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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mearls" data-source="post: 780002" data-attributes="member: 697">First, as a designer I see 90% of licensed games as the RPG design equivalent of producing Garfield coffee mugs. Read into that what you will.Licensed products are easy to sell to distributors and retailers. They allow you to make the incorrect assumption that if, say, 500,000 people are fans of Cucumber Wars, a Cucumber Wars RPG will sell lots and lots of copies. Distributors and retailers see a licensed product as less risky, and are more willing to order it.As PC points out, a vanishingly small number of licensed games actually survive to produce viable player bases. Look at the games that have survived 10+ years: only CoC (and to a lesser extent d6 Star Wars) were based on licenses. All the rest have died.What a license does is allow a company to bootstrap itself into the industry. If my first release is a game tied to a popular license, that gets my games into lots of retailers and distributors for the reason noted above. With that foothold, I can then launch profitable settings that I've developed in-house. At least, if I were running a publisher that's how I'd do it.The key, IMO, is that most licensed games are awful. The license is either wholly unsuitable for use as an RPG, or the execution is terrible. CoC and d6 Star Wars are the best examples of good licensed games. They are both dedicated to letting you make up adventures and campaigns that fit into their source material. They don't spend endless pages obsessing over irrelevant, fanboyish details or regurgitating stuff that you could find in non-RPG books about the license.The key to the RPG industry is that it's probably much cheaper and more efficient in the long term to create your own games and settings rather than license them. Licensed games sell to RPG players who are also fans of the setting, and as PC points out they rarely see play. Rather, they end up treated as collectibles. Most people who are fans of a license are more interested in reading about it than playing games set in it.</blockquote>

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