The market dying?

[eris404]

I am depending more on reviews.

Amen to that. I still buy a whole lot of PDFs (since they take up a lot less space and tend to be cheaper), but as for bound books, I read as much about a potential purchase as I can (previews, reviews, etc.) before I buy.

 

[Paradigm]

...aaaand we have a winner.

Lets not kid ourselves, Adventure Game unit sales (all segments save board games) are not what they once were. D20 sales even moreso. I've noticed a downward trend and some clear warning signs. 3 of the US' largest distributors have closed in the past 5 years. Some smaller ones have also closed and another 3 were acquired by larger competitors. The S. Florida Market had 14 retailers and now has 7, I read similar stories for other markets on industry forums. These are all signs of an industry at least in transition, if not decline, and all 3 tiers are responsible.

Some manufacturer's flooded piles of crap into the chain, some as many as 4 - AWFUL! books a month, and fouled the waters for those that make quality goods. Some manufacturers have decided to test the $50-$150 waters; adventure games in direct cost competition to X-Box 360 is a bad idea. Some manufacturers in non-RPG sectors are printing less than pre-order then allocating the rest, driving down sales and harming the FLGS and distributor and ultimately themselves by shrinking the market.

Distributors are trying for a NIRTS market, where they try to meet demand to the second, an impossible task. A fraction of product that is backordered is a sale that is lost forever. Since some manufacturers (again not RPG guys) refuse to warehouse any product and the distributor refuses to order big and warehouse the product, all back orders in those segments are lost sales, for everyone.

Retailers refuse to preorder, even if they KNOW they are going to get a product, driving down distributor orders. Also, a significant number of retailers won't take the time to read about new releases and won't chase down in-print but older products for their customers. Also, many clump non-D&D d20 into one huge brand and will skip the newest release from a publisher because they are sitting on some 3 year old crap from 3 other publishers because it is all "D20".

Gareth is right about at least one thing, C&GR is the only source for hard data, and that is a problem because their methodology is flawed. We can't even use them because of those flaws.

 

[Numion]

2) Less retailers answered the request for data - Conclusion: less variance in the information collected, less artificial puffing of units sold, better number result, indicating that perhaps previous numbers were higher than actual...

Increasing sample size decreases variance in this kind of situation, actually. The results are average - would you rather trust checking two shops logs instead of calculating the average from ten?

EDIT: what I meant to say was that there is more confidence in the numbers (shorter confidence intervals), sample variances are also more accurate, not necessarily smaller.

 

[Paradigm]

Simply put, by being more rigorous in the information collected, the data ia actually more accurate than that collected previously, and if the data is more accurate (and shows lower sales than previously). This would seem to indicate that sales reported before the data collection method changed was possibly inflated slightly.

Just something to think about...

If it isn't the new data that is low, but instead the old data is high, it would still reflect a much more consistant flow. Which still means that the C&GR data cannot be used to show a decline.

 

[Warbringer]

Switch in the method how data were obtained, as stated above.

Thanks Turjan... Didn't see that, but that would make any comparisson meaningless.....

 

[Numion]

Some manufacturers have decided to test the $50-$150 waters; adventure games in direct cost competition to X-Box 360 is a bad idea.

Thats a great idea actually. Paizo people have even said so .. shackled city has done well.

 

[Krolik]

It is my feeling that we're in a cyclical down tread in this industry (much to do with the burnout of d20) along with some major new factors pulling at our customers purse strings:

- Gas Prices
- World of Warcraft
- Disasters and Charity

Another thing I would add to your list is the current price of books as well. 3 years ago $20-25.00 would get you a nice book. Now you are looking at $40.00+ [with $50, $60, $70+ becoming far more popular]. If a gamer has a $50.00 per month gaming allowance [$600.00 per year is not unreasonable] he is now looking at 1 book purchase per month where he was once looking at 2-3 books. So now one company benefits rather than 2 or 3. There's only so much blood in the turnip to go around.

 

[BryonD]

Why keep pointing back to the thread title? That was the question originally asked. However, I would like to point out that, as far as I recall, NOBODY has replied to the question in the thread title with an affirmative.

How's this one:

Yes...if you cook the numbers of a single-issue report, without knowledge of the previous decade's sales figures, and average them, and put them in a nifty graph, then yes: it's just a recent slump. Kudos. Everything's fine. You have Saved The Hobby. Laurels and rose petals all around.

Apparently its not just a slump and the hobby is in need of being "saved".
Not that I agree.

There has certainly been some more reasonable data presented from both sides. But I think you are being overly forgiving of one side here.
There has been a lot of comments that are talkign about decade long trends and implying (if not outright stating) that it is all coming to a head right now. I think that is well over the top. It is a slump. It happens.

 

[Paradigm]

Thats a great idea actually. Paizo people have even said so .. shackled city has done well.

Sure, if somebody wants to define "done well", people have differing standards of what doing well might mean.

 

[Turjan]

Simply put, by being more rigorous in the information collected, the data ia actually more accurate than that collected previously, and if the data is more accurate (and shows lower sales than previously). This would seem to indicate that sales reported before the data collection method changed was possibly inflated slightly.

Just something to think about...

If they get less reports, the variance is most probably higher, as Numion pointed out.

Anyway. The main point is that you cannot compare the data from before the method switch to the data from after the method switch. It's not permissible to estimate any trend from data that stretch over the point where the method of data acquisition was switched.