Daztur
Hero
OK in my last post (http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=208976) I talked about why I think that D&D is in more financial trouble than most people realize. Now what, from a purely business perspective, would be necessary for 4ed D&D to be a financial success?
I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that having most of the current D&D player base buy some core 4ed books (and by core I mean the books you need to play, not whatever WotC has decided to call core these days) is not enough. Sure they’d be able to make a nice pile of money for a year or two, but then what? What keeps the salaries paid until the next edition? For the last couple years WotC has been making a MASSIVE chunk of their D&D money off of minis but that market has got to be getting saturated. As I see it, here’s what possibilities there are for WotC’s D&D business in the future:
1. Release a new edition every five years or so and ride out the nerd rage.
2. Hold off on releasing a new edition until the community feels it really needs it (every 7-9 years or so) and in between editions fire most of the staff and then cherry pick the best third party designers to hire when its time to write up a new edition.
3. Figure out a way to make existing D&D players spend more money than has previously been the case and/or figure out a way to bring a significant number of people into the player base.
What would be needed for 3 to work in the light of the PnP genre decline, grognards who don’t buy new stuff, increasing average age of D&D players, competition from MMORPGs and other issues that I brought up in my last post?
-Subscription-based income: in order to keep the money coming in between editions, WotC needs a steady revenue stream. Subscriber-based income is good for this since its very steady and is more resistant to piracy than publishing piles of splat books. How to make gamers willing to fork out money for a subscription service like DI?
-Lowering the barriers to entry: Right now if you’ve heard about D&D and want to start playing it’s not easy. Chances are that it’ll be hard for you to round up enough people that you already know and get them to sit down and play with you if they haven’t played PnP RPGs before and often campaigns run by first time GMs with first time players are less fun than well-made computer games. So what do you do then? Find the local hobby store and hope to find someone to play with there? Hobby stores that host D&D games are getting fewer, growing up the closest hobby store was an hour drive away from my home, which is damn far for a kid with no car. You can also poke around on the internet for D&D groups (something that there’s no central directory for), hope you can find someone, hope they need a new player, hope your schedules match, hope you can figure out how gameplay works at the level that they’re playing at and with the house rules they use, hope they’re not a bunch of freaks and hope you care enough about a game you’ve never played to dedicate a Sunday to meeting a bunch of strangers. There’s a reason why not a single one of the people who’ve joined my area’s gaming group has been new to PnP RPG games. How to fix this?
(to be continued)
I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that having most of the current D&D player base buy some core 4ed books (and by core I mean the books you need to play, not whatever WotC has decided to call core these days) is not enough. Sure they’d be able to make a nice pile of money for a year or two, but then what? What keeps the salaries paid until the next edition? For the last couple years WotC has been making a MASSIVE chunk of their D&D money off of minis but that market has got to be getting saturated. As I see it, here’s what possibilities there are for WotC’s D&D business in the future:
1. Release a new edition every five years or so and ride out the nerd rage.
2. Hold off on releasing a new edition until the community feels it really needs it (every 7-9 years or so) and in between editions fire most of the staff and then cherry pick the best third party designers to hire when its time to write up a new edition.
3. Figure out a way to make existing D&D players spend more money than has previously been the case and/or figure out a way to bring a significant number of people into the player base.
What would be needed for 3 to work in the light of the PnP genre decline, grognards who don’t buy new stuff, increasing average age of D&D players, competition from MMORPGs and other issues that I brought up in my last post?
-Subscription-based income: in order to keep the money coming in between editions, WotC needs a steady revenue stream. Subscriber-based income is good for this since its very steady and is more resistant to piracy than publishing piles of splat books. How to make gamers willing to fork out money for a subscription service like DI?
-Lowering the barriers to entry: Right now if you’ve heard about D&D and want to start playing it’s not easy. Chances are that it’ll be hard for you to round up enough people that you already know and get them to sit down and play with you if they haven’t played PnP RPGs before and often campaigns run by first time GMs with first time players are less fun than well-made computer games. So what do you do then? Find the local hobby store and hope to find someone to play with there? Hobby stores that host D&D games are getting fewer, growing up the closest hobby store was an hour drive away from my home, which is damn far for a kid with no car. You can also poke around on the internet for D&D groups (something that there’s no central directory for), hope you can find someone, hope they need a new player, hope your schedules match, hope you can figure out how gameplay works at the level that they’re playing at and with the house rules they use, hope they’re not a bunch of freaks and hope you care enough about a game you’ve never played to dedicate a Sunday to meeting a bunch of strangers. There’s a reason why not a single one of the people who’ve joined my area’s gaming group has been new to PnP RPG games. How to fix this?
(to be continued)
