The Supplement Treadmill vs. The Alternatives

[Philotomy Jurament]

...as your fanbase stagnates...

Hey, I'm not stagnant!

 

[Raven Crowking]

Absolutely. If your goal is to spend decades barely clinging to life as your fanbase stagnates, cleverly avoiding any opportunities for profit and relying almost entirely on reprints for revenue, then, yes, they're the company to model.

What if your goal is to have creative control over your material, whether or not it means you can quit the day job?

What if your goal is to produce the best material you can, when it should be produced, whether or not it means you can quit the day job?


RC

 

[buzz]

What if your goal is to have creative control over your material, whether or not it means you can quit the day job?

What if your goal is to produce the best material you can, when it should be produced, whether or not it means you can quit the day job?

The Forge/IPR model is a far better one in this case.

There's nothing about creative control and quality that dictates unprofitability. Chaosium, great guys and gals though they are, simply do not make good business decisions. I wouldn't even call what they do a "model." Their release schedule is slow simply because they don't seem to be able to muster anything more frequent.

 

[Raven Crowking]

The Forge/IPR model is a far better one in this case.

There's nothing about creative control and quality that dictates unprofitability. Chaosium, great guys and gals though they are, simply do not make good business decisions. I wouldn't even call what they do a "model." Their release schedule is slow simply because they don't seem to be able to muster anything more frequent.

Sure. My point was merely that the needs of "art" (as it were) and survival (i.e., finances) seldom go hand-in-hand.....or, at least, not reliably. Having a good business model means that you are effective at moving product; it doesn't mean that the product is the best possible product. OTOH, no matter how good the product, if your business plan bites you might not be able to make a living at it.

So, what you should do depends upon your goals -- where along the "art for art's sake" to "business for profit's sake" line you stake your claim.


RC

 

[woodelf]

They have to make money somehow, and that means supplements, accessories, or a new edition.

Pick one.

You missed an option: new games. How does a video game or boardgame company make money? Not, primarily, by producing add-ons to existing games, or new editions of existing games (though, in both cases, there's some of that), but by producing whole new games. Yes, in both cases, they are often sequels, or in other ways tie in to previous games. But they don't have the dependency that an RPG supplement has. I can play Final Fantasy XII without even being aware of the previous 11 games in the series, and have plenty of fun. The Complete Psionic is kinda useless without at least 2 previous D&D books.

So, instead of producing, say, 20 D&D supplements each year, WotC could produce 10 new one-book games each year, and then 10 supplements for whichever of those games (or previous years' games) proved the most popular.

Now, i *do* agree that you can't simulataneously complain about too many supplements, *and* consider a game that isn't getting fresh support to be "dead". Personally, i've never understood the attitude that an in-print game that isn't getting new supplements is somehow any less playable/viable/"alive" than one that is getting new supplements. [and with POD these days, there's no reason to let any small-press/niche-audience book go out of print, once it's made its costs back.]

 

[buzz]

So, instead of producing, say, 20 D&D supplements each year, WotC could produce 10 new one-book games each year, and then 10 supplements for whichever of those games (or previous years' games) proved the most popular.

Has any company ever been successful doing this? This seems a much harder sell than supplements. You basically need to generate a new fanbase from scratch each time. And developing a new game each month has got to be a bigger investment than supporting a single one.

 

[DragonLancer]

I have no objection to a company making money. Thats what they exist for, after all. However, I do object to unnessecary changes (4th edition, for example). Release new product for different gamers needs, but refrain from making changes just for the sake of money making (again, 4th edition, I'm looking at you).

 

[JustinA]

Has any company ever been successful doing this? This seems a much harder sell than supplements. You basically need to generate a new fanbase from scratch each time. And developing a new game each month has got to be a bigger investment than supporting a single one.

No. And I doubt a company ever will be.

The problem here is not just that you have to generate a new fanbase, it's that a typical RPG requires a certain time commitment: They require a time commitment to learn and then master the rules. And they require a time commitment to run a typical campaign (which usually lasts for several months and perhaps longer).

This is dissimilar to video games in two ways: First, most video games have a very low learning curve -- and that learning curve is usually built into the gameplay. Second, most video games have only 20-40 hours of solo play. The typical person will learn the game, play the game, and be done with the game in less than a week. That supports a once-a-month release schedule.

RPGs can emulate those qualities to some degree. (And in the case of better support for integrating the learning curve into the gameplay, I'd argue that they should be emulating it. The 1984 Basic Set was an excellent example of how to do it right, but it's never been emulated since for some reason.)

But, ultimately, RPGs as we know them today support an open style: Gamers can take the game and do what they want to with it. So even if you decide to stop supporting the game, plenty of gamers are going to (at the very least) finish their current campaign. Which means they aren't going to be in the market for your next 12 games released on a monthly schedule.

There are video games that look like RPGs: They're the FPSs and MMORPGs. These games, due to their strong multiplayer content, have essentially unlimited gameplay and a mastery curve. And you'll notice that these are the games that most closely resemble RPG release schedules: Nobody releases a new MMORPG every single month. Nobody releases a new FPS every month. Partly that's the amount of work that goes into these titles, but mostly it's because they know that fracturing their fanbase doesn't make sense.

This is the reason for the "supplement treadmill": Supplements aren't designed to support entirely new campaigns. They're designed to be slotted into existing campaigns. You're actively marketing to everyone playing your game a that very moment.

What you can get away with is what White Wolf is doing: Release "mini-series" games. These games come out, they support a typical campaign, and then the company moves on to the next mini-series game. The yearly release schedule means that a typical campaign will be wrapping up just as the next game comes out.

In many ways these "mini-games" are similar to the Adventure Paths: No company in its right mind is going to release multiple 1-20 adventure paths in a single year. You're automatically dividing your potential customer base.

 

[woodelf]

In many ways these "mini-games" are similar to the Adventure Paths: No company in its right mind is going to release multiple 1-20 adventure paths in a single year. You're automatically dividing your potential customer base.

I have some thoughts on other parts of this topic, but just wanted to grab this one right now: i doubt that. That assumes that the market for campaign-length D&D games is any more monolithic than the market for shorter D&D games. Now, releasing two similar campaigns at the same time doesn't make much sense. But releasing, say, a political/espionage/mystery campaign, with horror elements, lots of recurring NPCs, moral ambiguity, and lots of social challenges; and an adventuring/exploration/expedition campaign with a focus on physical/combat challenges, B&W morality, monsters to be killed, not scared of, and travelogue/"location of the week" situations, could work just fine. Because while i'm sure there are people who'd want one of those styles, and settle for the other if it was the only thing available, probably more people would prefer one of those styles and buy nothing if it wasn't avaiable. So by making the 2nd one available, you gather a whole new market. I don't think "adventure paths" automatically compete with each other except in the broadest of senses.

 

[woodelf]

Has any company ever been successful doing this? This seems a much harder sell than supplements. You basically need to generate a new fanbase from scratch each time. And developing a new game each month has got to be a bigger investment than supporting a single one.

A single company, as an economic entity? Nope. But it's pretty much what the Forge folks and IPR are doing, collectively. That is, a new Forge game shows up every month or so--actually, on average, way more than that--and the market is roughly the same as for a lot of the other Forge games. This wouldn't suddenly change if the Forge was actually a collective, cooperative, or other unified business entity--it'd still be a single market segment buying a new RPG every month (more-or-less).

Now, it's of course not successful on the scale that WotC or WWGS, or even, i suspect, Green Ronin is. And, not surprisingly, a lot of those games are very different from traditional RPGs, in a number of ways that specifically tie to buying habits (favoring closed-ended plot structures, having lesser replay value (if only due to a narrower focus), often having lower prices, usually being much quicker to read/learn). I mean, yeah, trying to sell someone a new D&D or V:tM or GURPS every month would be an exercise in futility--you'd be back to the "need a new market outlet every month", or at least every few months. But to generalize that to "trying to sell someone a new RPG every month is an exercise in futility" is a bit of a leap, IMHO.