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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alphastream" data-source="post: 7658744" data-attributes="member: 11365">I won't speculate on the speculations, but on the above, I've been surprised many times by the size of the market in terms of players... as opposed to $. For example, when I played Living Greyhawk it was very clearly the most successful organized play campaign ever, and it felt like it. It felt like a huge extended family, and you felt like you knew everyone, if only by screen name or face at a con. When I moved to the Portland area it wasn't hard to find the local crowd and get to know them. There were about 80 frequent players, as it was a fairly quiet city in terms of gaming. Or, so I thought. LG ends and I start helping to organize D&D Encounters. In many ways, it felt like a far less successful program. People weren't active on forums, it didn't feel like there was that much excitement, and it wasn't at all like a big family... more like a little one.And yet, when I organized the second season of Encounters we drew more than 300 different players in just a few months! Of those players, only something like 5 of them were LG players! It was insane. I had no idea the city had that many people interested, even casually, in D&D. This is just at one store. There were about 6 other stores in the city running Encounters at that time. Play is even bigger now, for what that's worth. Now, what is really interesting is that these weren't 300 customers. The majority of these people didn't give any dime to the store or to Wizards. Many had a PH, but most didn't. For the Dark Sun season that I oversaw many did buy the campaign book, because the world was different and interesting enough to fuel that purchase. But many of the 300 came in, tried it out, came a couple of more times, and faded away. This all reinforces the problem with the industry, but it also shows how enormous the market could be. Encounters is bigger today - are more of those people becoming customers and staying customers? I think so. I'm seeing far more stores that charge money for just playing, which sends a message. I'm seeing far more players sit down at my tables with product they just finished purchasing. And, I'm hearing stores say that 5E Encounters is very good for business. So, yeah, I do buy that Wizards can focus on new players, still retain old players, and not focus on competitors.(It's also worth mentioning that I see lots of new and potential players at PAX and other non-typical events. The vast majority of PAX attendees are video gamers, but thousands of them come to try D&D each year and leave enthusiastic. Our local museum had a game night and tons of new players had the same experience. On the Neverwinter MMO the chat often has actual (positive) discussion of the 5E edition, which suggests a nice gateway.)</blockquote>

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