite a few years gets expensive quick. That doesn't even talk about the DDM or 3PP purchases on top of it.

I bought D&D DDM occassionally even after 4E. Between that and Star Wars Saga and it's DDM line I still was a WotC customer directly buying new products from their retailers. I just didn't jump to 4E, nor did I jump to PF. I simply stayed with what I had and was very happy doing it.
Once SW Saga and the DDM lines ended, all of a sudden I wasn't a direct WotC customer anymore. So their sales further eroded.

As an outsider looking in, it is very easy to look at WotC and Paizo and see Paizo taking over the industry lead. But that is just appearances.

Using the Amazon numbers as an example, when was the last new thing WotC put out? That certainly cuts there numbers there.

But in the end as I said it doesn't matter what the numbers are as we will never know the truth.
Play the game you love, and encourage others to play it, cause in the end we are what we are: Gamers.

 

[renau1g]

So Auld, you comment that your store sells less 4e products than PF ones, but you only recommend PF ones to your customers when they ask? Surprised?

 

[Stormonu]

Before this goes too far afield in attacking 'validity', are there other sites that present info on sales ranking for RPG products? I saw nothing on B&N's site, for example. I do seem to recall someone posting an article -I think from ICV2? - discussing general sales ranking for 3rd quarter RPG sales; is there more information such as this somewhere available to us?

----------
As an aside, I went back to Amazon to look at the rankings for the D&D boardgames, and just where Gamma World was sitting in the rankings. I couldn't find Gamma World in the running on the general list under where I found PF and most RPGs, though it's ranked 32 on the "D&D" list.

Wrath was #42 on the boardgame rankings, which is pretty decent, though strangely way behind Munchin (#20?!?). Its at least beating out games like Descent

 

[BryonD]

Didn't you just say you were willing to assume his data is true?

Yes, and I still am. My comment does not challenge that, it questions why others are permitted a doubel standard.

Bend over backwards? That's how I read it! ....

Going out of my way? ...


What possible double standard is in play here? ...

You took the most charitable possible interpretation of the pro-4e side and replacing "slipping" with "failing" when assessing the other side. If that is just how you saw it, then fine, I accept that.

But it is no less a double standard.

I just felt it somewhat out of line to claim that someone's objection to using a collection of anecdotes about the industry as a whole meant they weren't allowed to use personal knowledge to come to conclusions about a situation they experienced first hand.

I didn't say that. I was mocking the XP, not the statement. And "weren't allowed" is pretty extreme. I'm not trying to disallow anything. But just as they are allowed to present it both ways, I think I'm allowed to point it out.

Do you really think Dannager's comment was putting forward a theory that all game store owners act like this, or was some sort of hypothesis on them actually being paragons of mankind?

Just to go back to this....

Quite simply, in the midst of "edition wars" the point was to mock someone seen as on the other side. Do you still claim it was "silly"?
And my point is that the XP was supporting a random claim on the internet in the midst of demanding that such claims from named sources can't be trusted.

Black Diamond has recently stated that the only thing which has saved the market from 4E's decline is PF filling the void. Now, obviously there is perfectly valid room for calling that just a segment of the market and not definitive of the big picture. But it at least deserves the same support or dispute as an unnamed claim about a single store. And, again, I believe them both. Or at least am willing to accept them both.

And I also know that this data point is consistent with numerous other sources, including my own personal experiences and conversations.

But that is beside the point. If we are being sceptical thne lets be sceptical. If we are bein accepting, then the fact that we need to be accepting over and over and over and over regarding the split market should start to paint a picture in reasonable minds.