New Metrics to Measure the Industry By

[Sholari]

Over the years I have seen a lot of people talk about the sales for different products was the only indicator of success for the roleplaying industry. However, I think that just looking at sales is very short-sighted and will ultimately hurt the industry in the long run. For the health of the industry I think the following metrics deserve equal attention:

Group Formation: What is the rate that new groups form vs. old groups disband?

Gaming Frequency: How frequently does the average gaming group get together and what is the consistency level?

Active Player Base: The number of people that game at least once a month?

Passive Player Base: The number of people who consider themselves gamers but do not game at least once a month?

New Player Recruitment: The number of new players to the industry that have never gamed before?

Player Satisfaction Level: How satisfied is the average gamer with their gaming experience?

DM Satisfaction Level: How satisfied is the average DM with their gaming experience?

DM Turnover: What is the rate by which DMs turnover within a gaming group?


While sales are great, my sense is that many of these metrics are in decline, because no one has been paying attention to them. I argue that you take care of these things and sales will follow. Granted that for smaller companies it is very difficult to do much here but for the bigger players, more needs to be done to support these things. There are probably some very low cost ways to support things like group formation, etc.

 

[Azul]

Much as I hate to say it, those aren't very effective or useful metrics for the industry. First, it is extremely hard to gather such information (and presumably therefore very expensive to gather such information... probably too expensive to do it often enough to measure change in a meaningful way). Second, much of that information is not valuable because it has little or no connection to present/future sales and thus profits. Industries are about making money... even the gaming industry. A player who buys nothing more than a PHB *ever* could score very highly on those metrics... and provide a terrible revenue stream for every game company out there.

The majority of players actually buy very little gaming stuff (a few player-specific books, some dice, a mini for their PCs). Aside from those items, the bulk of sales come from GMs and hardcore "book-junkie" players.... the occasional guys with the ever-increasing gaming book collections. There are tons of players out there still using 10-20 year old gaming material who would score wonderfully on your metrics and yet haven't bought anything from the industry in ages. The industry wants metrics that tell it about its regular customers, and not every gamer (I'd even hazard to say well under half of all gamers) are *regular* customers in any sense of the word.

If there were a way to cost-efficiently gather such information, your metics would be a good way to assess the health of the gaming hobby in general... not the industry but rather the community as a whole. It would allow you to measure how active the player community is and which games have created long-term, fan-bases. It would tell you which games are enjoyed and have stayed enjoyable over time (as you keep collecting data).

Sales do reflect some of this information (e.g. sales are likely to corelate with the size of the active player base, repeat sales will have some corelation with player satisfaction -- however, the the exactly relationships aren't linear... a regular bookaholic game buyer is worth several casual gamers to the industry, but those casual gamers as a group might account for more actual game playing). However, sales figures don't tell you which books still see use a decade later and which books are collecting dust in a few months. Once the item is sold, the industry may support it for a few years but as the game ages it falls off the industry's sales driven radar (for very good business reasons). Discontinued games and old editions account for a serious chunk of the games played these days.

While it is in the gaming industry's best interests to generally promote the hobby itself since it is the driving force behind their sales, the industry must be business savvy in its approach to keep alive. That means that its focus and interests will sometimes be different from those of gamers in general. Casual gamers, old-edition gamers, discontinued game players, core-rules only players and other infrequent buyers are important members of gaming groups but are peripheral to the main client base of the industry. They guys who buy all the junk are who keeps the gaming companies afloat so obviously the industry is most interested in them.

 

[Geoff Watson]

The use sales as a measure as it's pretty much the only one that can be measured.

Most of your suggestions would be very difficult to implement.

Geoff.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Perhaps this should be moved to the publishers forum to get the professionals whose liveliehoods are involved with the industry as opposed to the general forum where casual and not so casual gamers roam.

 

[Sholari]

The use sales as a measure as it's pretty much the only one that can be measured.

Most of your suggestions would be very difficult to implement.

Geoff.

Oh come now. Its not that hard. Several of these metrics could be supported by a representative market research panel. For a company like WOTC at the very least they should be paying attention to these sorts of things or perhaps an industry organization like GAMA.

 

[Sholari]

Second, much of that information is not valuable because it has little or no connection to present/future sales and thus profits. Industries are about making money... even the gaming industry.

So if all these things were tanking, how profitable do you think the industry would be? I'm saying most publishersiare only paying attention to sales and not the health of the overall industry. Someone needs to pay attention to this whether and industyr organization, etc. to the state of the industry.

 

[Maggan]

Oh come now. Its not that hard. Several of these metrics could be supported by a representative market research panel. For a company like WOTC at the very least they should be paying attention to these sorts of things or perhaps an industry organization like GAMA.

I would be surprised if WotC didn't already pay attention to stuff like this.

I would be extremely surprised if they shared that data, though.

Just because we aint seein the numbers, doesn't mean that someone aint collecting them.

So my question is ... does anyone know if data like this is collected, eg by WotC?

/M

 

[WayneLigon]

There are tons of players out there still using 10-20 year old gaming material who would score wonderfully on your metrics and yet haven't bought anything from the industry in ages. .... Discontinued games and old editions account for a serious chunk of the games played these days.

I would find that very hard to believe, myself, but this is where a survey of gamers would come in useful. I personally don't know of anyone playing old editions or discontinued games on a rgular basis; certainly not enough to qualify it as being something they do all the time. Every gamer I've ever known makes at least a few purchases of new things a year.

Oh come now. Its not that hard. Several of these metrics could be supported by a representative market research panel. For a company like WOTC at the very least they should be paying attention to these sorts of things or perhaps an industry organization like GAMA.

I would think it would be fairly hard, but then I don't know a great deal about how a marketing team determines what it does. Some of those at least were address by the last survey Wizards did, such as gaming group size and frequency of play. How in the world would you measure Passive Player Base, though, without knocking on every door? They are unlikely to see a survey in Dragon, or fill out one at the FLGS, so how do you find them?

It would be nice to know those things but it still ties back to sales: those stats are useful only in terms of how it might affect the purchase of gaming books. You first have to detemine how each of those thins correlates to game book sales, or if there is any correlation at all. About the only one of those mentioned I would see as being important is the number of new players.

 

[Sholari]

Here are a couple more ideas before I have to run to work...

1) Support and _manage_ an online player registry and use it to support online surveys for the industry. This could be done very cost effectively for a couple hundred per survey. Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey are both very cheap but there are even less expensive providers that still have good online software for this.

2) Include regular comment cards in books and then process them through a data entry processor. With a lot of this being scanned in the US and then transmitted and processed overseas this is much more cost effective than it used to be.

 

[WayneLigon]

Here are a couple more ideas before I have to run to work...

1) Support and _manage_ an online player registry and use it to support online surveys for the industry. This could be done very cost effectively for a couple hundred per survey. Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey are both very cheap but there are even less expensive providers that still have good online software for this.

Might be good, but then you come back to the problem of selecting your survey group. The Wizards survey said, I think, that only about half of gamers even own a PC. Then you have those who would find the site, and the ones that would fill out the survey. I mean, ENWorld is very large and active, dedicated to the best known RPG, and we get a bare sliver of the gamers out there. We're not all that 'representative' a sample, either.