Daztur
Hero
From reading various bits of information I think I’ve been able to piece together what I think are the business motivations for 4ed. A lot of this is just speculation, but I think that it is logical and well-founded speculation.
The 3.*ed business plan:
It’s a rule of thumb in business that 20% of a business’s products will make 80% of a business’s profits. However you still need the other 80% that make 20% of the profit in order to keep the customers interested (for example I’m sure that Borders makes well over half of their profits on bestseller books alone but if they got rid of everything but the bestsellers their business would tank since nobody would bother to come in to browse through the shelves).
What the idea with 3.*ed was that WotC would publish a lot fewer books than had been published for 2ed (i.e. mostly stick to the 20% of the products that make 80% of the profits) and through the OGL let third party publishers churn out the 80% of the products that make 20% of the profits. In theory, WotC gets to sell big piles of Core books (and relatively few non-Core books) and save a lot of money on development while the third party publishers churn out a big pile of diverse stuff that keeps people under the D&D umbrella. In theory everyone wins, WotC gets high profit margins, third party publishers can sell D&D stuff and players get a lot of choices.
It didn’t work.
I’m willing to bet anything that since about 2005 sales of D&D books (especially Core) have been in steady and accelerating decline. This isn’t because there was anything specifically wrong with the OGL/SRD idea but a lot of other stuff has been happening that has been ripping huge gaping holes in WotC’s bottom line. Let’s look at some of these problems:
-General PnP RPG market collapse: there is a very nice chart on Ryan Dancey’s (one of the main 3ed guys) blog (on a page that isn’t working right now, grrrr) that shows sales for PnP RPG products in rather massive decline. According to him D&D hasn’t been spared from this general trend.
-Piracy: Look in any P2P program and it’s very easily to download virtually any WotC D&D book. I’m sure that this can’t be helping.
-MMORPGs: Quite a few former PnP RPG players have been turning to MMORPGs, specifically WoW. I presume that MMORPGs have hurt D&D worse than its competitors since the gameplay of MMORPGs tend to be much more similar to D&D (because they tend to be very heavily influenced by it) than to World of Darkness etc. making the transition easier. Even worse, many of the young people who would’ve otherwise started playing D&D started playing WoW instead.
-Increasing average age of D&D players: traditionally most PnP RPG players start quite young and relatively few old people start playing PnP RPGs. However now D&D groups tend to be older than they once were, since less new people are joining, leaving an increasingly older player base. This means that the decline in RPG sales is worse than it looks since the sharply decreasing number of new young gamers bodes ill for the future. Also since most D&D groups are older than they once were, it must be hard for a lot of new young gamers to join a lot of existing groups since the age gap would cause problems. For example in my gaming group all of us have been gaming since we were kids, our youngest members are in their mid-20s and we haven’t recruited a single new person to the hobby. I’m sure there are a lot of other gaming groups like ours out there.
-Grognards: There are a lot of people who have been playing D&D for a long time and have lots of books. It can’t be easy to sell D&D books to people who already have a bookshelf of perfectly functional D&D books.
And then things get worse.
All of these sources of decline aren’t independent, they reinforce each other. If some people quit they might leave their gaming group with too few people to run effective campaigns, leading more people to quit. If too many people quit then some RPG retail outlets go out of business, which makes it harder for new people to get into the hobby and makes gaming less convenient for some people, leading to further declines. Then with there being fewer gaming groups the average gamer has to travel farther to game, which makes gaming less convenient, which makes more people quit. Failure cascades and positive feedback loops abound.
I didn’t play any RPGs (or buy any RPG products) for 10 years since I simply couldn’t find any people in my area to play with. Unless current trends are reversed, this will become increasingly common.
At this point I think that despite the cheery press releases there is a lot of panic in a lot of gaming companies. 4ed isn’t about cashing in, it’s about keeping D&D afloat financially and I think that some of the ideas that they have for 4ed just might work...
(to be continued)
The 3.*ed business plan:
It’s a rule of thumb in business that 20% of a business’s products will make 80% of a business’s profits. However you still need the other 80% that make 20% of the profit in order to keep the customers interested (for example I’m sure that Borders makes well over half of their profits on bestseller books alone but if they got rid of everything but the bestsellers their business would tank since nobody would bother to come in to browse through the shelves).
What the idea with 3.*ed was that WotC would publish a lot fewer books than had been published for 2ed (i.e. mostly stick to the 20% of the products that make 80% of the profits) and through the OGL let third party publishers churn out the 80% of the products that make 20% of the profits. In theory, WotC gets to sell big piles of Core books (and relatively few non-Core books) and save a lot of money on development while the third party publishers churn out a big pile of diverse stuff that keeps people under the D&D umbrella. In theory everyone wins, WotC gets high profit margins, third party publishers can sell D&D stuff and players get a lot of choices.
It didn’t work.
I’m willing to bet anything that since about 2005 sales of D&D books (especially Core) have been in steady and accelerating decline. This isn’t because there was anything specifically wrong with the OGL/SRD idea but a lot of other stuff has been happening that has been ripping huge gaping holes in WotC’s bottom line. Let’s look at some of these problems:
-General PnP RPG market collapse: there is a very nice chart on Ryan Dancey’s (one of the main 3ed guys) blog (on a page that isn’t working right now, grrrr) that shows sales for PnP RPG products in rather massive decline. According to him D&D hasn’t been spared from this general trend.
-Piracy: Look in any P2P program and it’s very easily to download virtually any WotC D&D book. I’m sure that this can’t be helping.
-MMORPGs: Quite a few former PnP RPG players have been turning to MMORPGs, specifically WoW. I presume that MMORPGs have hurt D&D worse than its competitors since the gameplay of MMORPGs tend to be much more similar to D&D (because they tend to be very heavily influenced by it) than to World of Darkness etc. making the transition easier. Even worse, many of the young people who would’ve otherwise started playing D&D started playing WoW instead.
-Increasing average age of D&D players: traditionally most PnP RPG players start quite young and relatively few old people start playing PnP RPGs. However now D&D groups tend to be older than they once were, since less new people are joining, leaving an increasingly older player base. This means that the decline in RPG sales is worse than it looks since the sharply decreasing number of new young gamers bodes ill for the future. Also since most D&D groups are older than they once were, it must be hard for a lot of new young gamers to join a lot of existing groups since the age gap would cause problems. For example in my gaming group all of us have been gaming since we were kids, our youngest members are in their mid-20s and we haven’t recruited a single new person to the hobby. I’m sure there are a lot of other gaming groups like ours out there.
-Grognards: There are a lot of people who have been playing D&D for a long time and have lots of books. It can’t be easy to sell D&D books to people who already have a bookshelf of perfectly functional D&D books.
And then things get worse.
All of these sources of decline aren’t independent, they reinforce each other. If some people quit they might leave their gaming group with too few people to run effective campaigns, leading more people to quit. If too many people quit then some RPG retail outlets go out of business, which makes it harder for new people to get into the hobby and makes gaming less convenient for some people, leading to further declines. Then with there being fewer gaming groups the average gamer has to travel farther to game, which makes gaming less convenient, which makes more people quit. Failure cascades and positive feedback loops abound.
I didn’t play any RPGs (or buy any RPG products) for 10 years since I simply couldn’t find any people in my area to play with. Unless current trends are reversed, this will become increasingly common.
At this point I think that despite the cheery press releases there is a lot of panic in a lot of gaming companies. 4ed isn’t about cashing in, it’s about keeping D&D afloat financially and I think that some of the ideas that they have for 4ed just might work...
(to be continued)
