Sequels to Successes

[TerraDave]

That was more than a "bit" long and "frickin' wicked harmonica solo!"?

On the one hand: they have been a little negative on 3E, I agree.

On the other: A lot of D&Ders do seem to feel that the game becomes excessively complicated, swingy, and unbalanced at higher levels, requires a "bit" too much prep time, and has too much rules space devoted to corner cases that don't come into play much, and/or are so fidly you didn't want them to come into play at all.

With 4E, they are claiming to fix all that.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

If people are fans of Coke, they won't necessarily give New Coke a whirl. I think both of those are pretty good examples of trying to make a "sequel" that failed pretty catastrophically.

In fact, I think New Coke is *especially* relevant.

I've been thinking for awhile that New Coke could be the example that best relates to 4E. New Coke was an interesting story. Coca-Cola was seeing their market share slip slowly to Pepsi. The president decided that he was willing to go out on a limb and reformulate the Coke recipe to make it better. They spent allot of time on the new recipe and kept tweaking it until almost everyone in taste tests and focus groups liked it better than Coke or Pepsi. In those focus groups though were a VERY SMALL if somewhat vocal segment that kept saying over and over, it may taste good, but it is not Coke and it never will be, Coke had some flaws but thats what they liked about Coke. The president was informed of this but marketing and everyone else kept saying, don't worry this is at most like 1% and 99% of the people love it. So Coca-Cola went ahead and released New Coke.

Now this is a part that most people are not aware of. At first New Coke was a giant success. Coca-Cola market share went up and lots of people bought New Coke. Within the first couple of months though that small but vocal minority kept up its chants of New Coke is not Coke it is something else. We want real Coke. The media started to pick up on this meme and it started to be believed by the general public. Sure the public liked the taste of New Coke, but they began to believe as well that it wasn't really Coke but Pepsi by a different name. Some of the vocal minority also hit Coca-Cola at their bottlers. Bottlers began complaining to Coca-Cola that people on the street would come up to them and yell and complain that they had destroyed Coke. It wasn't that the bottlers weren't selling product but they were getting sick of being yelled at.

Coca-Cola was beginning to feel and notice the PR disaster that was happening around them. In order to placate the masses and hopefully staunch the wound it was decided to bring back the original formula (even if it wasn't really the case since the sugar had been replaced with high fructose corn sweetener) and call it Classic Coke. New Coke was not taken off the market and even stayed on the market for over 10 years as Coke. The two brands of Coke were to both be on shelves and people could choose which formula they wanted. Once Classic Coke went on the market it immediately outsold New Coke and soon sent it into niche oblivion. Classic Coke shortly thereafter not only kept the market share that New Coke had gained but increased it even more.

I see many of the same factors with D&D. 3.5 was losing market share and WotC/Hasbro wanted a boost in sales. They did lots of research and came up with new rules that made the game more fun. Almost everyone who tried the new system kept saying yes this is more fun. I like this better than 3.5. A small but vocal minority kept saying though, yes it is fun but it doesn't feel like D&D anymore. We want D&D and this is no longer it. Well WotC has heard this but like Coca-Cola looked at the bigger picture and said, yes some people don't like it but almost everyone does so lets go with it.

The small minority continues with its insistence that while it may be fun it is a different game and no longer D&D. Slowly this idea is catching on and more and more people are repeating it. 4E will be released soon, and just like New Coke it will probably sell really well. But does that mean it will be successful in the long run.

The question will start to be how much the idea catches on that while 4E may be fun it isn't really D&D anymore. We also need to look at what kind of reaction the FLGS end up getting. Will it be like the bottlers where customers come in and start harassing the employees because WotC ruined D&D. If the PR gets bad enough, even if sales are strong, this could make WotC reconsider their direction. New Coke didn't die because it didn't sell well, New Coke died because of bad PR.

 

[Goreg Skullcrusher]

That was more than a "bit" long and "frickin' wicked harmonica solo!"?

On the one hand: they have been a little negative on 3E, I agree.

On the other: A lot of D&Ders do seem to feel that the game becomes excessively complicated, swingy, and unbalanced at higher levels, requires a "bit" too much prep time, and has too much rules space devoted to corner cases that don't come into play much, and/or are so fidly you didn't want them to come into play at all.

With 4E, they are claiming to fix all that.

Indeed, and it's soundly in their court on how to convince people to leave their investment and pick up the new game. If it were only a simple decision between option A and option B, I'm sure most of us would at least sample each to see which they like. The movie comparison is especially apt in that the only things by which to judge the sequel are trailers and reviews.

As it is, a lot of people are being asked to leave something they liked and are invested for a system which will require further investment, and may not be as good as the edition they currently like. Not many people are willing to take that leap of faith when they hear bits and pieces of things that on the outside don't seem like good changes.

 

[Kaodi]

I think there are some interesting arguments and analogies here. However, I also think that the major premise, the Sophomore Syndrome, has a few problems. Maybe 3e/v3.5 did do really well, but that is at most only relative. There is a lot of market out there that D&D has yet to hit, a lot of room for improvement.

That said, perhaps D&D is forever stuck as a niche product that will have trouble increasing its sales beyond the current peak, but I think that that scenario is at worst no more likely than the one being propsed by this thread.

I enjoyed the more in depth history of the New Coke.

 

[The Little Raven]

On the one hand: they have been a little negative on 3E, I agree.

About as negative as they were on 2E, and as negative as TSR was on 1E and OD&D.

 

[JoelF]

I've been thinking for awhile that New Coke could be the example that best relates to 4E. New Coke was an interesting story. Coca-Cola was seeing their market share slip slowly to Pepsi. The president decided that he was willing to go out on a limb and reformulate the Coke recipe to make it better. They spent allot of time on the new recipe and kept tweaking it until almost everyone in taste tests and focus groups liked it better than Coke or Pepsi. In those focus groups though were a VERY SMALL if somewhat vocal segment that kept saying over and over, it may taste good, but it is not Coke and it never will be, Coke had some flaws but thats what they liked about Coke. The president was informed of this but marketing and everyone else kept saying, don't worry this is at most like 1% and 99% of the people love it. So Coca-Cola went ahead and released New Coke.

Now this is a part that most people are not aware of. At first New Coke was a giant success. Coca-Cola market share went up and lots of people bought New Coke. Within the first couple of months though that small but vocal minority kept up its chants of New Coke is not Coke it is something else. We want real Coke. The media started to pick up on this meme and it started to be believed by the general public. Sure the public liked the taste of New Coke, but they began to believe as well that it wasn't really Coke but Pepsi by a different name. Some of the vocal minority also hit Coca-Cola at their bottlers. Bottlers began complaining to Coca-Cola that people on the street would come up to them and yell and complain that they had destroyed Coke. It wasn't that the bottlers weren't selling product but they were getting sick of being yelled at.

Coca-Cola was beginning to feel and notice the PR disaster that was happening around them. In order to placate the masses and hopefully staunch the wound it was decided to bring back the original formula (even if it wasn't really the case since the sugar had been replaced with high fructose corn sweetener) and call it Classic Coke. New Coke was not taken off the market and even stayed on the market for over 10 years as Coke. The two brands of Coke were to both be on shelves and people could choose which formula they wanted. Once Classic Coke went on the market it immediately outsold New Coke and soon sent it into niche oblivion. Classic Coke shortly thereafter not only kept the market share that New Coke had gained but increased it even more.

I'm no expert on the New Coke debacle, but that's not how I remember it at the time, nor when I studied the Harvard Buseinss School case study while getting my MBA. The focus groups did give it positive reviews, but it was not the huge sucess you're suggesting. Pretty much immediately after it came out there were large vocal protests (not rioting in the streets or anything, but for a soft drink, pretty vocal). I remember trying New Coke the first week it came out and thought it tasted awful, as did most of my family and friends. I'm reasonably certain that nowhere near 99% of people ever liked it from any type of random sample of the population. The move to bring back the "old formula" under the name Classic Coke was due to a flop in sales, not just a vocal minority. The Coca-cola company would have happily kept New Coke as the only version if sales were strong, and ignored the vocal minority, who would have stopped being vocal after a while if the cause was lost.

I think another telling parallel from business history that hopefully isn't relevant is the 1970s attempt by Levis jeans to make dress pants. The executives basically ignored their market research that said no one wanted to buy dress pants with the Levis brand name, since Lee was too strongly associated with causal jeans and not dress pants. The executives went ahead with their product launch anyway, and lost their shirts (no pun intended) and their jobs.

Hopefully, WOTC hasn't conveniently ignored market research from before 4E was announced. I have no idea what that research may have indicated, but if there was a 20% block of players who indicated that they wouldn't convert to a new edition that wasn't backwards compatible, I hope WOTC doesn't expect a 95% conversion rate. (This is purely hypothetical, of course.)

 

[Harshax]

From what I can tell, 3e was the best selling edition of D&D to date.

Maybe the numbers are skewed because of accessibility to online vendors, but I know a respected FLGS owner who has been in business for decades who would tell you AD&D 1e blew the pants off 3e sales. His ledger says that The Unearthed Arcana outsold any 3e book he had in his shop. (his 3e catalog is extensive)

 

[Goreg Skullcrusher]

Coke stuff

Relevent link

 

[Brown Jenkin]

I'm no expert on the New Coke debacle, but that's not how I remember it at the time, nor when I studied the Harvard Buseinss School case study while getting my MBA. The focus groups did give it positive reviews, but it was not the huge sucess you're suggesting. Pretty much immediately after it came out there were large vocal protests (not rioting in the streets or anything, but for a soft drink, pretty vocal). I remember trying New Coke the first week it came out and thought it tasted awful, as did most of my family and friends. I'm reasonably certain that nowhere near 99% of people ever liked it from any type of random sample of the population. The move to bring back the "old formula" under the name Classic Coke was due to a flop in sales, not just a vocal minority. The Coca-cola company would have happily kept New Coke as the only version if sales were strong, and ignored the vocal minority, who would have stopped being vocal after a while if the cause was lost.

Looking back at sources, the oposition rate in focus groups was about 10% and not 1% but the positives were still much higher than negatives. There were large vocal protests, but that was fed by the media that picked up on the New Coke is not Coke setiments of the vocal minority. Nonetheless year to year profits went up 8%. There was no dip in sales, what executives started to worry about however was that at the 2 month mark the summer June sales stayed flat instead of increasing. It was at this point that Classic Coke was introduced so no further sales figures can be gleaned as to its future success or not. Coca-Cola saw the PR dissaster looking them in the face and saw thier initial sales boost flatten and chose to back down rather than to see whether the flattening of sales was a temporary PR problem or an indication in a future colapse of sales.

 

[Carnivorous_Bean]

Well, if it adds anything to the discussion, my RPG group had given up entirely on 3rd edition about 4 to 5 months before we heard that there was even going to be a 4th edition. The combination of its "everything's generic," "everything involves 20000000 ongoing modifiers to track, some of which stack and some of which don't," and the fact that you had to use information scattered between half a dozen books or more to make any class except wizard, cleric, or druid interesting to play at higher levels, which became a bookkeeping nightmare ('we're using pages X to Y of Bo9S, but not pages Z to C, or was it Z to B?'), made us abandon it in pure frustration.

Really, it was the fact that you had to use material (some of it dubiously balanced) from up to a dozen splatbooks to make any classes except wizard, cleric, and druid versatile and interesting at the higher levels, that finally drove us wild enough to toss the whole thing over as a bad business.

I tried creating a "Book of 9 Swords" list of powers/maneuvers for the other "dull as dishwater" classes (fighter, barbarian, rogue, ranger, and yes, even paladin, although at least the last two have a few spells to spice them up -- although I wanted a wilderness archer rather than a nature priest with a bow), but the volume of work involved was inconsistent with the demands of running my own small business, and I reluctantly abandoned the project.

I'd given up on role-playing as a hobby until someone I know told me that 4th edition was in the works tempted me back to the boards. And lo and behold, I saw that 4th edition was at least promising to give all the classes maneuvers/powers so that, maybe, they'd actually have something to do other than hit or miss or try to trip someone (God, I came to hate Trip with a passion). So, in three words, I was sold.

So it seems to me that a sequel that fixes a problem in something you badly want to like, but that doesn't work the way you want it without tinkering beyond your power to perform -- and which removes the said problem as one of its main features -- can have the opposite effect, by re-engaging people who had regretfully shrugged and moved on.

I think these D&D iterations are a bit more like car models than movie sequels, myself. One presumes that it isn't a marketing mistake to put out a 2009 Ford, as a random example, simply because 2002 Fords already exist. The old ones are showing their age and starting to run not quite as well as once they did. Some people will keep restoring them, sure, and they'll work fine for many more years. But the average consumer is going to want to ditch the headaches of the aging system -- even if the headaches are minor, they're still there -- and try a new one. They know headaches will occur with that in time, too, but there's a period when everything is smooth sailing.

That is the appeal of the new model of D&D. Not that it's perfect, or that it'll last forever, but that it sweeps out the clutter and promises several years of renewed gaming pleasure. Without tanglefoot bags, I hope.