Will the last person to leave WOTC please turn out the lights...

[Vaxalon]

I don't think we're going to see many D20 publishers "collapse".

Why?

I don't think most of them are in it to make a profit in the first place.

Look at Malhavoc. Yeah, he likes making money, but will it go away if he doesn't? Nah, Monte'll just get a day job and putter around with Malhavoc in his free time.

 

[cybertalus]

So, when will the bleeding stop? If the retail division gets sold off, is that the end or is there more to come?

If I were a betting man, I'd bet a month's salary that the book (meaning novels) division will be sold off within a year.

If you look at every single press release about the spinoffs it has nearly the identical text about this spinoff allowing them to focus on their core business of making games. Novels, no matter how profitable, are not the same thing as games.

I just hope that when the book division goes, the other recent trend of selling to former employees, usually ones who were involved in the particular division being sold, remains. I'd hate to see the novels division languish as a small part of some big publisher.

 

[Lady Dragon]

80+ companies? D20 collapse? No sorry it's not going to happen.

Because you see first of all although there might be 80+ companies on paper in reality there are far fewer.

First of all Half of the 80 or 40 have never published a print product either because they are exclusive to PDF's or they are really taking there time to come out with there first product.

So that leaves us with 40(approximately) actual print publishers.Of the remaining 40 five have not put out a product in nearly a year so we can assumed that they are either already out of the buisness or not very serious about it.

We are down to 35 of these 10(approximately) have put out only 1-2 products and at the rate of 1 product a year I'd hardly call them a threat to D20.

So now we are down to 25 companies,and I'm afraid we need to mark off another 5 companies for incredible slowness for example Privateer press will only release 1 product this year.These companies generally put out good work but they are strictly part time companies run mostly as hobbies by there owners who are happy as long as they don't lose money so I doubt they are going anywhere unless the owner get bored with his hobby.

So ultimately that leaves us with only 20 serious D20 companies, many of which existed before D20 did and will continue to exist regardless of what D20 does.

Will any of these 20 go under? It's possible if they are poorly managed or if there products are inferior.Will there be changes to the existing companies? Sure we already seen the first merger with Mystic Eye and Thunderhead and more are certainly possible.
Will more companies join the fray as serious publishers?Again yes at least a couple will but I wouldn't expect that many.

Keep in mind that they don't really have to sell that many copies to make a profit so as long as they keep there expenses down and the quality up most of these companies will be fine.

As for duplicate books for example everone seems to be doing Dwarf books this month.Fans of Dwarves will probably buy more than one anyhow.Even if there is a weeding out it will come very slow and we are more likely to lose companies because there owner found a better job elsewhere than we are to bankruptcy.

 

[333 Dave]

When the 3e was first released, and the d20 system first allowed publishers to make "D&D" books, everybody predicted that there'd be a huge glut of new publishers, but within a year half of them will have dissapeared. Two years later, we're still getting more d20 publishers by the day, and no huge crash has happened yet.
Not that I blame you, pessimism is human nature.

 

[Nightfall]

Yes but I, like mister Dylan Hunt, don't consider Pessimism a survival trait.

 

[JohnNephew]

What if D&D gets sold off? In theory, the OGL could be rescinded and the d20 publishers shut down (I may be dead wrong here as I am no lawyer - I am basing this on the old adage what can be made can be unmade).

D20 System trademark license, yes; OGL, no. The OGL is effectively perpetual, with only the limitation of Product Identity, and WotC claims no product identity.

WOTC products appear in a large number of countries. Do all D20 publishers have this distribution clout outside of White Wolf? If WOTC stops publishing, what about the D&D gamers on the other side of the ponds called the Pacific and Altantic.

Most of them do, yes. We at Atlas Games deal directly with distributors around the world (selling our D20 lines in English); we already have translations of Penumbra books available in German and Spanish, and coming up soon in Portuguese. Our Coriolis Feng Shui/D20 dual-stat book, Burning Shaolin, is currently in print in French and Spanish as well as English.

The day WotC announces they are no longer publishing D&D, if that ever happens (and I doubt it), is the day we announce the imminent release of the Penumbra Fantasy Roleplaying Game, a 100% Open Game Content core rulebook of the rules of the world's most popular FRPG.

Trust me, in crafting the OGL, the minds of pre-Hasbro WotC knew they were creating a "gamer lockbox" to ensure that the game would remain out there forever, regardless of what Hasbro and any other future owners might do. (That's not to say it wouldn't be a rough ride for publishers, mind you...)

 

[Agback]

I'm an economist too!

The situation in which many smaller companies compete with each other is much better for the customer than the situation in which many larger companies dominate the market.

Not [necessarily] if you assume continual returns to scale. And not [necessarily] if you assume non-uniform products with costly information. Copyright law alone blows the 'perfect competition' model of the RPG industry right out of the water.

Regards,


Agback

 

[FDP Mike]

It's not really the same ...

As an example lets take Green Ronin they apparently have 4 full time employees plus a number of freelance writers yet in the year 2002 they have put out 8 high quality products one of which was a Hardcover. In the same period WoTC with dozens of employees has put out 10 products 4 of which were hardcover. Certainly not that much more than Green Ronin manages with a skeleton crew.

And the biggest irony is that while Green ronin has quite a few products planned for the rest of the year WoTC only has 4 more products planned one of which isn't even for D&D(D20 modern).

With no disrespect meant toward Green Ronin, I'm not sure that this example actually works. The difference is a matter of scale.

True, Green Ronin has put out a number of products in the past while, but other than the Freeport hardcover, most of those products (for instance, Armies of the Abyss or Arcana: Societies of Magic -- which I have and quite like!) are softcover books in the 64-page range.

Other than the PsiHB, WotC's hardcovers tend to run a decent 250 pages or more, and the text density in them is very high. It takes a lot more people (designers, editors, artists, cartographers, layout and typsetting folks, and so forth) and resources to put those hardcovers together than 64-page books. Even WotC's classbooks all hit the 96-page mark, usually having two designers. Then there are the superb Forgotten Realms products, Call of Cthulu, the revised Star Wars RPG . . . .

(That reminds me: we shouldn't forget that WotC's also producing regular Star Wars material.)

Also, the d20 Modern game (and book) is a quite significant investment in hours and development, I would imagine -- on a scale that not many d20 companies even attempt.

I'm sure that if you totalled up the page count for the products from Green Ronin and WotC, you'd see that WotC's is much higher -- and that is significant when considering how much time and how many people it takes to get just a single product from concept to print.

(This post is in no way meant to diminish the fabulous achievements of Green Ronin -- only to put those achievements in perspective when numbers such as products and employees are used. Heck, here at FDP it's just 4 guys all with full-time jobs, and up until we left Sword & Sorcery, we were churning out a pretty regular release schedule . . . which is just to say that putting out 64-page books does take an immense amount of effort, even in comparison to WotC.)

A more intriguing example in this case might perhaps be Mongoose, though I still think that scale remains important to consider. (Perhaps even AEG is a better example, as it does put out more regular hardcovers and has a diverse gaming line beyond just strictly d20 products. Hmm . . . .)

In a lot of ways, I think that WotC is still the leader in putting out high quality books ("crunchy" and "creamy"), from the design on down to the layout. Maybe all of this is just a cycle? Whatever the case, gaming (and D&D) is now pretty safe, I'd bet: the SRD is out (though s l o w l y getting finished); a wealth of excellent and creative and exciting companies are producing material; we're seeing different ways of using the d20 System for games and genres other than D&D and fantasy; and, perhaps most importantly, the fan base is back -- if not encouraged by the many d20 publishers out there now.

Hmm, maybe FDP should hire an intern . . . .

 

[Desdichado]

Agback:
Not [necessarily] if you assume continual returns to scale. And not [necessarily] if you assume non-uniform products with costly information. Copyright law alone blows the 'perfect competition' model of the RPG industry right out of the water.

Agback, I knew I liked you!

I'm not trying to imply that the RPG market is really a perfect competition model, by any means. Obviously different products are not interchangeable in the minds of the customers! However, as customers, we certainly benefit from having a smorgasbord of options to choose from, rather than the relatively limited pallete of material that only WotC produces, for example. And because those smaller publishers can afford to have the smaller print runs, we can be relatively assured that they can continue to do so and remain financially healthy. Compare this to the 2e days when everyone just had to wait on whatever TSR deigned to publish. In that model, you only had 1 publisher putting out material for D&D, so you were much more limited in terms of options. And, TSR, as a big bad mutha of a company, showed us very clearly that being a big bad mutha is a difficult proposition in this market (I think WotC shows us the same thing, to a lesser extent, although how much that is true, and how much we are witnessing meddling from Hasbro is anyone's guess) and if you wanted something else, you had to turn to another game system entirely. This meant you also lost the "network externalities" of having a big player base to plug into.

All in all, the model we're operating under today, even if WotC and "official" D&D folds entirely (which I don't see happening, BTW) is better than it was before the release of 3e and the OGL.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I've got all the d20 books I'm going to buy so who cares?