State of the RPG Industry

[Sir Whiskers]

Don't know if I am the only one that notices this. But fewer and fewer people seem to want to run games. DMs seem to be burning out more quickly these days.

Two examples from my own group:

1) One player had never GM'd before, but wanted to give it a shot. His campaign was so off the wall, it reminded me of my OD&D days - he had the party working to save Tiamat from evil Transformers, Marvel supervillains, and intelligent skeletons! He stopped after several sessions because it was just too much work.

2) Myself. I've run two campaigns since 3E came out and both stopped when both the players and I ran out of energy. With so many other demands on my time, I haven't been able to generate much excitement about 3E for months and suspect a long hiatus is due. Not coincidentally, I've almost completely stopped buying any gaming material.

 

[woodelf]

I'd frankly be surprised that there were very many market studies done for this market. Have any of our industry posters ever paid for a market study? I suppose WotC has done so, though I wonder how often and when the last one was. Market studies can be expensive things, and the RPG industry doesn't strike as a big enough industry to generate very many.

There's only been one that anyone has ever admitted to, commissioned by WotC but conducted by a reputable polling firm, in '98-'99 (i forget exactly). WotC has not released enough data to independently audit their conclusions, and based on what they have released, coupled with some of the screening survey questions i saw (as a consumer/participant), i think it's fatally flawed when talking about RPers other than D&D players. How that translates to relevance (or its lack) for the slightly-broader D20 market, i have no idea.

Maybe there's something about text interspersed with statblocks that tweaks my brain.

See, and my eyes just glaze over when i get to statblocks, and i skip right over them. IMHO, statblocks should be redundant to the text--i should know about a character, say, from reading the narrative part of the text, and all the statblock should do is quantify the details.

 

[woodelf]

In the short term, yes. In the long term, no. As long as there is profit to be made, competitors will seek to enter the market. Eventually, the one with both best product and the healthiest financials will emerge on top.

Only significant barriers to entry will sustain the market leadership of a company that sells a poor product. Eventually a competitor will come along who not only has the financial savvy of the market leader, but has a better product too.

I suspect other mindshare issues can have a significant impact, too. Do you really think that The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones would've done as well as they did (in terms of sales) if they hadn't had the Star Wars name on them? In the RPG market, i don't think anyone is going to knock D&D out of the #1 fantasy RPG spot, at least not in the next couple of decades. It doesn't matter how good the competition is, so long as D&D is passable (it doesn't even have to be good, much less great), it'll keep the lead. Notice how, despite people leaving the game in droves during the later AD&D2 and Players' Option days, D&D was *still* the #1 fantasy RPG.

 

[Psion]

My experience is exactly opposite to yours. More and more folks that I know actually want to run games than I've seen in the last 15 years.

Similar here. For a while around here, it devolved into multiple DMs competing for players, and finding players was difficult because if you had a player move (frequent occurance when many of your players are military), it is hard to find replacements unless you "catch them on the inbound" because they are all playing someone elses game!

 

[woodelf]

This is borne out by the marketing survey WOTC did in 1999 (http://www.theescapist.com/WotCsummary1.htm). For RPGs in general, the total outlay of the average player is $400, and the average DM spends a total of $2,000. When focusing on D&D specifically, the figures were $187 and $1,444 ($7 and $21 monthly). I have no idea how the figures have changed over the last four years, but the "four players for every DM" thing that often gets bandied about is a lot less relevant when DMs spend 3-5 times more on the game than players do.

It's never been claimed that there is currently 4x the market for a players book. Rather, the current split in spending is acknowledged, while pointing out that *if you can get players to buy*, the market would be ~4x the size as for a GM's book. It's the holy grail of game marketing: get players to buy the way that GMs do. And thus the plethora of player-oriented (or at least player-accessible) books.

Also, note that those total figures were for the "lifetime" of a gamer. And note how you get the players' total up: play more games. Whereas you get the GMs' total up by sticking with the same game. [Based on my extrapolation: if a player has $187 of D&D books and $400 of gaming books, D&D represents less than half their gaming investiture, while for a GM D&D represents 3/4ths of their gaming investiture. Which makes sense: a GM buys more and more stuff for a game the more she plays it, and wwhen that material is crunch-heavy, she has an increasing incentive to continue playing the same game, in order to get maximal use out of the investment. Whereas a player buys a small amount of stuff and is good to go until the game switches, at which point more stuff is bought. This is probably less true now, since there are a lot more player-oriented D20 System products than there were player-oriented AD&D products--and was probably never true for WoD games (among others).]

 

[woodelf]

Because, as a consumer, it indicates that there's a good chance that my gaming needs won't be met by d20 companies. And obviously, as a consumer, that's scary. If I generally enjoy the hobby, but realize that my needs aren't being met, and after a while discover that that more books are have little to no utility to me (and my time requirements for the game increases)... well, the hobby may just be "moving on without me".

You know, there's another solution: switch to a game system that *does* have the sort of support you want, or one that is mechanically simple enough that adapting movie/novel/TV plots is trivial. Or, in short, you can leave D&D/D20 System without leaving RPing.

(Further, I don't think that "liking modules" is such an aberrant behavior for a DM... but maybe it really is in this current D&D climate.)

My perception is that more D&D GMs use prepared scenarios now than did in the pre-D&D3E days, but that Dungeon largely fills that demand.

 

[woodelf]

Don't know if I am the only one that notices this. But fewer and fewer people seem to want to run games. DMs seem to be burning out more quickly these days.

My experience is exactly opposite to yours. More and more folks that I know actually want to run games than I've seen in the last 15 years. In the past, at best, I had one other DM...now I have three potential people, all running or working on their own games.

My experiences match both of yours, because i don't see them as contradictory. I see more people GMing now than i used, *and* i see them burning out more quickly. It used to be, there were a few semi-perpetual GMs who did all the GMing, but ran campaigns that lasted for several years, were frequently running multiple campaigns, and started a new one as soon as the old one finished. Now, i see a lot more people GMing, but rarely multiple campaigns; more of the campaigns fall apart more quickly (not always due to GM burnout); and a GM who has finished a campaign is less likely to want to jump right back into the saddle. In fact, in the last year i have twice had to deal with a GM who wanted to stop GMing in the middle of a well-run, fun ongoing campaign. In both cases, the players weren't getting tired of it, or otherwise feeling it had run its course--it was just the GM. In fact, in one case the GM wanted the campaign to continue, but just couldn't be the GM any more. I'd never before, in ~20 years of gaming, run into this phenomenon. GM ending a campaign 'cause it wasn't fun any more? Yep. Game falling apart for scheduling or personality reasons? Yep. Campaign ending because the storyarch was complete? Yep. Someone wanting to try GMing, and so the current GM graciously stepped aside? Yep. GM recognizing they were doing a poor job? Yep. But never before a GM wanting out of a perfectly good game. In both cases, they were D&D3E games, so i'm tempted to blame the greater complexity of D&D3E (compared to anything else i've played), but i'm not sure it's that simple. [edit: doh! My brain wasn't engaged: in one case, the GM suffered system frustration first, and we switched to a different system that he enjoyed, so the burnout was definitely unrelated to D&D3E.] I *do* know that, speaking as a GM, constant power escalation isn't particularly fun, and can even be actively frustrating, while that same power escalation tends to be one of the primary appeals as a player--and D&D3E probably has more and quicker power escalation built in than previous versions of D&D. As a player, i want to level on a regular basis. As a GM, i'd prefer the characters never to level (but rather grow in other ways)--the constant re-adjustment of the power curve, and re-learning how to make the game challenging, and so on, i find very tiring.

 

[woodelf]

2) Myself. I've run two campaigns since 3E came out and both stopped when both the players and I ran out of energy. With so many other demands on my time, I haven't been able to generate much excitement about 3E for months and suspect a long hiatus is due. Not coincidentally, I've almost completely stopped buying any gaming material.

Maybe you need to try a different game to re-energize your interest. Try something completely different, but in a genre you enjoy. And, since you're trying to combat burnout, i'd try a fairly rules-light system. (Added bonus: less prep time required.)

 

[Vaxalon]

I've written one book, and I'm writing another.

They're NPC resources.

For me, I don't see a difference between fluff and crunch. It's like I'm building a doll... I need to have stuff that makes the character "live", the fluff, and I need stuff that makes him gameable, the crunch. I include enough of each to do the job.

I can't see how any responsible author can do any different.

 

[Umbran]

The other and much better option is to expand the RPG market base. More players and more DM's means more books sold all around. I also see elements of this strategy in WotC's recent move to 3.5 and connecting the game to the minis market. This accomplishes several things. It allows WotC to sell both books and minis, cross-marketing their RPG products and their minis products and hopefully expanding the customer base for both products at the same time.

The link that Staffan gave suggests that it's not all that likely to work, though. The previous survey showed that there aren't many "general gamers" out there. Issuing a D&D based game in another gaming genre (say collectible card games, or miniature wargames) is not likely to bring those players over to RPGs, as only a minority tend to play more than one type of hobby game. This leaves a company free to use the IP in different game types without hurting themselves, but they aren't likely to cause bleed-over.

Unless, of course, you think that the CCG players and wargame players just don't know that D&D exists, and that the new crossover game woudl be their introduction. I doubt that most CCG and wargame players are ignorant of D&D. They know it is there, and don't choose to play it. Giving them a dwarven barbarian mini isnt gonna change that.

Seriously, the amount of IP that WotC sits on and does nothing with just boggles my mind.

It doesn't boggle me at all, for one simple reason - it is not true that all press is good press. A bad movie or cartoon can cause people to choose to not play the game. A dumb or low quality action figure isn't going to turn people on - it will turn people off. Add to this the fact that we're not yet out of the current economic dip that will have put a damper on more chancey ventures, and you have the current position.

So, WotC has to bide it's tiime, and wait until a quality use of the IP comes along.