When did WotC D&D "Jump the Shark"?

[Hussar]

But the market is deeply split now. If 4E had not split the market it would be making a hell of a lot more money than it is. And when I commented upthread about WotC being schizophrenic and swinging back and forth between supporting the 4E fan base and chasing the people they lost, it tied back to this.

You keep repeating that the market is specifically "deeply" split. What evidence do you base this on? That Paizo is doing well? We still have very little idea of how many people are actually playing 4e or Pathfinder.

Does anyone have any numbers on the RPGA? That would likely be a good place to start I would think. If the RPGA has been losing membership year on year since 4e has been released, I'd say that would be very good evidence of "deep" splits.

The problem is, Paizo doing well doesn't really tell us much. What is good for Paizo might be fantastic for WOTC, or it might be an absolute failure, just because of the difference in the size of the companies. Doing ok, or even just kind of coasting along isn't fantastic for WOTC, but, for any other RPG company would be a red letter day, again, just because of the size difference in the companies.

What is your metric for "doing well"? Doing as well as 3e did after initial release? Then D&D has been failing for most of its history, because the only time we saw those kinds of numbers was shortly after the release of AD&D in the early 80's.

Here's why I don't buy into the idea that you have any sort of solid evidence. Look at En World. Since the release of 4e, En World has grown about 50% in registered users. (Looking at Wayback machine, a snapshot of November 2008 states that the site had 70k members, that's a 50% jump (give or take) in 3 years) Give En World's fairly friendly 4e stance, wouldn't that lead to a conclusion that there is a growing population of 4e gamers?

Or are those 30k new members all playing other games?

Actually, this is my point. We don't know. All we know is that there has been a pretty decent spike in membership in the last 2 1/2 years. But, again, we lack any real context. We can't say that 4e is driving membership, anymore than we can say that anything else is driving membership.

Look, BryonD, I'm not saying that you are wrong. I'm really, really not. I'm saying that you are making statements that don't have a lot of backing behind them. It's pretty flimsy and repetition does not actually make anything true.

 

[Hussar]

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.

But, again, let's not forget historical context either. 3e is released after several years of the largest economic growth in American history (and much the same in many other countries as well). 4e is released after several years of some of the poorest economic performance in a generation or two.

Getting a passing grade on a luxury product when economic times are poor isn't a bad thing at all. Adequate in a time when many other companies are failing isn't too shabby.

And, again, what is your benchmark? How good should 4e be doing to get a B grade? Or an A grade? 3e just released? Again, outside of the early 80's, D&D has never reached that level. 3.5 certainly didn't. 2e didn't. And most of the time, 1e didn't as well.

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.

Why is "doing adequately" equated with "dying hobby"? I mean, modest growth or even static doesn't mean dying. Again, outside of about six years, the past 30 years of D&D has not been fantastic sales, it's been mostly "adequate".

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.

Again, there seems to be this disconnect. You and BryonD admit that WOTC is doing well with the DDI. That seems to be the case, although, again, big grain of salt time. You say that it's doing adequately, as in it's not losing money, but not making a whole lot either.

But, if I'm still making a return on my investment that is better than what I'd get in the bank, why would I sell off the investment in a very poor economic time? Wouldn't it be much, much better to do what WOTC did and sell at the hottest time? Let's not forget, Hasbro didn't wait until WOTC was failing to buy the company.

 

[Fifth Element]

You keep repeating that the market is specifically "deeply" split. What evidence do you base this on? That Paizo is doing well? We still have very little idea of how many people are actually playing 4e or Pathfinder.

To build on Hussar's post, there's also another important factor: the number of players who play both 4E and Pathfinder. Having two games with large player bases does not necessarily mean the market is "deeply split". There are obviously some players who play only one or the other, but there are others (like my groups) who alternate between the two.

So not only do we not know how many people are playing each game, we don't know how many of these two groups are also members of the other group.

Thus, claims of a "deep" split, other than amongst vocal minorities, are unsupported.

 

[BryonD]

Look, BryonD, I'm not saying that you are wrong. I'm really, really not. I'm saying that you are making statements that don't have a lot of backing behind them. It's pretty flimsy and repetition does not actually make anything true.

And repeating claims that "all of it" is flimsy doesn't make *that* true.

There have been detailed discussions of the various sources of information. And you were involved.

There is a group that has given up on actually discussing the situation and instead wants to declare everything null without any basis for THAT claim. And I can spend a bunch of time re-presenting everything. And in another thread two weeks from now you will just again hit a reset button and act like none of this ever happened either.

I'm not going to feel obligated to restate the argument over and over. Feel completely free to declare victory over that. If that is your standard, then by your rules I declare you the winner. Congrats.

I'm going to keep calling it the way I see it.

 

[BryonD]

How much different would things be if Paizo, instead of being WotC's #1 competitor, were instead their #1 cheerleaders?

There is no telling where a path not taken may have lead.

Honestly, I don't see much chance of converting large numbers of people who really strongly dislike 4E into fans.

 

[TheYeti1775]

From an historical perspective, when did 3.5E D&D jump the shark?

Book of Nine Swords as said earlier.
===========================================

Far as the rest of it, my prespective is as a non-4E player/dm.
I've played a total of one 4E campaign. About 8 sessions or so.

--------------------------------------------------------
We were spoiled during 3.0/3.5 years. Admit it to yourselves first.
The OGL, and the plethora of D20 3rd party products was pretty much a player/dm's dream. It was a long cry from the days where a fan page would get you a C&D letter from TSR.

Something happened prior to 4E that caused WotC to rethink their strategy in the market place.
That is in evidence from bringing all the licenscing back in house and to the GSL.

Dragon & Dungeon, yup I was pi$$ed off at that when it's print line ended, but using the 20/20 of hindsight. The magazine market itself was shrinking. So can't fault them there. In retrospect it might have saved the branding of those magazines with their move.

DDI really intrigued me as they were ramping up. But as I saw there was no support to older editions (which I still play) there was nothing there that made me want to buy into it.
The character builder offline was great though, I liked it. Because of that CB I actually played in that 4E game without much issue.
Once it went to an online model only, it wasn't something I wanted. As there was nothing within DDI that appealed to me.

To the 'Jump the Shark' moment within 4E, I think it will be looked back as the Essentials moment if it comes to it. That seems a general consensus within many boards of when Players/GM's begin not purchasing 4E products when they purchased all before.

---------------------------------------------------
But what ever your preceived shark jump is, it is still recoverable. At least in my opinion.
While a heavy crunch book only sells to a subset of your entire demographic, a heavy fluff book has the ability to cross that Edition War barrier.
Think about it, how many lapsed and current edition players/DM's would love a real updated on Greyhawk?
I know I would snag up a fluff book.
Same with many other settings they have in house.

I think they went a step in the right direction when they were going with the 3 books and done method for a campaign setting. You didn't saturate a setting out, but you satisfied a lot of different players by allowing for old settings to come back to the fold (i.e. Darksun). I actually picked up and browsed the book and put it to the wishlist on Amazon as a might buy later, think it's about number 10 on my to buy list. Considering not only D&D is on that list, that's pretty good.

Half the battle for them is get someone to consider buying it.

Death of mini's hurt in another way. That was one of the last items of Hasbro/WotC I was regularly buying. How many here can say the same?
Same with the Star Wars licence. I had just gotten into Star Wars when it all ended. The good thing though is I jumped in both feet to it and I have all the books as a complete set now.

Another idea that might/would boost your sales up.
Tie in modules/settings to your DDI.
No not as a must have but as a benefit to older edition players.
You have the knowledge base there at WotC and you own the rights (least I assume you do) to the old editions to have articles on the DDI about using that book under prior edition rules.
Really it's a kill three birds with one stone method.
1. Boost Sales of books by lapsed edition players/gms
2. Boost DDI usage/sales.
3. Satisfy grognards and bring them back as paying customers. $$

But what do I know.
I'm just someone with several hundred in disposable income per paycheck. And only two real hobbies.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

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.

Marketing 101: When you're talking marketing & brand management, belittling your prior product is something you simply don't do unless you're mocking something objectively bad about it, like a safety issue, for instance. And even then, it's usually a bad idea to explicitly call attention to past flaws. The risk of alienating parts or all of your installed customer base is generally not worth the potential payoff.

Simply put, WotC's marketing plan was a bad idea from the start, and the result was predictable.

 

[MrGrenadine]

I don't mean to pick, Hussar, but I'd like to make a couple comments on your post:

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".

I would say Paizo has done more outreach in the past decade, myself, but who knows? Here's an honest question, though: Whats the feedback loop for Encounters and GW, because reaching out to customers doesn't necessarily mean listening and responding to customers. You need the loop! And if WotC is really listening to its customers, and wisely choosing which feedback to incorporate, then that can only be good for the game.

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.

Are you thinking of specific publishers here, because I thought the GSL was the death knell for D&D 3PP.

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).

I think D&D was a mess at the tail end of 2e, because TSR was a mess. The game rebounded spectacularly during the 3e years, which was great to see.

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.

Interesting point, but I would think it would be more worrisome for D&D's current owner that a d20 D&D-based game is the one nipping at their heels. (If that's really happening, off course, because I have no proof of that.) And I'm not sure what you mean by "leveraged the D&D name", because Pathfinder doesn't seem to do that. What it does do is leverage past D&D editions, as did 3rd edition, 3.5, 4e, Essentials, etc etc.

Also, excellent marketing can get folks to the table, but only a solid and fun game will keep players at the table. My unsupportable anecdotal experience leads me to believe that Pathfinder will be fine down the road. But anything can happen.

In the meantime, I'll keep playing both PF and 4e.

 

[UnknownAtThisTime]

I've glanced at the whole thread and can't believe there is not a single photoshop of a "Fonzie cum polearm" leaping over a ferocious Bulette.

My gods, that is terrible.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

OK, I actually agree with you.

But this is certainly where it gets very frustrating because you are VERY much arguing with 4E fans at this point. Over and over I hear from people who insist that the complaints against 4E are just the absolutely predictable history repeating itself. My reply has been that two people saying something then and 500 people saying it now is not history repeating itself.

It seems we agree on that.

Right, it isn't history repeating itself. Certainly not exactly. OTOH there's still a good bit of validity to the idea that every version roll produces angst in some part of the fan base. How much of that is 4e in particular and how much is just editionitis is hard to say.

Actually, 3E was clearly on the way out. It certainly wasn't allowed to reach the pits that 2E wallowed in. But it is interesting that PF seems to be more popular now than 3E was in the last couple years of its life.

I don't know this actually. That is I don't know either thing to be true. I'd say 3.x was pretty tapped out as far as new material, sure. I actually don't really know how popular PF is in relation to any other system. It is reasonable to guess that PF is similar in popularity to 4e, but I don't even KNOW that. Again, you have very few facts. I have very few facts. You interpret them to get the answer you like, and frankly I probably do the same thing.

First, you are falling into the same trap as Hussar.
As numerous people have said, myself included on many occasions, 4E is making a lot of money.

But the market is deeply split now. If 4E had not split the market it would be making a hell of a lot more money than it is. And when I commented upthread about WotC being schizophrenic and swinging back and forth between supporting the 4E fan base and chasing the people they lost, it tied back to this.

Again though we do not know what 4e is making, nor what PF is making. Maybe both of them are doing better than 3.5 ever did. Maybe both of them are doing much worse. The bit we know seems to indicate they're both doing OK, but we have NO way of knowing what the market would be like without either 4e or PF in the picture. I'm going to pretty much guess that truth is the vast majority of players out there don't really give a knob about PF vs 4e. I think 3.5 might have been not making WotC a lot of money, but my observation is that PLENTY of people were playing it. Heck, it is still quite popular.
[/quote]

I certainly am willing the go out on a limb and presume that WotC's plan was NOT to split the market and they hoped, and expected, to continue being the single 800 lb gorilla. Wouldn't you agree that is a reasonable guess despite my ready concurrence that we truly don't know anything on that?

4E is not "failing". I don't claim it is. But the market is deeply split and D&D could have been doing MUCH better and when 4E was first given the go the plan and expectation SHOULD have been that it would do much better.[/quote]

I don't know about that. My feeling is that what WotC saw was that 3.5 was slowly winding down, partly due to just being a saturated market and natural tendency for gamers to go on to the next new thing, but also because the whole RPG market HAS shrunk.

In essence I think 4e was more of a strategic move than just a 'refresh' like 1e->2e was. They COULD have tweaked 3.5 and made effectively a WotC 'PF'. The problem with that is all it achieves is AT BEST selling a new set of books to the same people. They wanted to create a system that they can leverage further, to get new players. To bring in the people playing other games, kids, MMORPG players, etc. A 3.5 rehash would have zero chance of doing that.

The WERE willing to take the risk of splitting the market or leaving some of the fan base behind. I agree, I don't think they anticipated Paizo doing what they did, but I'm not convinced it is actually that big a deal for WotC. Paizo has the same problem NOW that WotC had 3 years ago. A system that only appeals to a diminishing fanbase and if they want to fix that they'll have to do the same thing WotC did, make a new system. Except now WotC has 3 years head start on that. Even if 4e itself DOESN'T get them all the way where they want to be, the competition is going to have to go piss off their fanbase to produce a modern game that MIGHT still be viable in 5 more years. 4e is there. Maybe it still needs another iteration, and maybe the quest for a bigger market is hopeless, but if it can be done it isn't Paizo that is likely to be able to do it, it is WotC and it will be done with substantially the game they have now.

All that said....

There is evidence. It gets absurd when people who don't like what the data say decide they just want to ignore it.

I am NOT claiming that I know what 4E makes or what PF makes. I'm not claiming I know to the nearest 10% what the split in revenue is.

But there is a ton of evidence that things are a lot different now.


It is? I thought you just said there was NO OBJECTIVE EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER

There's no objective evidence as to how they are doing financially or sales-wise. Nobody ever claimed it isn't obvious that PF is a popular RPG. There's simply no evidence that it is doing some kind of number of 4e. We don't know how much either makes, we have only a nebulous idea about their sales at best, and we have no idea of how many people play each one, play both, etc. MOST OF ALL we have no evidence that 4e isn't doing everything that WotC expects of it and wants it to do. None at all. We have no idea what their sales projections are/were, costs, expected return, or any of the other numbers we'd need to know that.

By itself, I agree. But there has certainly been a pattern here.

Pathfinder was in no small part born from the discontent with 4E in a large segment of the fan base.

So no, you certainly can't just look at PF sales and declare that an indicator of 4E. But if you have been following the story all along, the common source is there to see.

Oh, I think PF was born from a desire by a certain segment of the market that basically wants to keep playing 3.5. That's obvious. I think the error is in thinking that when 4e was dreamed up that WotC was ignorant of the fact that a lot of people would continue to play the old game and there are always plenty of fans of every earlier edition that gripe on the new one. It wasn't a big deal with 2e->3e simply because there wasn't a choice, WotC needed to put out something and 2e was dead. Anyone at that point who was annoyed with the change was no longer a customer they could have pleased. I think they were fully aware that 4e would split the fan base. Surely they weren't anticipating PF, but then again that die was cast LONG BEFORE 4e was even dreamed of with the OGL terms. What nobody has shown me any evidence of is that 4e has been seriously hurt by PF.

I know a bit. And as I just said above, I agree that just trying to assign direct cause and effect between the two is wrong. There is more to it than that.

Just simply not true.

Lets see it then. LOL. I hear all these statements about how people 'know this' and 'know that' and yet somehow delivery of evidence is always astoundingly lacking. I mean I laid out all that I know of that can be garnered without some kind of insider info that I have yet to meet anyone who can prove that they have it. "I know things" isn't squat. This is the Intertubes, talk is cheap, lol. I don't mean that to sound offensive. It is just the reality, there's lots of talk and vanishingly little substance going around.

Wait a second. Just before you were talking about how people buy both games so the "notable" success of PF says nothing about 4E. And, again, as an isolated comparison, I agree. But that presumes that a lot of people buying D&D are now just buying D&D plus PF and the pie is therefore growing and instead of one success we have two. That is certainly a potentially valid model which could exist. But then you turn around and say "the pie is shrinking". If the pie is shrinking AND someone else now has comparable amounts of pie as the guy who used to have the majority of the pie, then the only rational conclusion is that the guy now has less pie.

Well, I never said that I thought 4e sold as well as or better than 3.5 did in its heyday. I don't know actually, but I suspect ALL RPGs sell less now than they did in past years. However, more choice for customers is better, and if having 2 games that are both interesting keeps more gamers engaged AT ALL, then both games are relatively better off. If say 4e would be selling 30% below 3.5 at its 3 year mark and because of PF it is only 20% off that, then wouldn't that mean 4e benefited from the existence of PF? Sure it would. Now lets suppose that PF was quite appealing to newbies and brought droves of them into the hobby, it could sell 10x better than 4e and still be a good thing for 4e. Honestly though 4e APPEARS to be quite a lot more friendly to new players than 3.5/PF to be honest, so the question is really how effective is it at bringing them in? That seems to be (by WotC's own admission) job #1 for 4e, get new players.

Oh, I don't doubt it. Neither am I. I did not say no one could find a group. Hussar said you don't hear that. I said I have. Just anecdotes.

Yeah, I was just stating what I see too.

No, that is not true.

My point is that his example could not exist in the first place if my position was truly wrong.

Well, it sure sounded like to me you were interpreting Hussar's example to mean all he could find was PF games and that was some kind of evidence of something. That was what I got from what you said. His example seemed utterly generic to me. He could as easily have swapped the names of the two games around and made the same point. Maybe I don't understand what you were trying to say there, and this exchange has gotten long enough now it is hard to even sort out who said what, lol.

Obviously PF could not exist as is without WotC's OGL. Hats off.

But the success of PF is still, as you put it, "notable". And I think is interesting in itself. The very game that was not doing good enough to continue supporting is now breathing down WotC's neck.
Is Paizo just that much better at marketing and giving the people the material they want? Is it a case of you don't know what you've got until it's gone?

As I said, PF appears to be doing better now than 3E was in the waning days. There is something going on there.

As I said, there's a trade off that WotC apparently feels compelled to make. They could have made something just about like PF and gotten the same sort of response (and had Paizo doing support for it). The problem is that doesn't work in the long term. It might not even work in the medium term. PF is a 3.5 refresh, everyone buys the shiny new, and then what? It is basically the same game. You can repeat that endlessly but the customer base gets smaller every time. WotC decided to break the mold. They're not after the 3.5 fan base, they're after a whole new market. Did they want to lose customers? Of course not.

Here's the thing though. What, aside from making a game that is not warmed-over 3.5, has WotC done that is so terrible? Really? Produce a fine and high quality line of books for 4e? AWFUL! lol. Create an online offering? Wow, terrible! lol. Paizo produces good books too, but I'm sorry I don't buy this whole WotC is a bunch of incompetent boobs, watch them fail silliness. They're doing some new things and taking some serious risks so they do run into issues. What is Paizo doing? Publishing nice books. They can both do that. Could Paizo do a DDI Compendium, a Character Builder, or a Monster Builder? A VTT? Hunh, don't see a single sign of any possibility they can do those things. Are those new things perfect? Nope! They're just things you can buy or not buy depending on if you like them, but hey, apparently 50k+ people are dropping at least $6 a month in WotC's pocket for DDI. Who's actually doing the better job here?

Again, the whole "can't sell it" is either just knee jerk or red herring.

But I disagree that a different 4E could not have been vastly more successful. Now, I certainly agree that it is easier said than done to make a fully new game that still appeals to 3E fans. But is was certainly more than "conceivable".

But it would not fulfill their long term goals, so that would be useless to them.

But the problem is that this was never even WotC's goal. They made that clear, and early on this was held as a standard and point of pride. They wanted to vastly increase the fan base of D&D. They saw tons of people playing WOW* pretending to be an elf and wanted to know why those people were not giving THEM money to pretend to be an elf. They wanted DMing to not be intimidating and they wanted to lower the bar for entry level play.

And they did. Now, maybe they're tilting at windmills and there's really no possible way to grow the fanbase all that much. There's no way we'll ever know if that is true or if they simply failed to do it right. That is assuming they fail...

And the whole "firing" customers thing started as a light hearted off hand comment that certainly got blown way out of proportion. But it did sum up their position. If they lost 10 old fans and gained 200 new fans, then they are up 190 fans. You can't make an omelet and all that.

Now that all sounds great. I'm all for them growing their business and if they lose me but gain just 2 to replace me, then good on them. I completely support it.

But it didn't work. And in trying to do that, they passed on trying to keep what they had. So we will never know if they could have done it or not. That ship has long sailed.

And again with the "but it didn't work" CITATION NEEDED. This is what we're talking about man. You can make these statements all day and all night, but you HAVE NO EVIDENCE TO BACK THEM UP.