Tabletopocalypse Now - GMS' thoughts about the decline in the hobby

[UngainlyTitan]

Pretty much. What, did you think that responding to you meant I disagreed with you?

By virtue of replying no, but I did think I was being lectured at, so sorry about that piece of talking past you.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

When you're in our shoes, you collect what data you can find and you draw a picture. You've got to keep in mind what quality of data you have, and know that your picture is going to be inaccurate, but it's better to be the guy who said that there are five planets and they move around the Earth, then the guy who didn't waste any time looking at the stars.

In any case, I was responding to this post:


Yes, Amazon numbers are much, much more reliable then your gut. So are the ICV2 numbers. Even given what I said above, it's one thing to ignore the stars, and yet another to argue about them without reference to, or in denial of, what is known.

Looking at the stars or the motions of the planets gives access to raw data and so one know what any measurement means. For that matter the ICV2 list has a pretty cleear meaning but you cannot draw inferences as the the health of the industry from it since a simple ranking does not tell you weither this years sales are greater than or less than last years.

 

[carmachu]

It's the fifth best selling RPG right now, according to some figures. That's not niche of a niche.

Of course it is. Number 1 is the 8000 ound gorilla, Wotc. The next step down is Pazio, who doesnt do nearly the numbers WotC does. Then is WHF and DH/RT which does no where near Paizo sales numbers....then comes Dresden- which did according to the 3rd quarter.....3000 sales.

Thats a niche of the niche hobby.

 

[Umbran]

By virtue of replying no, but I did think I was being lectured at, so sorry about that piece of talking past you.

Gotcha. And sorry for making you feel lectured at. I was intending to expand a bit on your point, not school you on your own point.

 

[Elric]

Whenever you see a metric, you should ask yourself the purpose of its presentation, to help you decide if it is pertinent to your use.

Amazon does not provide ranking metrics to give you a good idea of how well different products are selling within their market spaces - Amazon's not in the business of providing market analysis. They're presenting them in the hopes they may influence your purchasing choice. Their metric is not likely to be appropriate for analysis.

The inference to make here is that Amazon's "bestsellers" is based on a more recent period of time than what we'd want to analyze the relative sales of industry products.

Still, in the Amazon snapshot I pointed to earlier, over this unknown (but likely short) time horizon D&D is significantly outselling Pathfinder if the books at the top have relatively similar sales to the books farther down and slightly outselling Pathfinder if the books at the top have much larger sales than the books a little further down the list.

I wonder how the ICV2 survey came up with a "tied" ranking for D&D and Pathfinder. Did they calculate a margin of error below which they call two companies equal? If anyone knows/can link to details of how the survey and rankings work, I'd appreciate it.

 

[Dire Bare]

I wonder how the ICV2 survey came up with a "tied" ranking for D&D and Pathfinder. Did they calculate a margin of error below which they call two companies equal? If anyone knows/can link to details of how the survey and rankings work, I'd appreciate it.

One thing to keep in mind is that how D&D vs Pathfinder sells in the FLGS market is likely different than how it sells in the mass market, like on Amazon.

It seems logical to me that D&D would outsell everything else by a wide margin on Amazon and other similar retailers, while having Pathfinder as a serious contender in the hobby market. If I understand correctly ICv2 only polls the hobby market, and not the big retailers . . . right?

 

[nedjer]

a group of friends creating a story together.

That's one of the simplest and best explanations I've come across. Your XP will be along in a minute

 

[billd91]

If I understand correctly ICv2 only polls the hobby market, and not the big retailers . . . right?

That is correct. There are, however, other tools that report fairly reliably on those too. ICv2 focuses on the hobby market because that's their area of expertise having come out of the distribution biz.

 

[Elric]

If I understand correctly ICv2 only polls the hobby market, and not the big retailers . . . right?

So by "hobby market" you mean that ICV2 doesn't poll the likes of Borders stores, and also doesn't poll online operations?

That makes sense, as I have rarely been to a Borders or Barnes and Noble store with a significant selection of non-D&D RPG books compared to D&D books relative to the ratio you see in dedicated gaming stores.

It isn't clear to me that smaller games would sell similar numbers of products online versus in hobby stores. So even if the 5th game on ICV2's list sold few products, that doesn't necessarily mean that there weren't significant orders of some other game that didn't sell many products through stores. I doubt there's any good data here, though.

Speaking just for myself, of the last 10 RPG books I've bought (some D&D, some not), half were pdfs and the other half were books I ordered online. So I wonder how much of the market even for non-D&D games is covered by ICV2's survey.

Supposing that D&D has similar numbers to Pathfinder among dedicated gaming stores and significantly outsells it among Amazon online retailers and Borders-type physical stores, the next question is what the relative share of sales of RPG books among these types of stores is. Doubt there's available data on that either.

 

[czak]

Bookscan tracks bookstore sales and amazon so that data is available. - http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboard...hfinderIsTiedFor1stCongratsToPaizo&page=3#118