eyeheartawk
#1 Enworld Jerk™
They can already do that, does it need to have Chris Pine's face on that?
D&D Movie/TV Where is all of the Honor Among Thieves D&D stuff, WotC?
- Thread starter Whizbang Dustyboots
- Start date
I think you are missing the whole point of "tie in" products.
eyeheartawk
#1 Enworld Jerk™
Cute.
I'm just saying, it's kinda pointless to make tie-in gaming products to promote the movie. They'd be better served making a dragon shaped Hershey's bar or similar. Something with a more general reach to promote the film. If people are interested in playing the game after seeing the movie they'd buy the starter set regardless of what art is on it.
Bagpuss
Legend
delericho
Legend
The Start Set adventures to date have covered multiple levels, so could easily have the displacer beast as one of the high-level challenges, and the Red Wizard BBEG could always be a low ranking member or even an apprentice.Displacer beast and Red Wizards at first level, it would be a TPK!
I don't think you are recognizing the value of impulse buying based on image recognition. But it really isn't worth arguing about since there ISN'T a movie themed game product in sight.
teitan
Legend
There is a movie branded starter set at Target. It’s called Dungeons & Dragons. It doesn’t need Chris Pine‘s face on it. In fact there are three of them. Perhaps they found with the themed started sets that they don’t sell as well? but the movie is D&D. That’s the brand. It’s in the Realms. The starter sets are… in the Realms. It’s already there.
it’s kinda like asking why they didn’t do novelizations of The Lord of the Rings movies. Do we really need another Queen’s Gambit board game fiasco where it was just a chess set? Lmao
I think Reynard is arguing the opposite, that there should be a tie-in movie gaming product to promote the game not have the game promote the movie. As in get that audience who liked the movie to come check out the game by having a boxed set where the artwork is all movie stills and the adventure is somehow tied into the movie's plot without either spoiling the movie's plot or being superfluous and superficially connected to the film (which is what I meant yesterday when I was saying I think I know what a movie tie-in Starter Set would look like and it would likely be kind of meh IMO.)
I'm actually not sure that it would work, but my cynicism largely comes from the comic book side of things where comic book films just don't move the needle on getting people to buy comics, regardless of whether or not there's an actual movie tie-in. There is some overlap, but it's generally two different audiences.
(And @teitan does have a point that if someone goes looking for a D&D game at Target after the movie they are going to find something branded "Dungeons and Dragons" on the shelves that is actually a good product for new folks, so I'm not sure they actually do need something with movie stills on it to get the folks who might be in that overlap but just don't know it yet.)
Lol. They absolutely reissued The Lord of the Rings in multiple formats with the movie imagery on the covers. You just proved my point for me. Thanks!
Undrave
Legend
They could always re-release it with added cameos, it's not like changing NPCs a bit would be hard or have been a long process.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
My first copy had an image from the 1978 film.
Rabulias
the Incomparably Shrewd and Clever
Yeah, but if you're wrong, watching it 3 times won't really be a punishment, will it?
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Etsy is full of high quality stuff that Hasbro should have made. Yeah, we're probably getting a Hasbro made Deck of Many Things prop later this year. But right now, you have more than a dozen choices you can get from Etsy that are almost certainly going to be of higher quality than what Hasbro will produce, if their past card products are any indication.
There needs to be much more and better merch than is out right now. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit going unplucked. Where are the posters? Where is the action figure line slowly working its way through the Monster Manual and beyond? Where are the oversized art books centering on classic D&D worlds or artists? Where are the cute Bluetooth headsets every kid in America seems to want? When they come out with a new setting, like Strixhaven or Prizmeer, why aren't we getting stuffed animals and t-shirts and stuff themed around it, to make it a brand of its own?
Instead of screwing around with the OGL in the hopes of maybe somehow getting a winning lottery ticket, they need to stop all the sales opportunities that passing through their fingers in the meantime.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Decades of marketing says otherwise.
That's not the argument I'm making with this thread.
Yes, you can sell a D&D-themed candy bar once. You've made the company whatever cut of that candy bar. (More likely, you got a flat deal from Hershey's.)
With branded D&D stuff, you can get people who are not current D&D customers to start buying WotC stuff for potentially decades. That's vastly more lucrative than a candy bar promotion. Even if having a branded set only gets 10% more new customers to become long-term D&D players, that's incredibly valuable and more than pays for the man hours required to create an Honor Among Thieves starter set.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
How do non-players know this? WotC isn't even putting a sticker on the boxed sets saying "Explore more of the world as seen in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves!"
Only existing customers would know there's even a remote connection.
And it is remote: "OK, sail for a week southwest from Neverwinter, which you saw in the movie. That island out there? That's this boxed set. Oh, and there's some characters who cameoed in the movie in the art, although they don't actually appear in the adventure. No, we don't understand that part, either."
Clint_L
Hero
They made one for Stranger Things. Just sayin'.
They do this all the time - it is a pretty common thing in book publishing. Most of the time when they turn a book into a movie, they reissue it with a tie-in cover. Hunger Games, Twilight, and yes, even LotR. A notable exception is the Harry Potter books.
It is easy to forget we here are a niche of a niche and there are orders of magnitude more people that know who Chris Pine is than know what the Forgotten Realms are.
teitan
Legend
Oh sure sure. I agree but they didn’t rewrite anything and it didn’t boost sales on the already best selling novels. People didn’t go into stores saying “I need that novel with Elijah Wood on the cover”. They said “do you have Lord of the Rings?” and the clerk said “sure” and they bought whatever the clerk handed them.
teitan
Legend
It says… DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. The movie is called what again???
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