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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 7674190" data-attributes="member: 6680772">I don't agree.  The whole context of this discussion is "Where is the science fiction RPG with the same kind of market penetration as 5e?"  To say that Paizo, Pelgrane, MCG etc. have "found their niche" is exactly the problem.  No other RPG can compete with 5e's market, except for possibly Pathfinder, which is still fantasy D&D.  And even Paizo is looking at alternative revenue streams to supplement the RPG.And the problem is, successful RPGs find their initial success with RPG fans, who, as Mearls notes, then demand more options, more complexity.  Answering that demand is great for the game's short term, continued success, but makes it difficult to slowly and steadily build a market of non-RPG fans, as D&D did.  So, does the publisher respond to the short-term demand, or do they play the long game, hoping they can eventually break into the mainstream?  To what extent is the latter made difficult by the fans' response to the rejecting the former?  We already see how much flack WotC is getting for slow-playing expansion.  They (and D&D) are big enough to take the short-term hit and still play the long-game.  What non-D&D fantasy game and/or publisher out there is big enough to do the same?The Dancey Roundtable a while back was instructive.  You have two heavyweights: WotC/D&D and Paizo/Pathfinder.  They can count units sold in six or seven figures.  Everyone else, even the most successful, are waaaay behind.  Perennial ICv2 Top 5 finisher Evil Hat games has, lifetime, sold 211,000 units of everything in their RPG lines.  Per <a href="https://www.acaeum.com/library/printrun.html" target="_blank">this</a>, WotC was selling that much in Player Handbooks per year during 3e.  They probably sold at least twice that in 5e PHBs this year.  Burning Wheel sold 5,000 units and people in the industry were agreeing that that was a success. Most of the other companies are thriving based on Kickstarter, which lets them come up with an idea, test the market, and then publish to the exact size of the market willing to buy the product.  That's great for giving them stability and avoiding costly failures.  But it also means that it's highly unlikely that a game they produce will ever get the market penetration D&D has.  Their niche becomes well-protected, but it is nonetheless a niche.Changing subjects, regarding using settings as "expansions", I think this is a viable strategy.  The problem with TSR was not that they used settings as expansions, but that they were trying to do them all at the same time.  Ideally, what they'd do (and what I suspect they are trying right now) is have a setting expansion.  Support it for a bit, and then stop.  Let whatever product that is out there in the wild do its thing, and move to the next expansion (setting).  Support that for a while, and then stop.  You can still get the richness of variety of different settings, but you're not killing your return on investment.</blockquote>

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