I agree with most of the non-extreme statments expressed here and I am going to miss the magazines. I own a successful game store and am working of a game design project we are going to publish in the near future. Over the years my staff in the store and on the project have come to understand key game design values, and I just felt like putting my two cents in based on our work in both the retail store and game design studio.
Wizards track record with products other than D&D and Magic is poor. They tend to try to be trend setters and push the gaming industry in ways it doesn't want to go. They have a fairly large library of dead rpgs, ccgs and wargame attempts to support this. Though Magic's yearly development cycle is impressive and D&D products have gotten better over the years, most of Wizards new products fail. Think Dreamblade, Star Sistaz, Vampire, Mechwarrior, Netrunner, Everway, Duelmasters, Chainmail, Star Wars CCG. Most of these games had potential and alot of money put into making them, but they often lack key design elements and are dead before they even reach their target markets. Year after year Wizards pumps this kind of product out and they eventually all fail. Wizards has great staff, it just something in the final assembly of the products misses the mark. If I were to make a educated guess, I would say it is the creative directors on each of those products who either do not understand their target market or how the final game should play.
Both the parent company hasbro and Wotc themselves do not utilize the internet well. Their websites are akward. They often fail to use the web as a medium well. This concerns me about the Digitial Initative and the future of Dungeon and Dragon magazines.
Likewise, Wizards is seeing the success of WOW and reacting to the MMOs (including putting taunt and aggro, hearthstones, socketed items, and other WOW features in D&D) instead of adapting D&D for the future of the web. There is a key difference in these two actions:
WOTC is reacting when they are try to bring D&D to the internet and make it compete with a MMO in its own medium. A MMO and a RPG are two different products and treating them like they are the same will fail. You can learn or be inspired by a business model of one for the other, but just trying to market to your customers and tap into their revenues in a similar manner is not thinking the consequences through all the way.
What WOTC needs to do is adapt D&D by removing its barriers to entry for new players and DMs. Strengthen what makes D&D unqiue and why people play it. Recapture the essence of what made D&D exciting in the first place and share that with a new generation. Likewise, draw solid, positive mainstream attention to the D&D brand instead of the negative attention of a couple of terrible movies, a really terrible MMO and the cheesy (but lovable) cartoon from the early 80's. The various video games that have done well mostly don't count because they are under the Forgotten Realms brand and the non-D&D players had little idea of the connection between those games and D&D. So far, D&D has not made a good household name for it self with the non-hobby gamers. This has to change.
Roleplaying games offer something computer games (and MMOs) never can do well. They offer a shared adventure in the imagination driven by character development and storytelling. MMOs are all about the fights, persistant peer recognition and the various grinds. Roleplaying games can skip boring travel, trash mobs, weekly guild raids to Molten Core for the Nth time this year. They can move from scene to scene, they can delve in to social and political conflicts, they can evoke emotional reactions, immerse players and create drama, tension, fear and other moods. They can allow players to use their imagination and do anything they can think of, as opposed to what the programers were limited by time and budget to be done in the game. This is what roleplaying games should be figuring out how to support and sell, and then use the internet to support that in an intutive manner (kinda like what ENworld does naturally, and basically for free).
D&D should not try to be WOW. It should try to be a better D&D with its barriers to entry removed for new players, DMs and veteran players alike. In our product studies, we found out of all the games in the hobby, platform and PC markets, World of Warcraft had zero barriers to entry for their users, other than basic computer skills until you reached end game content and could no longer play casually. D&D (and other RPGs) would be fairing better if they looked at their own barriers to entry and removed them without hurting gameplay. Then redevelop the games to capture and communicate why their fun to the target audiance, and give the target audience a free demo of that experience. That is what WOTC needs to be doing, instead of making goblin sims games (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=goblinz/welcome) for their Digitial Initiative.
I wish D&D and Dragon and Dungeon well. They are responsible for most of the gaming industry's existance and have some great talent working on them. It just seems to me it hard to find creative directors that have the business skills and the game industry knowledge to do it right and bring it all together. Hopefully this isn't one of those cases.
Nate Jones
Borderlands Games
www.borderlandsgames.com
Wizards track record with products other than D&D and Magic is poor. They tend to try to be trend setters and push the gaming industry in ways it doesn't want to go. They have a fairly large library of dead rpgs, ccgs and wargame attempts to support this. Though Magic's yearly development cycle is impressive and D&D products have gotten better over the years, most of Wizards new products fail. Think Dreamblade, Star Sistaz, Vampire, Mechwarrior, Netrunner, Everway, Duelmasters, Chainmail, Star Wars CCG. Most of these games had potential and alot of money put into making them, but they often lack key design elements and are dead before they even reach their target markets. Year after year Wizards pumps this kind of product out and they eventually all fail. Wizards has great staff, it just something in the final assembly of the products misses the mark. If I were to make a educated guess, I would say it is the creative directors on each of those products who either do not understand their target market or how the final game should play.
Both the parent company hasbro and Wotc themselves do not utilize the internet well. Their websites are akward. They often fail to use the web as a medium well. This concerns me about the Digitial Initative and the future of Dungeon and Dragon magazines.
Likewise, Wizards is seeing the success of WOW and reacting to the MMOs (including putting taunt and aggro, hearthstones, socketed items, and other WOW features in D&D) instead of adapting D&D for the future of the web. There is a key difference in these two actions:
WOTC is reacting when they are try to bring D&D to the internet and make it compete with a MMO in its own medium. A MMO and a RPG are two different products and treating them like they are the same will fail. You can learn or be inspired by a business model of one for the other, but just trying to market to your customers and tap into their revenues in a similar manner is not thinking the consequences through all the way.
What WOTC needs to do is adapt D&D by removing its barriers to entry for new players and DMs. Strengthen what makes D&D unqiue and why people play it. Recapture the essence of what made D&D exciting in the first place and share that with a new generation. Likewise, draw solid, positive mainstream attention to the D&D brand instead of the negative attention of a couple of terrible movies, a really terrible MMO and the cheesy (but lovable) cartoon from the early 80's. The various video games that have done well mostly don't count because they are under the Forgotten Realms brand and the non-D&D players had little idea of the connection between those games and D&D. So far, D&D has not made a good household name for it self with the non-hobby gamers. This has to change.
Roleplaying games offer something computer games (and MMOs) never can do well. They offer a shared adventure in the imagination driven by character development and storytelling. MMOs are all about the fights, persistant peer recognition and the various grinds. Roleplaying games can skip boring travel, trash mobs, weekly guild raids to Molten Core for the Nth time this year. They can move from scene to scene, they can delve in to social and political conflicts, they can evoke emotional reactions, immerse players and create drama, tension, fear and other moods. They can allow players to use their imagination and do anything they can think of, as opposed to what the programers were limited by time and budget to be done in the game. This is what roleplaying games should be figuring out how to support and sell, and then use the internet to support that in an intutive manner (kinda like what ENworld does naturally, and basically for free).
D&D should not try to be WOW. It should try to be a better D&D with its barriers to entry removed for new players, DMs and veteran players alike. In our product studies, we found out of all the games in the hobby, platform and PC markets, World of Warcraft had zero barriers to entry for their users, other than basic computer skills until you reached end game content and could no longer play casually. D&D (and other RPGs) would be fairing better if they looked at their own barriers to entry and removed them without hurting gameplay. Then redevelop the games to capture and communicate why their fun to the target audiance, and give the target audience a free demo of that experience. That is what WOTC needs to be doing, instead of making goblin sims games (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=goblinz/welcome) for their Digitial Initiative.
I wish D&D and Dragon and Dungeon well. They are responsible for most of the gaming industry's existance and have some great talent working on them. It just seems to me it hard to find creative directors that have the business skills and the game industry knowledge to do it right and bring it all together. Hopefully this isn't one of those cases.
Nate Jones
Borderlands Games
www.borderlandsgames.com
