DaveMage said:
So, to Erik Mona and Mike Mearls:
Where do you see the d20 industry going in the next 1-2 years? Or even 3-5 years?
Some have hypothisized that several d20 companies will go out of business and that to survive long-term, a d20 company only has to weather the current storm.
If that's the case though, once the market "pares down", wouldn't that then create an entry point for more new companies (and thus a never-ending glut of products)?
I think that in the short-term, we're going to see companies doing more settings and new games. My sense is that companies see generic fantasy as largely done. The 2nd edition back catalog has been exhausted. No offense to Mongoose, but I giggled when I saw the announcement of Quintessential Fighter 2. The idea well is running dry, or at least that's the perception.
I think in the next 5 years, we're going to see the d20 hobby solidify as a wholly separate entity from the White Wolf hobby and the general RPG hobby. I think it already is separate in many ways, but as the current crop of new gamers moves through D&D, IMO a dwindling percentage of the already small proportion who move on to non-d20 games will end up migrating to them. As more games come out that competently handle different types of games, there'll be less and less of a reason for d20 gamers to bother with non-d20 games. I think there's plenty of design room waiting to be explored in d20, and as that space is explored it leaves less room for well-designed non-d20/WoD games.
The one wild card lies in WotC. If they release 4ed and make significant changes to the core gaming engine, they face a huge problem. Third party publishers can easily continue to produce support material for 3.0/3.5, possibly creating a rift in their market. There's also the chance that, if WotC has some success with Eberron and goes back to the TSR way of doing things, that the entire industry could go haywire. I think that if WotC started producing lots of books, everyone but WW and AEG would take a big hit. Though they'd eventually choke to death on their own excess a la TSR, even a failed D&D book would have more sales and bigger draw to distributors and retailers than any d20 book short of those two publishers.
The thing about a d20 "glut" is that if you step back and look at it in terms of the RPG industry in general, I think it's business as usual. Look at how many World of Darkness books WW squeezes out every month. Look at an issue of Gametrade or scan the gaming news sites. There's tons of non-d20 books coming out every month, and there always has been. The only reason that we see d20 as a glut is that it's new, and it forces us to look at an endemic characteristic of gaming in a novel light. I think we'll always have 3 or 4 major publishers, whose ranks change rarely, about a dozen mid-list publishers whose ranks turn-over on a roughly 5 to 10 year cycle, and dozens of smaller publishers who have tremendous turn over. There is some movement between those three tiers, but not too much.
So, while companies may fold and new ones show up, the industry as a whole remains stable. In many cases, while company names change the people behind them remain the same.
So, that's how I see it. d20 has stabilized, perhaps at a point south of what people expected, and its a bigger hobby than WW gaming or everything else.
