D&D General Ray Winninger on 5e’s success, product cadence, the OGL, and more.

[Charlaquin]

Really interesting to learn that the big demographic shift was not actually more younger players, but more women! I wonder what brought that on, if it was really just more exposure through live streaming games and such, or if other factors played as big or bigger of a role. Obviously it’s anyone’s guess, but I’m more inclined to assume something in the hobby space must have changed to make it more friendly towards women than that it was just a matter of exposure.

 

[Scribe]

Really interesting to learn that the big demographic shift was not actually more younger players, but more women! I wonder what brought that on, if it was really just more exposure through live streaming games and such, or if other factors played as big or bigger of a role. Obviously it’s anyone’s guess, but I’m more inclined to assume something in the hobby space must have changed to make it more friendly towards women than that it was just a matter of exposure.

The shift in nerd culture alone. Before Twitch turned into a soft core site, you could see more women taking part in gaming.

Hell, just go back to early WoW, raids were full of women, when not too long before that, it just wasnt really happening.

Add more women to the nerd/hobby pool, and it only makes sense that it would show up in D&D when it took off with 5e.

 

[michaeljpastor]

Stan!, a longtime employee and contractor for TSR and Wizards of the Coast has an amazing YouTube interview shoe he’s been running talking to many luminaries who worked at TSR and WOTC. You can find the playlist here.

I would just like to point out that Stan!s show has been running the entire 50th anniversary year of D&D - even WOTC hasn't celebrated it as much as he has. Ed Greenwood's interview is one of my favorites - it's one of those "I'm not crying, you're crying" moments.

 

[michaeljpastor]

The shift in nerd culture alone. Before Twitch turned into a soft core site, you could see more women taking part in gaming.

Hell, just go back to early WoW, raids were full of women, when not too long before that, it just wasnt really happening.

Add more women to the nerd/hobby pool, and it only makes sense that it would show up in D&D when it took off with 5e.

Add to that comic book fandom, cosplay, furries and just an overall increase in Geek Chic cred. Big Bang Theory was the result of Geek Chic just as much as it caused it. You could start bringing in "Creative Class" hypothesis, GenX demographics, network effects and technology egalitarianism while you're at it.

 

[eyeheartawk]

He brought up the DMs Guild as the way to build those deep catalog products. He didn’t talk about the fundamental business model problem of the Guild, though — that an exclusive perpetual license and a 50% revenue split means it’s very hard for a Guild creator to make enough revenue to make anything other than a hobby project without losing money. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are just that — exceptions.

This is where I fall.

I know I'm in the minority, on this board anyway, about that. But, a 50% revenue split and a perpetual license are a pretty extortionate set of terms when you are, in essence, taking on the work and expense of doing their product support work for them. They certainly benefit more from all the setting support than the authors do, far and by large I would say.

 

[Scribe]

Add to that comic book fandom, cosplay, furries and just an overall increase in Geek Chic cred. Big Bang Theory was the result of Geek Chic just as much as it caused it. You could start bringing in "Creative Class" hypothesis, GenX demographics, network effects and technology egalitarianism while you're at it.

Yep. So it's not like 5e actually did anything. It was happening across all of geekdom well before.

 

[Reynard]

Yep. So it's not like 5e actually did anything. It was happening across all of geekdom well before.

I think it is safe to say that there was a feedback loop -- like there has literally always been with D&D and popular culture.

 

[rhythmsoundmotion]

Really interesting to learn that the big demographic shift was not actually more younger players, but more women! I wonder what brought that on, if it was really just more exposure through live streaming games and such, or if other factors played as big or bigger of a role. Obviously it’s anyone’s guess, but I’m more inclined to assume something in the hobby space must have changed to make it more friendly towards women than that it was just a matter of exposure.

Vampire the Masquerade brought more women into the RPG scene. And did so earlier then the other positive “nerd culture” events.

 

[michaeljpastor]

Stan!, a longtime employee and contractor for TSR and Wizards of the Coast has an amazing YouTube interview shoe he’s been running talking to many luminaries who worked at TSR and WOTC. You can find the playlist here.

He had a recent interview with Ray Winninger, who led the D&D team from 2020 to 2022.

50 Years in the Dungeon — Episode 50 — Ray Winninger

Ray Winninger is the former head of Dungeons & Dragons for Wizards of the Coast and a long-time game designer and technologist.This week's cartoon homage wil...

www.youtube.com

The meat of his insights into D&D, WOTC, and Hasbro begins around the 50 minute mark.

Here are some things I grabbed from it:

• The reason there were so few products during the early days of 5e wasn’t a strategy but a simple matter of having a small team unable to release more than they did.
• Because of this, sales of older products did better than the sale of newer products, which was an inverse of how it normally worked (new products typically outsold older products).

I think there's a little bit of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" here. We don't know all the factors that turned D&D from a front-list to a back-list market. First, we have only the two extremes of (few products, few product lines and high sales) and (plethora of products in plethora of lines and high sales). We haven't seen the variations in between - how many products and lines per year can the company and the market handle? One data point group we don't accurately have is each person's annual budget for RPG products.

People frequently talk about the glut in terms of 'there were too many settings and we were cannibalizing the market.' What I don't hear is 'there were too many settings AND too many products in each' which I think is more accurate. Would the market be able to sustain one new book per setting per year (a sort of yearbook)? Two products, such as a setting book and an anthology setting book? I don't know - I don't think we've seen enough variety in models to establish a cause/effect relationship, yet.

 

[Reynard]

Really interesting to learn that the big demographic shift was not actually more younger players, but more women! I wonder what brought that on, if it was really just more exposure through live streaming games and such, or if other factors played as big or bigger of a role. Obviously it’s anyone’s guess, but I’m more inclined to assume something in the hobby space must have changed to make it more friendly towards women than that it was just a matter of exposure.

I would have guessed it was an age thing, too.

Since we know a lot of GenXers and Xellenials returned with 5E, and they were old enough to have families by then, I wonder if it is possible that wives and girlfriends came with some of the lapsed gamers. I know from personal experience that during the "dark years" when WoW ate a lot of tabletop D&D groups, women were easily half of those players. So I wonder if folks coming back to the table were joined by the same women playing WoW etc with them?