NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark" data-source="post: 5164070" data-attributes="member: 5"><p>There's no need to make this edition-specific or even game or game-type specific since the trend to gear some of the visual appeal of packaging and artwork particularly toward younger audience has been a concern of game companies since the eighties, but I would argue that they just weren't as good at it back then (the industry had smaller, less-experienced businesspersons running the hotter companies, e.g. TSR and on down).  Since the tabletop hobby gaming establishment of that period was really learning not just how to market to young people but simply to market to a wider audience this wasn't such a problem; new customers of any age could boost the bottom line and the (primarily) wargaming hobby whence it genesised was never hugely populated in the first place.  It's really the CCG producers of the nineties that showed tabletop hobby gaming companies the way toward rapid growth through more youth-targetted artwork and, aside from some streamlined clever mechanics, a large percentage of their products' appeal was predicated on the artwork itself.  It's no coincidence that when the company that produces some of the hottest CCGs acquired the rights to the hottest.tabletop.rpg.brandname.evar they synergized their marketing techniques and complaints about spikes were born.  The corporation that then acquired the company with the hottest.tabletop.rpg.brandname.evar then lengthened the reach of this technique and it is now largely an industrywide practice by those who know which side their bread is buttered on.  So, in a roundabout way, and although the RPGing product lines aren't where things began, the thread title does point toward one of the main progenitors of this marketing trend.</p></blockquote><p></p>

Verification