raniE
Adventurer
Huh?
Why We Should Work With WotC
- Thread starter FormerLurker
- Start date
I think it was to finish with , "you end with 100 dollars." as the definition of flat but early post.
Just a guess
Posted by mistake. I was trying to do the math, realized I was missing some needed info, and must have tapped "post" without meaning to.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Hmmmmm.
But what is a lifetime gamer? Is it something only a 40+ y/o can be? Or is it something anyone can become? Because it seems to me it's the latter. Many of the gamers you're seemingly dismissing as "casual", who have maybe only played D&D for 3-5 years will, in 5, 10, 15, etc. years be still playing D&D or RPGs. Or at least they will be if WotC doesn't drive them away and make the hobby seem like it's dreadful. Some won't, I'm sure, but that's no more or less true in 2023 than 1983.
Like, when I had played D&D for 5 years, I knew I was a "lifetime gamer", but someone who'd been playing D&D for say, 20 years at that point would likely have seen me as some dumb upstart who didn't know anything about RPGs and was totally "casual". Indeed that was suggested to me almost as soon as I got on the internet lol.
This is true, but I don't think it's as simple as that. WotC estimates 30-50m active D&D players, but there are only 13m even registered accounts on DDB. That means the vast majority are playing with physical books or similar.
And instead of FLGSes mattering, stuff like Kickstarter matters. Kickstarter helps D&D. Loads of nerdy/alternative people (i.e. those most likely to play D&D, still) use Kickstarter a ton if they can afford it. And if you keep seeing D&D stuff on KS, you keep thinking of D&D as this important fun thing. Yet WotC's actions may significant decrease that, and even if they don't, it's not going to be for lack of semi-accidental trying. And de facto, KS and the like fills a very similar role to the old FLGS in terms of supporting D&D.
raniE
Adventurer
I don't agree at all. The core rulebooks are still the things that sell the most, even for companies known more for their adventures than for any other content. With more "casual" players, a focus on the PHB is even more important, because that's the extent of what many will buy. That's why it's always been the top seller. And core rulebooks were never the only major product sold. TSR, including TSR under WotC was selling settings, adventures, player option books etc. None of them sold as well as the PHB. The same is true for other game companies that sell core books and adventures, setting books etc. The core books are always the best sellers.
Dancey wasn't only talking about lifetime gamers either, he was talking about getting new players and locking them in the D&D/D20 bubble. To get someone into the bubble to buy a core book, you need network effects. You need other people to play the game, so the person has people to play with, because RPGs are social games (despite the occasional foray into single player stuff). So, to get the person who buys only a core book playing, you need the people who buy nothing at all and rely on someone else owning the books, and the whales who buy a lot of stuff. Third party content keeps whales interested, whales having all these books keep the players who buy nothing in the game, and thus you have a group which our potential new player can join, and then he can buy his PHB. Without the third party stuff, the whale has an easier time getting out of the bubble to other games. Then he starts buying those instead of, or in addition to, the D&D stuff. The player who doesn't buy any books follows the whale to whatever game he decides to play, and now our potential customer for the PHB has one less possible D&D group to join, and one more possible non-D&D group to join.
rcade
Hero
Was there ever a period when most players got their D&D books from gaming stores? Even in the 1980s when D&D was smaller there weren't that many stores selling RPG products. We had to look for them at bookstores, comic book stores, toy stores and even hobby stores like Michael's. The place I got the Monster Manual in 1980 was a train hobbyist store at a mall.
Heck, I got my copy of Dieties and Demi-gods at Carson Pierre Scott
Pirating, free sites, and sharing.
50% of my groups haven't bought a book, WOTC, 3PP, or otherwise.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I think too many people are blinded by appeasement, personally.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
That's a great question.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I got the actually the vast majority of RPGs books not from the three FLGSes I was aware of in London (Orc's Nest, Playing Games, and Leisure Games), but briefly from Games Workshop, and then mostly from bookshops and particularly from Virgin Megastore, which was kind of what it sounded like, and amazingly, until sometime late in the 1990s, had an RPG section, which varied in size and layout, but very much existed. Actually Virgin Megastore probably sold us the majority of RPG books we owned. Mostly the Oxford Street one for us, but even smaller Virgins had some, like the one in Oxford itself (not to be confused with Oxford Street lol), which I really remember has having a bunch of horror RPGs, including the now-forgotten Dark Conspiracy.
Virgin Megastores stopped having an RPG section entirely in what, like, 1997? 1998? I have a feeling it very briefly came back later.
After that, we did rely on FLGSes for a while.
TheSword
Legend
Yes 25 years ago if you wanted to buy gaming supplements in the UK certainly you had to go to a specialist game store. The main bookshops might carry a core rulebook, maybe. Not likely. (Edit: Just seen ruin explorers post - that might have been in London, but certainly not in the wider UK - though his timescale is 15 years before mine)
The argument made in the linked post was that D&D (the brand) benefited from microcosms of FLGs stores because it stimulated the market. I don’t believe it works that way in practice. D&D is the gateway, not the other way around. People but the D&D books and then get level up. They don’t buy Level Up if they’re not interested in D&D and then switch to D&D later on.
The best argument I’ve heard is that experienced DMs interested in 3pp bring on new players who then go out an buy D&D players handbooks. I’m skeptical as I don’t see any evidence that these groups even make up a significant
Portion of the player base.
rcade
Hero
With or without Melniboneans?
with Cthulhu and Moorcock.
There was Kaybee toy stores, Topps departments store, Riss department store, then later Walden Books and B-Dalton and Toys-r-us as the main sources here though. Can also throw in a pair of local comics shops and 2 hobby stores that were primarily RC Cars/Planes and the other Trains. Oh, and a Pet Store, I kid you not(they carried toys which to them included RPGs).
As I think about it... does it seem to anyone else that the whole Blueprint 2.0 strategy is just nuts?
Hasbro has a couple of highly profitable properties (M:tG first and foremost; D&D; probably a few others) and a bunch of underperformers. The logical strategy would be to cautiously tend the properties that are keeping the lights on. Sure, you try to push the brands into new markets (e.g., the D&D movie), and you try to keep the core product growing, but you don't take risks or make big changes to the proven moneymakers. Instead you monkey with the other properties, the ones that aren't up to snuff. That's the place to take risks chasing big rewards.
Instead, Hasbro is making significant changes to both M:tG and D&D, trying to push them up to ludicrous sales goals. In doing so, they are courting catastrophic downside, and the potential upside is much more limited when the brand is already so big. There's only so much money in any given market, and growing them takes time.
Say what you will about Hasbro's handling of 4E, at least it made sense as a matter of corporate strategy. D&D was one of the underperformers back then, so "gamble on turning it into an MMO gold mine, and if it fails, it fails" was reasonable. Now? It's anything but.
Hasbro has a couple of highly profitable properties (M:tG first and foremost; D&D; probably a few others) and a bunch of underperformers. The logical strategy would be to cautiously tend the properties that are keeping the lights on. Sure, you try to push the brands into new markets (e.g., the D&D movie), and you try to keep the core product growing, but you don't take risks or make big changes to the proven moneymakers. Instead you monkey with the other properties, the ones that aren't up to snuff. That's the place to take risks chasing big rewards.
Instead, Hasbro is making significant changes to both M:tG and D&D, trying to push them up to ludicrous sales goals. In doing so, they are courting catastrophic downside, and the potential upside is much more limited when the brand is already so big. There's only so much money in any given market, and growing them takes time.
Say what you will about Hasbro's handling of 4E, at least it made sense as a matter of corporate strategy. D&D was one of the underperformers back then, so "gamble on turning it into an MMO gold mine, and if it fails, it fails" was reasonable. Now? It's anything but.
Clint_L
Hero
I think you are overestimating what D&D brings into Hasbro. One of the issues that they specifically cited was that it has "10/10" brand recognition, but doesn't earn nearly as much as Magic, which is much more of a niche market, but highly monetized. They see a brand that well known but that low earning as having a ton of untapped potential, and they see other properties (Critical Roll, Stranger Things, World of Warcraft, etc.) making a lot of money that Hasbro thinks could have been theirs, if they'd had a better strategy back in the day.
D&D is a big deal in the RPG world, but in the wider world of entertainment brands? Tiny, despite being so well recognized.
D&D is a big deal in the RPG world, but in the wider world of entertainment brands? Tiny, despite being so well recognized.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
That’s a pretty wildly overwrought comparison.
Anyway, we will see what happens in time.
raniE
Adventurer
D&D is only the gateway if enough people play it. To keep it as the gateway, funneling money back to you, you need to ensure the maximum amount of people play your game or use your rules. You accomplish this by getting the game so big that everyone plays it and keeps playing it. It's not just about getting people in, although that is a major part, it is also about keeping people in the bubble. So, person A buys the PHB, and starts playing. Then they figure "I want more out of this game, there are things I feel I can't do in it, I want it to work in a different way". So, in the absence of third party support they go out and they ask "how do I get this in my games" and then they find other games and start playing them. If instead there are third party producers out then they find Level Up, or whatever other third party book the player finds that makes the game work the way they want, they go and buy that and stay in the system. They're likely to spend money on more Hasbro books later on, but even if they don't they're still there as a potential player for new players coming in, when they talk about gaming they talk about D&D and if they introduce people to gaming they introduce them to D&D.
You can never think about specifically in terms of one person and how Hasbro gets the most money out of them, because then you are entirely missing the network effects. It's about the totality, and in that sense WotC has done nothing but profit from the OGL and the D20/D&D bubble.
Here's another example. When I was a kid, I started playing with other games. I was introduced to roleplaying in the mid 1990s via The Fantasy Trip. I then got my own first game, the 3rd edition of the Swedish BRP game Drakar och Demoner (now coming out in its 11th edition as Dragonbane in English from Free League) and started GMing for it. My third game was AD&D 2e, first a starter set and then over time the three core books. I played this a bit, but moved on to other games. I played lots of different gams, many Swedish ones, lots of BRP. I tried free form stuff, indie games, Unisystem stuff. But from the late 1990s to 2013 I bought not a single D&D product. Nothing. Then in 2013 I stumbled upon the Fellowship of the Bling actual play on rpg.net. I read it, and it made me want to play old D&D again. I bought pdfs of Rules Cyclopedia and B/X, I got Labyrinth Lord and then i got Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
By that point I had gotten really into the OSR, getting many of the free and cheap rule sets. I also started buying old TSR adventures and new OSR stuff and eventually even got into buying a bunch of the AD&D 2e books I never had as a kid, like the Complete Handbooks. I ran LotFP games, and by this point I was partway into the D&D bubble again. I did still play and run other games (and the TFT relaunch really got me into TFT again) but OSR stuff was taking up a large part of my time. And then I started getting interested in 5e. I got the corebooks, liked the game, got into a few campaigns, started getting more and more books and when one of my Lamentations campaigns ended with a total party kill, I suggested running 5e for the same crew. So we did. I also had at this point left the staff of Sweden's largest tabletop gaming convention, and after running TFT last year decided to run a D&D 5e game this year. That would have been big because the con hadn't had a single D&D game run at it in at least 15 years, and the one ran then was something called Dungeon of Doom which was a drop in game where you saw how far into a dungeon designed to kill you you could get with a pre-gen, with all dungeon changes permanent (so if a group played before me and killed a mimic, when I played next the mimic would be dead). No serious D&D game had happened for two decades. And now it's going to be at least another year because the planned game was scrapped as soon as the news about the OGL broke, because no way in hell was I or my fellow game runners going to be promoting anything from Hasbro after that.
So, from this story we can see that I would have never gotten back into D&D if not for the OGL. Because without the OGL, no OSR. Without the OSR very likely no Fellowship of the Bling and no old D&D pdfs. Even if those had still existed, I don't think my interest would have been maintained if not for the OSR. And without me playing OSR games which got me partially back in the D&D bubble I hadn't been in since the 90s, I wouldn't have gotten into D&D 5e. So I would not have bought all the old pdfs I bought and I would not have bought all the 5e books I bought if not for the OGL allowing the OSR to flower. This is the type of roundabout and indirect effects a large bubble can have, and the type of journey that just looking at some kind of "assumed customer" won't tell you.
That's also a group, that if the third party material was not available would have left D&D. And again, everyone counts. If there are fewer people in the D&D/D20 bubble, that means some new gamers will be brought in through other games. That means the bubble is not working well as it isn't holding on to as many people as it could and it isn't getting all of those new gamers either. Also those people buying third party stuff are more likely than not to be GMs, and those are the biggest hurdle in getting someone playing. To join a group there needs to be a GM.
raniE
Adventurer
It's the exact same phenomenon. That the situations are different in societal impact (and number of likely deaths) does not change the underlying logic.
doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
If you think either situation is about or follows any logic, there isn’t much we can go forward discussing.
raniE
Adventurer
If you don't think there is an underlying logic to how people behave and how crowds react, then there is no way for you to predict anything to do with human behavior, so no then I guess there wouldn't be any reason for us to keep discussing this topic.
Similar Threads
