I haven't yet watched the video. I'll try to do so at some point, but it will likely be Wednesday before I get a chance.
My feeling: the tabletop RPG
hobby is thriving. The tabletop RPG
industry is about as healthy as Scottish football was last season.
Consider: For the past year, D&D has been in an edition-change cycle. Most of the new RPG products to come out have been reprints, while the new products have mostly been things that wouldn't even have made it to the release schedule in years past. (That's to say nothing about quality; it's just that crunch-empty books have historically not done well.)
Despite this, D&D has remained solidly the #2 RPG throughout the year.
Now, that's no doubt good for D&D, and I daresay it's reasonably good for WotC. But it's a pretty poor indication for the health of the industry as a whole. It means that FFG, despite their WH40k games being aggregated together as a single entry, despite them having a very popular license behind them, and despite the extremely high production values,
still couldn't match D&D
at its weakest.
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Additionally, I don't accept that Kickstarter is the salvation of the industry, any more than the d20 license was. In fact, it appears to be following the same pattern:
In the first wave, everyone is wildly optimistic about Kickstarter. Lots of money gets thrown around, lots of projects get funded. And that's pretty cool - we get to see some things that simply would not have existed otherwise.
However, we're now about to enter the second wave, of extreme pessimism. As the reality of having to actually produce bites, projects will start failing in numbers. Many projects will simply produce nothing at all, other projects will produce things that simply are not what the customer expected. We've already seen one project lead to a legal complaint; we should expect others. (The complaints probably won't come to anything, but they will sour people on the process.)
Eventually, we'll get to the third wave, where the customer base are willing to fund
selected projects. But to succeed, a project will need one of three things: it will need a 'name' behind it (Monte Cook, Reaper), or the proposers will need a proven track record of success, or the project will be to fund some
improvement to an already existing work (e.g. an art budget for an already-existing book).
But for the small-press, no-name designer, Kickstarter is already of limited use.
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As for the iPad and similar, these will have a significant effect, but I suspect it will prove to be more a case of rearranging the available opportunities, rather than one of creating lots of new opportunities.
Indeed, the major effect may well be that it dooms FFG's "Star Wars" games to failure - I suspect that for any game to be 'big' it will
need electronic support and PDF versions, but FFG's license precludes them from producing those very things. And the cost of the "Star Wars" license probably means it needs to be 'big' or fail.
As for the rest - adding tablet support will probably mean that a 'small' game can be a bit more successful - but it will remain small. For the 'big' games, technology will continue to represent a massive opportunity... and also a massive trap. The danger is of doing as WotC did with the DDI - make massive promises, invest huge sums of money, and end up with something that's "okay, I guess". But the potential, should they do it
right is huge.
I suspect the big winners of this will come if one of the 'big' companies teams up with a tech-savvy third party to produce electronic support. For example, Paizo will probably never do something like DDI, but by teaming up with Hero Lab, they both win.
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Long-term, I think tabletop TPGs will be to WoW as radio plays* are to TV - they won't ever go away completely, but they'll never again be more than the smallest blip on the market.
I think we're also seeing the heat death of the industry. Almost all of the 'big' companies now do RPGs as a sideline to their 'real' business. I expect to see this to continue, with the RPG emphasis continually shrinking. The only time we'll see a new 'big' company will be if someone snaps up a lucrative license - Shadowrun, Vampire, or perhaps even D&D if 5e fails.
On the other hand, I think we'll see no end of
product. It's just that it will mostly be small scale stuff from micro-publishers, very often based on open licenses and/or done with the tacit approval of the copyright holders. The OSR, Fourth Party, and similar groups are very likely the future.
* Another equivalent might be model railway enthusiasts. But the difference is that this latter group are reliant on being able to purchase various things that it is difficult or impossible for the enthusiast to construct himself. The same is not really true of gamers - the existence of the OGL effectively means that none of us ever need buy anything, ever again.
Naturally, everything here is IMO only. And almost all of it is probably wrong - I just don't know which bits.
