The market dying?

[Thorin Stoutfoot]

If you think about it, D&D makes huge sense for these places. A single D&D book goes for about $30, and you can fit the entire line in one, maybe two shelves. On a shelf inch/dollar basis, that's a lot of cash value stuck in a relatively small area. Best of all for a bookstore, if you establish a good presence, you can generate a lot of return sales as gamers start shopping at a bookstore rather than a game store.

In terms of infrastructure, the book trade is designed to handle RPGs - look at how many new books come out each week. Tracking all those titles is a lot easier for a national chain than for a single, small business.

You know, that makes a lot of sense. In particular, if I was looking to buy a book in person (as opposed to buying one on-line at Amazon.com), I'd buy it at Borders or Barnes and Noble rather than going to the crummy unlit game store where the guy behind the counter is rude or hasn't bathed in weeks. That makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the enlightenment.

What it means, though is that unless the d20 RPG publishers wise up and also start selling into the book market rather than trying to make it onto the game retailer store shelf, they are going to be history.

 

[philreed]

What it means, though is that unless the d20 RPG publishers wise up and also start selling into the book market rather than trying to make it onto the game retailer store shelf, they are going to be history.

Most publishers operating in the industry would be killed by the mainstream, mass-market channels. Returns are a major problem for companies -- more than one company has been killed by returns.

Hell, this is part of what led to TSR's collapse.

And then the roof caved in. Random House informed TSR that almost a third of their TSR products for the year had not sold at the store to a customer and that these products were being returned for a free of several million dollars.

Now a lot of the reason for the returns was the fault of bad publishing decisions during that year. But returns -- maybe not as massive -- can be a serious problem for lots of publishers that go blindly down the path of mass-market distribution.

In recent memory there was Osseum -- well known for lots connections in mass-market distribution -- that died and almost killed several publishers with them. Now there were more problems than just the mass-market channels but returns were definitely a factor.

 

[Umbran]

I think annual shrinkage of around 20% -- *each year*, for the last 4 years -- is not out of the question, with some artificial buoyancy for the market leaders.

"I think" is not really good enough. Either you have supportable numbers, or you've got personal guesses. As others have pointed out, a shrinkage of 20% a year for four nears would mean teh market would now be 41% of what it used to be. With WotC claiming better than ever sales last year, you'll need somehting better than "I think" to get folks to accept this claim.

You've one out - the "artificial bouyancy for the market leaders". Because in this business, for most intents and purposes, the market leaders are almost the entire market. If a couple of them are bouyant, then the entire market is pretty much bouyant. And if everyoneis still floatign okay, it's hard to say there's a problem.

 

[Akrasia]

There was an interesting thread over at RPG.net recently concerning the 'Shadow Community' of people who play OOP RPGs -- i.e. people who still play OD&D, AD&D (pre-3e), Runequest, MERP, etc. These people play PRGs on a semi-regular basis (maybe 1-2 a month, or less), are happy with the rules that they know, and see no need to 'upgrade' (especially given that they are probably busy 30+ professionals with families, etc.).

The claim was made that this is a huge community (admittedly, most of the evidence cited was anecdotal, but the popularity of sites like Dragonsfoot.org suggests that there are many OOP RPGers out there). Moreover, for obvious reasons, they tend to buy their stuff on e-bay and in used bookstores -- not from 'current' RPG companies.

For every new edition of a RPG, it seems reasonable to postulate that a huge chunk of RPG players leave the 'current market' as a consequence. They see no reason to learn new rules, etc. The RPG industry is thus very different from, for example, the computer industry. Once you've purchased a set of rules you don't need to buy anything else.

Granted, if a new edition is likely to attract more new players than it loses, then it makes sense for the company to introduce it. This has been GW's strategy with WFB and Warhammer 40K for ages, and it appears to be WotC's strategy as well (as seen with 3.5). It makes perfect economic sense from the companies' perspective, even though it might annoy players.

However, in releasing these new editions, RPG companies are competing against rivals that they didn't have 20 years ago -- viz., computer games, card games, etc. The 'big guns' (WotC, WW, BI/GW) have access to many distribution resources (big book stores, etc.), and thus can succeed. In addition, they have alternative, 'synergy-producing' sources of revenue (viz. minis, novels, card games). Smaller RPG companies don't have these resources.

In short, the RPG market faces several challenges: (1) many players (most not represented at a site like ENworld) refuse to 'upgrade' to new editions (they become members of the OOP RPG 'shadow community', and support e-bay instead of WotC); (2) competition from alternative entertainment sources (viz. computer games, card games, mini games); and (3) distribution challenges (especially acute for smaller companies, as explained by Mearls).

 

[eyebeams]

"I think" is not really good enough. Either you have supportable numbers, or you've got personal guesses. As others have pointed out, a shrinkage of 20% a year for four nears would mean teh market would now be 41% of what it used to be. With WotC claiming better than ever sales last year, you'll need somehting better than "I think" to get folks to accept this claim.

Do you have a preponderance of contrary evidence? Of course you don't. You have an off the cuff statement by someone whose job it is to tell you that D&D is doing gangbusters and who would be professionally obligated to do so in conditions up to and including his office being on fire while he was typing. And you, like many others, really, really want to believe that your hobby is in super-cool shape.

I don't have to get people to "accept a claim." Clearly that's useless, since the entire thrust of this -- another online backslapping session about how well the "industry" is doing -- is sentimental, not factual. There is no standard of evidence here -- just a standard of denial that gets looser each year.

I suppose I could direct you to C&GC, ICV2, to Ken Hite's annual roundup in Out of the Box, and several years of convention panels, but that wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. I'd have to post a link to an .mpeg of the Hasbro board taking a long concrete bellyflop over D&D sales, where each board member shouted 20 year sales arcs for the property as they soared to a messy end at the bottom, for this to get taken seriously. And maybe even not then.

Back in the real world, though, there is a consensus among all informed sectors of the print RPG industry that sales have been more or less continuous decline -- the newsworthy items have been bumps and levels in that decline. New editions of individual games don't change the fact that everybody together is making less money and has been for quite some time.

.pdf is doing better, but to a certain extent the very existence of the .pdf end of the hobby is an effect of its overall decline in popularity.

 

[Akrasia]

nevermind

 

[Turjan]

I suppose I could direct you to C&GC, ICV2, to Ken Hite's annual roundup in Out of the Box, and several years of convention panels, but that wouldn't amount to a hill of beans.

Well, most people in this thread know those reports. Most people here know that game stores, the providers of those numbers, are suffering greatly and dying a not so slow death. This doesn't change anything with the fundamental flaw in the numbers from those sources, i.e., that they really don't represent a large segment of the RPG market. If all people had a similar buying habit like I have, game stores would probably be gone bust by now and Ken Hite would report a market share of 0% for WotC (I've never bought a single WotC product in a game store), given the source of his numbers. Those numbers are rubbish! That's all what I say. That D&D is not directly a cash cow for a company like Hasbro is a completely different problem.

Back in the real world, though, there is a consensus among all informed sectors of the print RPG industry that sales have been more or less continuous decline -- the newsworthy items have been bumps and levels in that decline.

This is certainly true for the smaller or even medium-sized publishers. They have serious distribution problems (e.g., Green Ronin; interestingly, not so Black Industries). That's a problem of the general conentration processes in markets.

 

[eyebeams]

Well, most people in this thread know those reports. Most people here know that game stores, the providers of those numbers, are suffering greatly and dying a not so slow death. This doesn't change anything with the fundamental flaw in the numbers from those sources, i.e., that they really don't represent a large segment of the RPG market. If all people had a similar buying habit like I have, game stores would probably be gone bust by now and Ken Hite would report a market share of 0% for WotC (I've never bought a single WotC product in a game store), given the source of his numbers. Those numbers are rubbish! That's all what I say. That D&D is not directly a cash cow for a company like Hasbro is a completely different problem.

The trouble, though, is that these are the best public numbers out there, they all agree and have done so for several years. If they were being pulled out of thin air they would not be nearly so consistent.

This is certainly true for the smaller or even medium-sized publishers. They have serious distribution problems (e.g., Green Ronin; interestingly, not so Black Industries). That's a problem of the general conentration processes in markets.

[/QUOTE]

I think that a bigger problem is just the sheer lack of consumers. There are a fair number of people who haven't bought RPGs but still play, but more who just don't play any more. I'd link that problem to:

* Incompetent brand management. TSR and WotC have both at various times allowed the D&D brand to get associated with poorly socialized nerds.

* Incompetent industry representation. A trade organization that peppers its awards show with rappin' hobbits, careened to an alleged felony at the center of its elections and is shunned by market leaders is not in a position to put a good foot forward for the media or for collective marketing of RPGs. Then there's . . .

* Collective squabbling. Nobody wants to work together to provide a sound direction for the industry because everyone is slavering for a top 5 slot or will be damned before they let anybody else up. One manifestation of this is, in my opinion, a general decline in the craft (not novelty which is easy to get) of design. The two largest streams of RPG design ("indie" games and D20) both have vocal minorities who heap scorn upon design outside their rubric. The 90s were choked with wierd crap. The 00s are choked with boring crap.

* High concept is choking the market with more and more games that only appeal to initiated gamers. Does anybody outside of the hobby really give a damn about, say Etherscope? This works better for .pdfs (which usually only sell to the hard core anyway), but nobody seems to have found a new accessible millieu since the mid-90s or so.

* Demographics. Gamers are aging. Many of us come from any explosion of interest in the 80s or remember it. D&D has ahd a pervasive influence on games that are far more popular than it, but the sad flipside is that nothing exists to take people back to that point of origin.

The industry won't "die." But we're past the peak and ought to see where wargaming's gone.

 

[Turjan]

The trouble, though, is that these are the best public numbers out there, they all agree and have done so for several years. If they were being pulled out of thin air they would not be nearly so consistent.

I'm not sure why this point is so hard to understand. Even if these numbers are the only ones available and completely accurate, they are absolutely meaningless for judging the state of RPGs. They are a good indicator for judging the state of specialized game stores (or, concerning your other numbers, the US print industry). These are two (or three) completely different things. There may be some kind of relation between the state of game stores and the state of RPGs, but this relation is not logically conclusive in a way that it allows to make statements about RPG sales. You might (hypothetically) have had a doubling of RPG sales every year for the last decade and still have those same numbers; not that I believe that's in any way true, but this serves for illustrating the point. Your statement is a non sequitur.

I think that a bigger problem is just the sheer lack of consumers. There are a fair number of people who haven't bought RPGs but still play, but more who just don't play any more.

Which is, in principle, a normal cycle for all hobbies. The point is to draw new consumers into the hobby.

I'd link that problem to:

* Incompetent brand management. TSR and WotC have both at various times allowed the D&D brand to get associated with poorly socialized nerds.

* Incompetent industry representation. A trade organization that peppers its awards show with rappin' hobbits, careened to an alleged felony at the center of its elections and is shunned by market leaders is not in a position to put a good foot forward for the media or for collective marketing of RPGs. Then there's . . .

Well, it's a nerd hobby . The question is, why are CCGs a nerd hobby and, nevertheless, selling well? Ease of use, I'd say. This point seems more important to me. (Better profit margins and more advertising is another one, but nothing you can do much about.)

* Collective squabbling. Nobody wants to work together to provide a sound direction for the industry because everyone is slavering for a top 5 slot or will be damned before they let anybody else up. One manifestation of this is, in my opinion, a general decline in the craft (not novelty which is easy to get) of design. The two largest streams of RPG design ("indie" games and D20) both have vocal minorities who heap scorn upon design outside their rubric. The 90s were choked with wierd crap. The 00s are choked with boring crap.

Not a problem at all. As RPGs are invisible to the public in general, collective squabbling is meaningless. And that "general decline in the craft of design" is something I'd deny completely. I see very much the opposite. Not because designers are inherently better today, but because there is so much to build upon and communication is much better.

* High concept is choking the market with more and more games that only appeal to initiated gamers. Does anybody outside of the hobby really give a damn about, say Etherscope? This works better for .pdfs (which usually only sell to the hard core anyway), but nobody seems to have found a new accessible millieu since the mid-90s or so.

That seems to be one of the central points. It connects to the same I mentioned above: ease of use. What's Etherscope, btw ?

* Demographics. Gamers are aging. Many of us come from any explosion of interest in the 80s or remember it. D&D has ahd a pervasive influence on games that are far more popular than it, but the sad flipside is that nothing exists to take people back to that point of origin.

That's mostly true. Although it's sometimes a two-way street. I got interested in tabletop gaming by CRPGs. I succeeded, despite TSR's or early WotC's best efforts to prevent this (cease and desist orders against messageboards and crap like that) .

 

[Hussar]

Heh, FFN has this to say about the state of gaming.