Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilref" data-source="post: 4408864" data-attributes="member: 73517">Boring Industry economics ahead:I'm going to use the figures cited by a friend of mine who owns a game store.RPGs+D&D miniatures (which if D&D goes down would have an uncertain future) make up about 50% of his yearly sales.D&D books make up 40% of that overall 50% (with miniatures accounting for another 30% and other rpgs making up the final 30%, primarily White Wolf).If D&D goes down as described, without a comparable seller to take its place then that store is going to be down 20% of its sales (the figure would likely be more becase of losing out on point of sales for other things).Most small gaming stores will suffer serious hardships if they're out 20% of their overall sales, add in D&D miniatures as well and that's a bigger hit but we'll just focus on the books for now. Without the guaranteed cash from D&D sales, stores would have less money to put towards the possible sellers as opposed to products guaranteed to go out the door.X percent of stores would go out of business as a result of this. With X percent less stores to distribute to, distributors would have to streamline their lines to account for this as well, as they'd also have less money coming in.With distributors streamlining, this would see a number of other rpg companies dropped from distrubution (note, this has been witnessed before with the d20 'crash' so this isn't a wild guess, it's based on past precedent).What would end up happening at best is a much smaller industry, with less shops, less easy access to books outside the internet (and the more people use the net for their rpg shopping, the more likely for other gaming companies to go down).Thus overall a spectacular bust in the industry. It's not saying that rpgs would vanish, but it would see a significant hit to a lot of companies and individuals, one that would doubtless result in a lot of people getting out of the industry in terms of producing or selling rpgs.</blockquote>

Verification