Worlds of Design: Eight Awful Truths About RPG Marketing

I often compare fiction writing and publishing with game designing and publishing. They’re similar creative efforts in many ways, especially in tabletop and in the lower ends of video games where you can have one person creating the game.

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To compare with my own book Game Design: How to Create Video and Tabletop Games, Start to Finish (2012 McFarland), I wanted to find out what the average nonfiction book sells over a lifetime (turns out, about 2,000). Along the way I ran across “10 awful truths about book publishing,” an online by the president of Berrett Koehler publishers in late September 2016. It's about books, but if you change a few words eight of the ten points are also about games, especially RPGs (which, after all, are books). RPGs face the same problems for much the same reasons.

I am going to paraphrase and talk about these “Truths” in RPG terms.

1. The number of book (or RPG) titles published has increased immensely. As a result, each individual title sells fewer copies even though the market as a whole is growing. My book publisher McFarland, which is a large independent, reacted to this by publishing more books. The reaction of most game publishers is to publish more game titles, even though they can sell fewer copies of each. They're trying to avoid a drop in total sales. But the result is even MORE titles being published. Further, in RPGs it becomes easier over time to self-publish an RPG thanks to crowd-funding (which is particularly friendly to tabletop games of all kinds) and to digital printing, which makes small print runs more practical right down to Print on Demand (PoD).
2. Book industry overall sales are stagnant despite the explosion of titles published, and despite the growth of e-book sales.
3. (Cont.) Nowadays RPG sales are increasing, but each individual designer or publisher below the very top has a smaller piece of the pie.
4. Average individual book (RPG) sales are shockingly small and falling fast. Also true in tabletop games in general. Here I’ll take average to be the median, not the mean, as the big hits in RPGs skew the mean. Think about the hundreds of self-published RPGs: usually the Kickstarter has attracted, not thousands but hundreds of backers,. Sometimes they get into main distribution, usually they don't, and however many backers they got is the amount of the sales they get. 500 (not thousand) is OK for independents selling games, modules, and settings.
5. A book (RPG) has far less than a 1% chance of being stocked in average bookstore. Go to a game shop, compare the RPGs they have in stock with the number of RPGs and supplements being published. In many cases the RPGs on the shop shelves were published years ago, not published in the past year.
6. It is getting harder and harder every year to sell books. In games, we lose many friendly local game shops annually, despite the profits that come from Magic: the Gathering which tend to keep shops afloat. There are so many new games coming out that people don't pay attention to the old ones for long, and neither do the retailers. They move on to the next new one. The “Cult of the New” is very strong. So the game sells when it’s released (if at all), but not later.
7. Most books (RPGs?) today are selling only to the author’s and publisher’s communities. Discoverability is a big problem. Discoverability essentially means “if they don't know your RPG exists they can't buy it;” it's hard to get the attention of buyers. (Example: how many readers knew I’d had a game design book published, though it has been mentioned here before, and even though it’s been selling for six years?)
8. Most book (RPG) marketing today is done by authors, not by publishers. That’s certainly true for independent RPGs. Think about this from a major publisher's point of view: they sell fewer of each title so however much money they have to promote games, they have to allocate more carefully, that usually means they allocate to something they think is going to be a hit. That is, only a few potential hits get the big treatment, so designers have to go on social media, blogs, podcasts, and so on simply to let people know that their game exists. Reviews may not make much difference.
9. No other industry than books has so many new product introductions. [Video games may have more, and pricing there is dismal indeed, with many products free-to-play.] Not true for RPGs, which are a small part of the tabletop game industry and don’t approach numbers of book introductions. But the volume of RPG introductions may still be very large compared with the damand.
10. A never-ending state of turmoil. It’s a mess, with the market changing rapidly. Whether RPGs are also in a state of turmoil is unclear.

There are differences, of course. RPGs strongly differ from books in that so many supplements and adventures, and even many of the games, are dependent on the success of D&D.

Sometimes the truth is daunting, but it's better to know the truth, than to act on bad assumptions.

Reference: The original awful truths.

This article was contributed by Lewis Pulsipher (lewpuls) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. You can follow Lew on his web site and his Udemy course landing page. If you enjoy the daily news and articles from EN World, please consider contributing to our Patreon!

 

[Hussar]

/snip
This is true, but we need to put the blame where it belongs. The root cause of all of this is WOTC and the behaviors I've listed above, the secondary cause is the politicization of the Hobby and the LGS. You cannot turn many of the product lines, the gathering places, the online forums, the conventions, and most other facets of the Hobby into political war zones and then wonder why the Industry is toppling. That's the kind of dividing the customer base that killed 4th edition D&D and it's ramping up quickly now throughout tabletop gaming.

Huh? Considering that market for tabletop RPG's has QUADRUPLED in the years since the release of 5e, I'm kinda baffled how you can see it as dividing the industry?

What political war zone? Politicization of the Hobby and the LGS? Dude, you don't think that might be just a trifle overblown?

 

[Dr. Bull]

Friends:

I think this is a great thread, but I would encourage everyone to maintain decorum regarding this issue.

First of all, no one (and I mean no one on this earth) has all of the facts regarding the cultural, artistic, financial, economic, and/or political factors that have caused changes in the rpg market. Determining causality is exceedingly difficult. Even if a hypothetical expert had a MBA and a PhD in this singular topic (plus 20 years in the field), this hypothetical expert would still have trouble explaining all the trends in rpg publishing.

In academia, it's the same situation. College textbooks cost $300 and no one is buying them. At Barnes & Noble, fewer and fewer customers are reading books. Amazon has diversified. Books are less popular than they used to be... No one is surprised.

The publishing industry is in decline. Everyone involved in publishing saw this coming from a mile away. I've been watching its slow, inevitable approach for about 3 decades. Newspapers are dead. Magazine sales have withered.

Does anyone here remember the movie "Ghostbusters"? In 1984, Harold Ramis (Egon) warned us that "Print is Dead". The terms "going paperless" and "dead tree" have been circulating for a long time now. The technology known as print is reaching its final phase.

I think that it is a shame. I love books. I love the smell of books. I admire the finality of print. I own a lot of books. I am going to collect more books (simply because they contain knowledge that cannot be redacted or erased). For me, an ebook is a poor replacement for the printed page (but, then again, I'm also an old fart).

Thanks for reading this...

- Dr. Bull

 

[Hussar]

Heh. On the flipside [MENTION=6693776]Dr. Bull[/MENTION], I haven't bought a dead tree product in years. Heck, the core books for 5e are the last print books that I've bought. Ebook is definitely the way I want to go.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Well clearly the solution is to erect giant barriers to RPG making so that only a small select group of people can make RPGs, ensuring that each one gets a big enough piece of the pie...

 

[DM Howard]

" A book (RPG) has far less than a 1% chance of being stocked in average bookstore"
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What bookstores? The U.S. has only one left, Barnes and Noble. Everyone else is gone.

Books A Million is still here.

 

[loyin]

Ouful

 

[GrahamWills]

Not so sure these are truths as much as consequences.

How about we just go with two thoughts on what might be the ground state of the RPG market:

1. The market is, at best, growing nicely. It is is not exploding.
2. It is exceptionally easy, nowadays, for anyone to publish in this market. And people do.

I would argue that we have plenty of figures to prove #1 is true, and that numerous on-line sales channels support #2. Then:

The number of book (or RPG) titles published has increased immensely.
- a consequence of #2

Book industry overall sales are stagnant despite the explosion of titles published
- a re-statement of #1

Average individual book (RPG) sales are shockingly small and falling fast
- Given many titles and non-explosive growth, this is a tautology. If you divide a number by a faster-growing number, the average falls

A book (RPG) has far less than a 1% chance of being stocked in average bookstore
- Assuming book stores also are not increasing shelf space explosively, this is a straight consequence of #1 and #2

It is getting harder and harder every year to sell books
- No, it's not. When I published a book a decade ago it took 3 years of writing and a lot of layout, editing and so on. I can sell an ebook in a few days now. What I think you mean is it's harder to make money selling books. That I do not know about, but certainly the average books sells less, because #1 and #2.

Most books (RPGs?) today are selling only to the author’s and publisher’s communities. Discoverability is a big problem.
- a consequence of #2

Most book (RPG) marketing today is done by authors, not by publishers
- a consequence of #2

No other industry than books has so many new product introductions
- Well, quite a few do. Music would be an obvious choice for way more new products per day.

So really, this kind of boils down to: Lots of people are producing RPG material, and the market hasn't grown massively, so there is less money per product. I guess ... yes.