D&D 5E Second guessing WOTC

[wedgeski]

No surprises really. The Paizo product is higher-spec and higher quality.

Paizo's economics have always puzzled the hell out of me, though. Are they selling the Beginner Box at cost or something? And for that matter we have no idea what the margins are on the D&D Starter Set.

 

[Lalato]

Ryan Dancey cited some research they did at CCP on MMO demographics which indicated otherwise - the data showed that people were playing MMOs instead of, not as well as, TRPGs. The MMO pool had a massive population of ex-TRPGers.

I don't think this contradicts what I said that they scratch different itches. The location of those itches may be adjacent, but I still think they are different itches. I certainly don't get the same feeling from computer games, but I'm a sample size of one so what do I know.

I wonder about that, though. We're those people "retainable"? There are a number of reasons people play RPGs, and not all of them are common to both MMOs and TTRPGs. For folks who are playing for social reasons, MMOs might very well be able to replace TTRPGs. But if you are playing for story/sandboxy reasons, you may not be satisfied enough to switch to MMOs exclusively. What CRPGs did was fragment a market that was only a single market due to lack of options. When TTRPGs were the only game in town, it's not surprising that it had the player numbers. It's also not surprising that another option that gave gamers the part of the game they wanted would draw them away. They were destined to leave once any diversity of experience occurred.

Thanks for saying this in a way that I could never have articulated.