Whatever happened to Necromancer Games?

[ShinHakkaider]

I don't think you are right.
The nature of 3PPs certainly changed because THEY got burned with 3.5.

But I'd say my wotc/3PP usage went from 70/30 pre-3.5 to 20/80 post 3.5.
And people I've talked to seem to be in the same ballpark.
Perhaps I'm in a very happy subset of the overall market. But that's my view.

That was most definitely the case for me. I mean I still bought some of the 3.5 stuff because I really didn't see the change over from 3.0 to 3.5 as the fricking earth shattering deal breaker that some people did. I did buy heavily from Malhavoc, Goodman, Fantasy Flight and Necromancer Games. Having been burnt by Mongoose I didn't write off all third parties I just wrote off the companies that I felt had bad stuff.

 

[BryonD]

And yet most heavy supports of D&D 3.5 stopped because people stopped buying.

Yep. Once the market was completely saturated, people stopped buying. But that was several years after 3.5 AND WotC stopped as well, it just took WotC longer to turn their ship around.

At the end the 3E pie was smaller, no doubt. But you made no comment about the size of the pie. You claimed the WotC portion of the pie grew. I very much believe the statement you made was wrong.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Yep. Once the market was completely saturated, people stopped buying. But that was several years after 3.5 AND WotC stopped as well, it just took WotC longer to turn their ship around.

At the end the 3E pie was smaller, no doubt. But you made no comment about the size of the pie. You claimed the WotC portion of the pie grew. I very much believe the statement you made was wrong.

So when WoTC products were the only ones you could buy in the store, the size of WoTC pie didn't grow? When GR decided, "We're not going to print the Advanced Race or Advance Class compendium because we'd take a blood bath on it", GR's d20 3.5 slice of the pie grew? Since Chris has already said they took a massive beating when 3.5 came out in the first place, I don't see that happening. And as it happened to other comapnies like Atlas and their massive beastiary and Violet Dawn as well as others, we must have very different recollections or defintions.

 

[Treebore]

So when WoTC products were the only ones you could buy in the store, the size of WoTC pie didn't grow? When GR decided, "We're not going to print the Advanced Race or Advance Class compendium because we'd take a blood bath on it", GR's d20 3.5 slice of the pie grew? Since Chris has already said they took a massive beating when 3.5 came out in the first place, I don't see that happening. And as it happened to other comapnies like Atlas and their massive beastiary and Violet Dawn as well as others, we must have very different recollections or defintions.

I agree with you Joe, 3pp sales shrank and shrank after about the third year. If you were wrong their sales would have grown. I think the only 3pp who's sales increased was Goodman Games, everyone else, GR, Mongoose, Necromancer, PAradigm, AEG, everyone, cut back more and more because sales kept declining.

 

[BryonD]

So when WoTC products were the only ones you could buy in the store, the size of WoTC pie didn't grow?

That never happened.

When GR decided, "We're not going to print the Advanced Race or Advance Class compendium because we'd take a blood bath on it", GR's d20 3.5 slice of the pie grew? Since Chris has already said they took a massive beating when 3.5 came out in the first place, I don't see that happening. And as it happened to other comapnies like Atlas and their massive beastiary and Violet Dawn as well as others, we must have very different recollections or defintions.

You are mixing and matching and getting it all wrong.

You said:

You're the opposite of most GMs and players. Most went with official WoTC material after the 3.5 switch thanks to being burned by companies like Mongoose so often.

Players being burned and companies being burned are two completely different things. I mentioned before you did that companies got burned by 3.5. But I still bought a ton of 3.5 3PP stuff. Now, many companies got smart and moved away from D20 STL and other elements that made them dependent on WotC. That is part of what made WotC end up losing control.

Simple fact for you: My purchases and use of 3PP went up sharply AFTER 3.5.

Now: this is just anecdote, but my experience is that this was typical.

Now, later on, and having pretty much nothing to do with 3.5, the market became completely saturated. At that point sales really plummeted. Many companies stopped production of titles because the market was done. Tying this back to 3.5 years earlier is a mistake.

I suppose there may have been a period right at / after the 4E announcement that virtually zero 3PP became true. I'm not certain that the existence of new product from WotC constitutes a bigger sales pie, when the new product isn't selling either. But I guess the "never" I said above isn't 100% dead on. But in context of your initial quote it is close enough.

I know that I bought practically nothing between the 4e announcement and Pathfinder. My only early 2008 purchase that springs to mind was City of Brass by.... wait for it.... Necromancer.

Bottom line, everyone talks about the glut. There was a glut. A glut is when there is way too much product. Are you claiming there was too much product because no one was producing it?

 

[BryonD]

I agree with you Joe, 3pp sales shrank and shrank after about the third year. If you were wrong their sales would have grown. I think the only 3pp who's sales increased was Goodman Games, everyone else, GR, Mongoose, Necromancer, PAradigm, AEG, everyone, cut back more and more because sales kept declining.

I agree that sales shrank. I never disputed that.

I dispute that 3.5 was the primary cause.
And I observe that as sales shrank, 3PPs portion of what sales there were grew.

 

[Wicht]

I think the point Bryon is trying to make is that at the end of the 3.5 cycle, the 3pp were more appealing than the WotC products. I know that was true for me. I glanced through Bo9S and the various race books but none of them appealed to me. I bought Races of Stone, the only one of those books I bought and was a little meh about it and after that there wasn't any that made me think, I need that. In fact, I think IIRC after RAces of Stone, I bought Ghostwalk off of Ebay and then nothing till they released the Rules Compendium. At the same time, Paizo was beginning to really produce products that appealed to me and when the APs started coming out I more or less switched from being a WotC customer to a Paizo customer. So anyway, long story short: I haven't bought a thing off of WotC since Rules Compendium and not much else for two years before that. But I was supporting 3pps more and more.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I think the point Bryon is trying to make is that at the end of the 3.5 cycle, the 3pp were more appealing than the WotC products. I know that was true for me. I glanced through Bo9S and the various race books but none of them appealed to me. I bought Races of Stone, the only one of those books I bought and was a little meh about it and after that there wasn't any that made me think, I need that. In fact, I think IIRC after RAces of Stone, I bought Ghostwalk off of Ebay and then nothing till they released the Rules Compendium. At the same time, Paizo was beginning to really produce products that appealed to me and when the APs started coming out I more or less switched from being a WotC customer to a Paizo customer. So anyway, long story short: I haven't bought a thing off of WotC since Rules Compendium and not much else for two years before that. But I was supporting 3pps more and more.

And I guess if we're counting only internet e-books, nothing wrong with 'em, love 'em, outside of Paizo and Goodman, there really weren't ANY 3PP being published. White Wolf took a massive beating, GR skipped town, Atlas left, Bastion was crushed and evolved into a different beast, Bad Axe Games never finished their Races series, etc... Even good old fashioned Necromancer Games couldn't get for tat published by their partners at Paizo for a vareity of reasons well before 4e came out and prior to that were using other partners like Troll Lord (who long stopped 3e style in favor of Castles and Crusades) and Kenzer, who went back to Hackmaster, to publish their products.

I guess I'm not 'seeing' this wealth of 3.5 products I could've bought at the store in the first place for their to be more growth or purchase of those books.

But that's my own experience.

 

[Treebore]

I can buy that people were paying more attention to 3pp's as the end drew near to WOTC's 3E days, but unfortunately by that time there were very few 3pp's doing much of anything for 3E D&D. I think GR was still putting out an occasional Bleeding Edge module, Mongoose was dribbling out some things, AEG may still have been doing something, (talking print here, PDF is a little bit different of a story), and Necromancer was still trying to go full bore by publishing via Kenzer, but then the 4E announcement killed those plans after the first 3 mods were published. Even so, by that time Necromancer wasn't even selling a thousand copies anymore.

So the only really highly visible 3pp by that point was Paizo, with Goodman Games a distant second. Everyone else was a very distant third... or completely gone, or like FFG and completely switched over to other RPG's, with one or two notable exceptions. That still haven't seen the light of day last time I checked. Bastion Press was completely PDF by then too, I think.

So yeah, nothing much to look at anymore, except for close out prices on stuff that had already been on the shelves for years. So a good time to buy, but a lousy time for the companies.

 

[TheYeti1775]

I've always liked using a third party product on occassion. Even back in 1st Edition days. You all remember the Role-Aids series right? I remember mining them for a lot of goodies both fluff and crunch.

Third Parties have always played at least a small role in the development of D&D. And I'm quite sure they will continue to do so.

What grognards (like myself) all need to learn, the old editions will not come back, with the exceptions of Aniversary packs and PDFs.
Paizo holds the torch rather high for us and their Pathfinder product, sure it's D&D 3.95E but it still at it's core a D20 product of 3/3.5E.
Will we show the same 'nerdrage' when they announce Pathfinder 2.0? It's a valid question when you think about it. They will have a business model that dictates they need to sell x amount to make x amount, and if they only sell x, it's time to REFRESH the brand. The quickest way to do that is with a new edition.


Now back to the topics at hand, a very good faith gesture of WotC (if you all are looking in) would be allowing the incorporation of 3pp data to your Character/Monster builders. Have it stipulated as part of the GSL, that a company is allowed to provide data for import to WotC's developers in a specific format to include on their data releases. They can mark them as BETA only in the include source list and have them defaulted to off. Maybe a special border on their items to show on the character print outs that they are derived from a third party supplement.
How many third party publishers would make that effort?
Though I think the better method would be allow for a rules dataset importer be part of the Builders.
I think we could all agree this would be a good thing right least for us on the consumer side.

O well I'm babbling.