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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sammael99" data-source="post: 493381" data-attributes="member: 1157">Re: Re: Ok, im a business guyJohn, 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...</blockquote>

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