Unquestioning Fans in Pro Sports (and RPGs?)

[King of Old School]

Just wanted to salvage this side discussion from the closed thread in the main forum:

"Non-competitive owners" are the problem, not dedicated fans - at least in the sport I'm most familiar with, pro basketball.

Frankly, in most pro sports, it doesn't much matter if the fans are loyal or not. Revenue sharing keeps teams like the NBA's Atlanta Hawks afloat even when, in the immortal words of then Denver Nugget Jon Barry, playing in Atlanta is like "playing in a morgue" because so few people attend the games. Yet the Hawks keep on chugging along (and putting a terrible product on the court, last I checked).

On the flip side, who doesn't think that the LA Lakers would sell out every game regardless on-court product? Yet the Lakers are reliably a top franchise. The Sacramento Kings sold out every game even when there team hadn't made the Playoffs in about a decade. Yet when the current ownership came in, they put together an elite team. That didn't pack one more fan in, and it cost a lot more than having a loser - but that's what a competitive owner does.

I for one don't believe that many RPG publishers would intentionally lowball a product or throw it together just because they expect dedicated fans to buy it. If nothing else, the fierce competition for WotC's scraps keeps companies on their toes - not to mention TSR's eventual collapse. This isn't a successful enough industry to keep the RPG equivalent of the Hawks afloat, and even if it were as successful as the NBA, it doesn't do revenue-sharing.

Where to start... ?

I'll agree that non-competitive owners are the biggest problem, but unquestioning fans are still a problematic factor. In a sport without revenue sharing (and neither MLB nor the NHL has meaningful revenue sharing), unquestioning fans can give a penny-pinching owner license to field a cheap loser. Certainly, this was for many years the problem with my hometown institution ("team" is inadequate), the Toronto Maple Leafs (NHL); from Harold Ballard to the Ontario teachers' pension fund, owners were motivated to keep payroll down because the revenue would still roll in regardless. OTOH, the Toronto Blue Jays (MLB) realize that if they don't put money behind efforts to build a competitive ballclub, fans simply won't come to the park -- the era of consistent 50k crowds are as over as the era of back-to-back World Series titles. If fans vote with their dollars when they see chronic or deliberate underperformance, management is properly motivated to improve. It would be nice if competitiveness was a prerequisite of ownership, but that's not the real world.

And in sports without revenue sharing, low crowds = death. Perhaps not right away, and perhaps not for the franchise as a whole if some other sucker city can be convinced to play host, but certainly for the team as it exists. Low crowds killed the Montreal Expos, low crowds almost killed both Florida baseball teams, low crowds will almost certainly kill a handful of NHL teams if the strike ever ends. One common denominator is that all of these are/were perceived by fans to be non-players in terms of spending to build a winner, and most are markets where the sport itself is not a hard sell. Certainly there's an argument in favour of revenue sharing but at the same time, I'll confess to a certain Darwinist sympathy on my part.

RPGs aren't quite the same and I wasn't trying to imply that the analogy maps perfectly. With RPGs I think the problem isn't so much lowballing, as in allowing a very small market segment to distort a publisher's perceptions of the overall market. Indeed, the imminent collapse of TSR is a perfect example of what I'm talking about -- tons of product being churned out for the hardcore buy-on-sight fans of the brand(s), while the mainstream slowly becomes disaffected and stops buying.

KoOS