2003.
The premature release of 3.5 marked a shift in both the management and predominant design ethos at the company. The new management didn't understand what had made 2000 successful and overcompensated in reaction to mistakes (both perceived and real). The new design ethos was buying hard into the My Perfect Encounters(TM) school of design and allowing the CharOp tail to wag the dog.
I think you're right. This is also about the time that it seemed WotC started shifting from the open source/Dancey approach to publication back to a more traditional one. The GSL and DDI furthered this development.
On the other hand, while I agree that with 3.5 WotC "overcompensated in reaction to mistakes" there is an inherent problem to offering an open source product: third party publishers are going to be pissed whenever you make changes to the game, but the only way to improve the game is to make changes. So you end up being caught between a rock and a hard place: either keep the game unchanging, or only slowly changing, but remaining viable for 3PPs or continue to evolve and develop the game, adding new ideas and approaches.
I tend to prefer the latter, mainly because I enjoy a changing game - I like trying out and playing new versions of D&D. But I wish there was a way to keep the 3PP door as widely open as possible.
If I spent lots of time on the Paizo boards, I would think that 4e is the worst game ever written, right up there with FATAL and that WOTC employees regularly serve small furry animals live with their lunch.
Well, this is just another grain of sand on the pile. My point is that if you look at the total picture, I personally have never seen as much ire and dissent around a given edition of D&D. Now because of the internet, we really can't go much further back than about 15 years. But within that span of time, the D&D community is more fractured than ever (since 4E came out) - and it isn't even close.
Never mind that WOTC has done more gamer outreach in the past couple of years than anyone's done in the past couple of decades with things like the D&D Encounters and Gamma World, which apparently gets completely overlooked when people on chat boards talk about "listening to the people".
Good point. Unlike many, I also think Mearls' recent articles are authentically meant in good spirit.
Really? This is well known? Or is it just commonly assumed without any actual facts backing it up. I thought it was sales of PHB's that were the majority of D&D sales. Those aren't hardcore fans buying typically. Those are the casual players who only buy one or two books ever and probably outnumber the hardcore players a hundred to one.
Yes, you are right that PHBs and, to a lesser extent, the other two core books make up the bulk of D&D sales. My numbers--which, as you say, are entirely made up but simply serve as illustration--probably relate more to unique titles. My guess is that in terms of gross sales, you have 20% of fans spending about 50% of the money, which is still significant.
Whereas in the groups I've typically played with, generally everyone had at least the PHB (of whatever edition) as well as a couple of other books.
Whose anecdote wins?
Obviously we can't just look at our anecdotes.
But your numbers here are completely fabricated based on your own experiences and not based on anything resembling a fact. You have no idea how many groups play with one player with a large library or if groups spread out the costs.
Yes, thanks for repeating what I said in my previous post!
For example, every group I've ever played with has included multiple DM's. Every single one. Therefore, just about every group has had multiple copies of a number of books.
Might I ask how many times you've changed groups?
Not many, but does it matter? Again, I'm going upon what I've heard, mainly on message boards. But I am willing to at least meet you halfway - that groups are split between those with one diehard and a bunch of casual fans (maybe with one or two "inbetweeners"), and groups with a bunch of diehards and one or two casual fans.
It may be more useful to not look at groups but individuals. If we made a scale of 1-5 (with
speculated percentage of total active players in parentheses), we could come up with something like this:
- Very casual players (20-30%?) - perhaps the spouses of more serious players who don't own anything behind maybe some dice and a PHB and perhaps not even that. This also includes the people that try a game out once or twice and never come back.
- Casual players (30-50%?) - probably own one or two books, dice, shows up regularly, but probably never DMs or thinks about the game outside of the session.
- Dedicated players (15-25%?) - starts thinking about the game outside the session, expanding their collection, tries their hand at DMing, etc. Probably doesn't think about the hobby or industry beyond the game itself.
- Serious players (5-15%?) - has an RPG collection, regularly DMs, spends a fair amount of time thinking the game and hobby (and the industry) outside of sessions.
- Diehard players (<5%?) - these are the game room folks with vast collections, maybe playing and running in multiple games. For them gaming is probably their primary hobby, maybe primary interest. May be game designers.
My assertion is the bulk of RPG items - in terms of unique products - is bought by categories 3-5, yet the higher you go in categories the less total numbers of players. The majority of active gamers are probably Very Casual or Casual, and the only items either buys are dice, maybe a miniature, and a core rulebook - and perhaps not even that.
My point of all of this is that a game company, in order to survive beyond the initial release of the core rulebook, has to keep the Dedicated-to-Diehard fan base (maybe 30% of the total number of active players) happy.
But again, don't get too caught up on numbers - they're not meant to be definitive but illustrative (and highly speculative). They could be way off, although I think the general spirit of the proportions is about right. Remember, we're talking about millions of gamers - so to say that less than 5% are Diehard and about 10% are Serious, is still to say that there are some hundreds of thousands of gamers that are serious about roleplaying.
A blip on the radar? I'm sure there are rather a large number of d20 publishers that don't think 3e to 3.5 was a blip on the radar. For most publishers, that was the death knell of their publishing in D&D.
I was talking about fan reaction, not other publishers. I don't remember there being a lasting outcry from the fanbase and a mass exodus to other games like we've seen with 4E.
3 years after publishing 2e, according to some claims by people here, D&D had lost almost HALF of its player base. It had certainly lost a great deal by all accounts. 3 years after publishing 2e, D&D was in SECOND PLACE to Vampire in sales (at least briefly).
Good point. I think what we saw in the early 90s was the "Boomer" generation of D&D players (those who started in the late 70s and early 80s and made up the bulk of the so-called "25 million" D&D players of the early-to-mid 80s) growing up. That generation, my generation, went off to and graduated from college and then focused on their social lives and careers. In my opinion, part of the 3E boom was due to the fact that a lot of these folks came back - or at least those that had been at least Dedicated players - and started to settle down a bit with families, and wanted some form of creative/fun outlet that wasn't drinking or poker.
The Vampire wave was a new sub-generation of slightly younger players with a more postmodern outlook. I don't think this group was taken away from D&D as much as it was created, a new cultural group.
4e was briefly in second place to another D&D game - Pathfinder. It would be more worrying if it had been a non-d20, non-D&D game. But, it wasn't. A game that leveraged the D&D name and a great deal of really, really excellent marketing (and I won't deny for a moment that Paizo is WAY better at marketting its game to existing D&D players) managed to briefly pull ahead of 4e D&D. We'll see how things go a few years down the road.
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. I personally think that Pathfinder has more of a cap on total players than D&D does, partially because of the brand name but also because of the game itself. There are a large group of D&D players that won't go to Pathfinder, that prefer 4E and may be open to 5E, but feel that Pathfinder is "going backwards" to 3.5. I admit to being one of them (this is not to say that I wouldn't play and enjoy Pathfinder - and I do buy quite a few of Paizo's products - but that I prefer 4E and am curious as to what the next iteration of D&D might be).
I think it's the general tenor of a small, but EXTREMELY vocal segment of the community.
True, but it is an important segment - it is a significant portion of the Dedicated, Serious, and Diehard fanbase that is active on message boards and ends up being influential because of the loudness of its voice.
When they used an apparently hefty initial advertising budget from Hasbro to commission a commercial where they dumped dragon dung on previous fans.
Except that they didn't "dump dragon dung" on the fans, they mildly made fun of the older game. If I remember correctly, that is. Certainly it wasn't the best PR, but people have blown this way out of proportion, imo.
4E is NOT "failing".
DDI is making a very nice, steady stream of cash.
But the market is deeply split now. D&D as a brand could be doing vastly better than it is.
Well put - and this is crucial. Yes, 4E is (probably) doing fine overall, but if you are the Hasbro exec in charge of oversight of WotC, or if you are the D&D bigwig (Bill Slaviscek?) you're probably not satisfied with "fine." The crucial part is that D&D as a brand could be doing much better - that is the point. To put it into letter grades, I think WotC's handling of 4E has been in the D to C range; a D is still a passing grade and a C is still adequate, but neither are good. And when you have the hottest brand name in the industry you should be doing much better than adequate.
Now it may be that 3E was catching lightning in a bottle and that the world has moved on and we'll never see another traditional tabletop RPG renaissance. But if you're WotC, you're looking for ways to manufacture another renaissance, a new Golden Age - you simply can't operate under the assumption that the Golden Days are gone and RPGs are a dying hobby...otherwise you might as well make as much money as you can for as long as possible and start preparing to sell the brand.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if that is exactly what WotC is doing. But only time will tell. What someone described as WotC throwing all sorts of stuff at the wall to see what sticks may be their last gasp efforts to find something profitable enough to continue. If nothing sticks, or sticks well enough, we may be seeing the final days (years) of WotC D&D.
Even Star Wars was numbered so that Empire Strikes Back is episode V......... 
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