Let me explain my reasoning
Actually, the quote at the top of the thread is
mine, from a thread in another forum. And I am not bothered at all.
Currently, I am a buyer and manager at a small but fairly successful game store in the Sacramento area. I have been working in the game industry, retail, wholesale, development, publication, distribution, marketing, support, and so on for almost 30 years now. Here is what I am seeing now:
First,
from a game store's point of view, there will be no significant new
4E D&D product for the
4th Quarter, that is the all important
Christmas Retail Season, which for
most game stores accounts for nearly
half of annual sales volume. That is, I do not expect that game stores will do well with
D&D Essentials, because game stores tend to sell primarily to the
existing base of gaming customers, and are not well positioned to recruit large numbers of
new customers.
D&D Essentials will have almost
no appeal to existing
4E customers.
Second,
Wizards is being
nakedly aggressive in promoting 4E. For example, the last two promotional adventures,
PHB3 Game Day and
D&D Encounters, unlike previous efforts, have an actual staff of over two dozen credited, including a designer, an editor,
and a managing editor. They are by far the best effort to date, having taken me only an hour or two to fix the errors, omissions, inconsistancies, and lameties, compared to 10-20 hours for previous adventures. They
almost don't suck.
Further,
Wizards is using both carrots
and sticks to promote these events. The package for
D&D Encounters includes numerous goodies, including a digtal camera, and a
Pizza Hut Gift Card for $25. The
stick is that if our store does
not host these events, we will have to wait
ten days to sell new
D&D material, ten days that
Barnes & Noble will have those goods for sale. No hobby store can really afford to refuse, otherwise their competitors will get a ten day head start. Of course,
Barnes and Noble does not have to host
any D&D Events.
The
D&D Encounters promotion itself directly pushes specific products by
penalizing players
in-game who do
not use those products. For each player that attends, the event coordinator is supposed to record their
Reknown,
nominally a measure of how successful and therefore famous their character is. At specific
Reknown thresholds, the player gains an additional encounter power for their character. However, the
largest rewards are for using specific products. Someone playing a
PHB Human Ranger using a photocopied character sheet will seriously have one less encounter power at first level than a
Psion Shardmind made using
Character Builder. Use of specific products are rewarded more heavily that completing all the quests offered, more than roleplaying
"greatness."
Third, sales of
4E books
suck. Whereas I used to bring in a dozen or more of each new 4E book for opening week, I am down to half a dozen or
less, depending. Sales of
Martial Powers 2 were
pathetic compared to
Martial Powers 1. Looking at
my sales numbers, non-
D&D RPG sales will soon surpass
D&D sales. And by soon, I mean in the next month or two.
So, to sum up,
from the perspective of the game shop:
- 4E sales suck, and are dropping every month.
- Wizards witholds product from stores that do not host their events
- Players at the events are disadvantaged without specific products
- There is no new product for existing customers for Christmas
Sounds to me like
Wizards is having a do-or-die moment. Who would be lighting a fire under
Wizards except Hasbro?
Smeelbo
Abuser of BBCodes
