jgbrowning
Hero
MerricB said:
seven of my nine players are new: started on 3E, and 5 of them were under 18.
joe b.
[WFRP] Hogshead Closes Doors
- Thread starter Numion
- Start date
seven of my nine players are new: started on 3E, and 5 of them were under 18.
joe b.
Old Fezziwig
this is a low-flying panic attack
I came back with 3e as well after not gaming for almost 9 years.
tKL
tKL
My return to role-playing at the same time 3E was being released after two or three years of just CCGs was purely coincidental, but I'm so glad the two occurred together.
I think one problem with the RPGs that push the frontiers is that they are so hard on the GM to come up with new ideas. There are possibly a couple of exceptions, but there's a reason that D&D is so successful.
Trying to come up with an alternative worldview is hard work.
Cheers!
I think one problem with the RPGs that push the frontiers is that they are so hard on the GM to come up with new ideas. There are possibly a couple of exceptions, but there's a reason that D&D is so successful.
Trying to come up with an alternative worldview is hard work.
Cheers!
Arcane Runes Press
First Post
Re: Ok, im a business guy
Hogshead didn't publish crap.
Some of their product, notably Nobilis, is brilliant, an order of magnitude better than 95% of the stuff that has ever hit the rpg market.
Producing GOOD product was never a problem for Hogshead.
The market is sadly diminished by the company's passing, whether or not another company steps up to take their place.
Patrick Y.
Roland Delacroix said:
Hogshead didn't publish crap.
Some of their product, notably Nobilis, is brilliant, an order of magnitude better than 95% of the stuff that has ever hit the rpg market.
Producing GOOD product was never a problem for Hogshead.
The market is sadly diminished by the company's passing, whether or not another company steps up to take their place.
Patrick Y.
Has anyone heard anything about what this will mean for the SLA Industries rpg? Please let it live on... please!
As for Hogshead itself, well, I have never really seen much of their other product (all the WHFRPG stuff I ever bought was back when GW was making it themselves), so I can't say much.
As for Hogshead itself, well, I have never really seen much of their other product (all the WHFRPG stuff I ever bought was back when GW was making it themselves), so I can't say much.
JohnNephew
First Post
Re: Ok, im a business guy
It's more complex than that. Retailers and distributors are having a lot of trouble handling the flood of titles. Have you checked the listing on ENWorld of upcoming titles lately? Hundreds of new D20 releases due out in the next few months, hundreds already on the market. Overall, the anecdotal report is that the total sales of the industry are up in a healthy way. However, there are more products dividing up that pie. Maybe a year ago there were 10 new books selling 2,000 copies apiece in some window of time, or 20,000 books total. This year the sales are up 10%, which is healthy, to 22,000 books total in the same time window -- but there are 20 books, so they're only selling 1100 copies each, which probably takes the manufacturers of those books from a profit down to a loss. Meanwhile, retailers have plenty of unsold product from over-optimistic purchases earlier on; they have learned that if there are 20 products, instead of 10, you can't buy 5 of each and expect them all to sell; you have to cut back to 3 of each, or two, or maybe play it safe at 1. After all, next week there will be a dozen new titles (and for that matter, why reorder then? a reordered title has at least one less potential customer than any brand new title, right?). The consequence is a sharp reduction in sales per title.
If you want to compete, the temptation (or necessity, unless you have other things to fall back on, such as different target categories or different markets) is to produce as many of the titles as possible. If 11 of the 20 titles are yours, and you can restrain your costs (by not devoting as much time to editing or revisions or playtesting, paying authors less, etc.) while producing more titles, you can grab a bunch of the money while elbowing competitors off the shelves. The thing is, ultimately, selling 5 different books is less profitable than selling 5 copies of one book. But it's a tragedy of the commons situation; who wants to volunteer to take fewer pieces of the pie?
In theory, at some point, quality will win out; the retailers, distributors, and consumers will all put into place methods of winnowing the field, create barriers to limit the amount of product on the market, and reward the producers of the best product so that they will generate more of it. However, reality is hampered by chaotic patterns and finite timeframes. Publishers can't wait until the hypothetical infinite point on the horizon when the statistical distribution has reverted everything to the mean and determined and rewarded the true measurement of quality; as a rule, they do not have the financial ballast to survive severe short-term fluctuations. As for chaos, a publisher could be pulled into bankruptcy because some third party upon whom they depend is hurt or bankrupted by another publisher (perhaps a publisher of non-quality items).
Imagine this scenario. Publisher A does Good Stuff. Publisher B does Mediocre Stuff. The market, not knowing anything much about either at this point, orders equal quantities of both. Publisher A's stuff is devoured by the quality-hungry masses. Publisher B's stuff languishes on the shelves. All good? Well, multiply this by a bunch of releases, because the market still hasn't figured out how to deal with all this. At some point, some interesting things happen. For example, the games might be sold into the book trade -- on returnable terms. Then one day a big return comes back. A and B both use a fulfillment house, which did not make a reserve for returns (or made an inadequate one). As a result, the fulfillment house breaks the bank paying back the book trade for the return of all of Publisher B's books (or, what isn't much different, ships them a bunch of Publisher A's books but doesn't get paid beause the credit for the return covers it, and so the fulfiller has no money to pay A). It was the B stuff that was not quality...but when the fulfillment house can't pay its bills, Publisher A doesn't get paid for their stuff (even though it's all sold out and is clearly loved by consumers), money it needs to pay its printer, artists, and make payroll. Consequence: Publisher A goes out of business, in spite of publishing the superior products to universal acclaim. (In the past, this kind of thing would happen all the time, but not on as big a scale -- distributors would go bankrupt, with a warehouse full of Crappy CCGs X, Y and Z...and other publishers whose items all were selling great would get shafted with unpaid bills, sometimes more than they could survive. What's different today, and may make more publishers vulnerable to a sudden die off -- D20 or not -- is that more publishers are dependent on the common nodes of fulfillment houses.)
We're all lucky that the retailers and distributors have recently gone through a Pokemon-slowdown-induced purging/die-off, so the ones that remain are not so likely to get killed by inventory glut. That's good in the long run (I don't foresee a lot of stores driven into bankruptcy by overbuying RPGs they way they did from CCGs in the mid-'90s), but in the short run it may exacerbate the pain for manufacturers.
Blah, it's late, I'm rambling, it's bedtime.
Roland Delacroix said:
It's more complex than that. Retailers and distributors are having a lot of trouble handling the flood of titles. Have you checked the listing on ENWorld of upcoming titles lately? Hundreds of new D20 releases due out in the next few months, hundreds already on the market. Overall, the anecdotal report is that the total sales of the industry are up in a healthy way. However, there are more products dividing up that pie. Maybe a year ago there were 10 new books selling 2,000 copies apiece in some window of time, or 20,000 books total. This year the sales are up 10%, which is healthy, to 22,000 books total in the same time window -- but there are 20 books, so they're only selling 1100 copies each, which probably takes the manufacturers of those books from a profit down to a loss. Meanwhile, retailers have plenty of unsold product from over-optimistic purchases earlier on; they have learned that if there are 20 products, instead of 10, you can't buy 5 of each and expect them all to sell; you have to cut back to 3 of each, or two, or maybe play it safe at 1. After all, next week there will be a dozen new titles (and for that matter, why reorder then? a reordered title has at least one less potential customer than any brand new title, right?). The consequence is a sharp reduction in sales per title.
If you want to compete, the temptation (or necessity, unless you have other things to fall back on, such as different target categories or different markets) is to produce as many of the titles as possible. If 11 of the 20 titles are yours, and you can restrain your costs (by not devoting as much time to editing or revisions or playtesting, paying authors less, etc.) while producing more titles, you can grab a bunch of the money while elbowing competitors off the shelves. The thing is, ultimately, selling 5 different books is less profitable than selling 5 copies of one book. But it's a tragedy of the commons situation; who wants to volunteer to take fewer pieces of the pie?
In theory, at some point, quality will win out; the retailers, distributors, and consumers will all put into place methods of winnowing the field, create barriers to limit the amount of product on the market, and reward the producers of the best product so that they will generate more of it. However, reality is hampered by chaotic patterns and finite timeframes. Publishers can't wait until the hypothetical infinite point on the horizon when the statistical distribution has reverted everything to the mean and determined and rewarded the true measurement of quality; as a rule, they do not have the financial ballast to survive severe short-term fluctuations. As for chaos, a publisher could be pulled into bankruptcy because some third party upon whom they depend is hurt or bankrupted by another publisher (perhaps a publisher of non-quality items).
Imagine this scenario. Publisher A does Good Stuff. Publisher B does Mediocre Stuff. The market, not knowing anything much about either at this point, orders equal quantities of both. Publisher A's stuff is devoured by the quality-hungry masses. Publisher B's stuff languishes on the shelves. All good? Well, multiply this by a bunch of releases, because the market still hasn't figured out how to deal with all this. At some point, some interesting things happen. For example, the games might be sold into the book trade -- on returnable terms. Then one day a big return comes back. A and B both use a fulfillment house, which did not make a reserve for returns (or made an inadequate one). As a result, the fulfillment house breaks the bank paying back the book trade for the return of all of Publisher B's books (or, what isn't much different, ships them a bunch of Publisher A's books but doesn't get paid beause the credit for the return covers it, and so the fulfiller has no money to pay A). It was the B stuff that was not quality...but when the fulfillment house can't pay its bills, Publisher A doesn't get paid for their stuff (even though it's all sold out and is clearly loved by consumers), money it needs to pay its printer, artists, and make payroll. Consequence: Publisher A goes out of business, in spite of publishing the superior products to universal acclaim. (In the past, this kind of thing would happen all the time, but not on as big a scale -- distributors would go bankrupt, with a warehouse full of Crappy CCGs X, Y and Z...and other publishers whose items all were selling great would get shafted with unpaid bills, sometimes more than they could survive. What's different today, and may make more publishers vulnerable to a sudden die off -- D20 or not -- is that more publishers are dependent on the common nodes of fulfillment houses.)
We're all lucky that the retailers and distributors have recently gone through a Pokemon-slowdown-induced purging/die-off, so the ones that remain are not so likely to get killed by inventory glut. That's good in the long run (I don't foresee a lot of stores driven into bankruptcy by overbuying RPGs they way they did from CCGs in the mid-'90s), but in the short run it may exacerbate the pain for manufacturers.
Blah, it's late, I'm rambling, it's bedtime.
Sammael99
First Post
Thorin Stoutfoot said:
Thorin,
I think your position is fairly simplistic. First of all, apart from possibly Monte, I can't see any d20 game designer making much money. I'm not talking about the companies, I'm talking about the people in the companies.
J. Wallis wasn't saying his company was bankrupt, (and that is the reason for the "refreshingly solvent" comment, Wulf), but he was saying that it's a dog's life to earn a living designing games.
From a purely marketing point of view, Thorin, I agree with you. Who gives a sh*t ? Make your choices and live (or die) by them. From a fan point of view, I find I like products that have been written by people passionate about their subject a lot more than products that have been written with a marketing approach in mind...
At the end of the day, this whole thing makes me glad I'm not in the gaming industry and if I ever decide to write something for publication, it will just be fun. The same way I'm involved in music. As a hobby.
Sammael99
First Post
Re: Re: Ok, im a business guy
John,
Thanks for that most excellent and enlightening post. A lot of people haven't figured out the discrepancy between the business growing and the margins by product shrinking. FWIW, the recent thread on PDFs came to the same conclusion...
On the whole about 3E bringing new players into the fold or not, I find that I disagree with most of James Wallis' assumptions, but not necessarily for the reasons mentioned in messages above.
First of all, I don't have an opinion on whether 3E brought in new players into the RPG fold in a significant way. Here in France, I don't have a feeling that it's true in any measurable sense (it may be marginal) but then France isn't the US either.
That being said, I'm also fairly happy that 3E has not propelled the RPG business into a mainstream model. A niche hobby that is suddenly pushed into a mass product usually results in a dead hobby, either because it dies out when the fad passes (it's always a fad !) or because it's sustainably profitable and therefore becomes purely marketing driven.
So I'm happy for RPGs to remain niche. I take pride in the fact that a lot of good creative stuff in different media seems to have been influenced by RPGs, and that's that.
The paradox of James' position, IMO, is that he was looking for a creative way to make RPGs more accessible to the public and hence profitable, thus most likely destroying the creativity that he values so much.
Look at MtG. Was it new, original and creative when it came out ? Hell, yeah ! Many things can be said about it, but not that it wasn't a brilliant idea. But the creativity behind died quick, as soon as it began making a lot of money. Then they started releasing re-hash extensions, new editions left right and center, nothing creative there.
As for Once Upon a Time or Baron Munchausen, I think they are brilliant games, but I see them as only very distantly related to RPGs. Well maybe BM is closer than OUAT, but it's still very far from being an RPG, IMO. Can they serve to familiarise people with RPG concepts ? Probably ! Does it mean that people will then be happy to sit around a table for 8 hours making up stories and rolling dice ? Not necessarily...
JohnNephew said:
John,
Thanks for that most excellent and enlightening post. A lot of people haven't figured out the discrepancy between the business growing and the margins by product shrinking. FWIW, the recent thread on PDFs came to the same conclusion...
On the whole about 3E bringing new players into the fold or not, I find that I disagree with most of James Wallis' assumptions, but not necessarily for the reasons mentioned in messages above.
First of all, I don't have an opinion on whether 3E brought in new players into the RPG fold in a significant way. Here in France, I don't have a feeling that it's true in any measurable sense (it may be marginal) but then France isn't the US either.
That being said, I'm also fairly happy that 3E has not propelled the RPG business into a mainstream model. A niche hobby that is suddenly pushed into a mass product usually results in a dead hobby, either because it dies out when the fad passes (it's always a fad !) or because it's sustainably profitable and therefore becomes purely marketing driven.
So I'm happy for RPGs to remain niche. I take pride in the fact that a lot of good creative stuff in different media seems to have been influenced by RPGs, and that's that.
The paradox of James' position, IMO, is that he was looking for a creative way to make RPGs more accessible to the public and hence profitable, thus most likely destroying the creativity that he values so much.
Look at MtG. Was it new, original and creative when it came out ? Hell, yeah ! Many things can be said about it, but not that it wasn't a brilliant idea. But the creativity behind died quick, as soon as it began making a lot of money. Then they started releasing re-hash extensions, new editions left right and center, nothing creative there.
As for Once Upon a Time or Baron Munchausen, I think they are brilliant games, but I see them as only very distantly related to RPGs. Well maybe BM is closer than OUAT, but it's still very far from being an RPG, IMO. Can they serve to familiarise people with RPG concepts ? Probably ! Does it mean that people will then be happy to sit around a table for 8 hours making up stories and rolling dice ? Not necessarily...
Eben
First Post
Phew, what a read! This somehow reminds me of a column Monte Cook wrote a while ago. In there he stated that for RGS's to appeal to a bigger crowd they would no longer appeal to the the original crowd, since ours is already a niche hobby as Sammael99 stated. (He made an analogy with doll-collecting I think.)
And this seems to be the frustration of JW. I don't believe anybody is waiting for the next generation of RPG's.
The trouble is in seeing games as an artistic medium for the people who play them. They aren't: they're entertainment. Granted, they test our creativety more than Monopoly or Sonic the Hedgehog, but finally, I want to have fun while gaming and rpg's as they are provide me with the medium I need.
If you do see your rpg's as a means for artistic expression, that's great, but those are different games than those I play and than those most of us play. And the trouble for a games designer is that he is actully catering for a niche within a niche. So I think JW has done the courageous thing and quit while he was ahead instead of waiting to risk financial damage. Especially since I read in those interviews that his own creativity is what matters to him. Closing down hogshead shouldn't stop his creativity, rather the opposite.
And this seems to be the frustration of JW. I don't believe anybody is waiting for the next generation of RPG's.
The trouble is in seeing games as an artistic medium for the people who play them. They aren't: they're entertainment. Granted, they test our creativety more than Monopoly or Sonic the Hedgehog, but finally, I want to have fun while gaming and rpg's as they are provide me with the medium I need.
If you do see your rpg's as a means for artistic expression, that's great, but those are different games than those I play and than those most of us play. And the trouble for a games designer is that he is actully catering for a niche within a niche. So I think JW has done the courageous thing and quit while he was ahead instead of waiting to risk financial damage. Especially since I read in those interviews that his own creativity is what matters to him. Closing down hogshead shouldn't stop his creativity, rather the opposite.
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