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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5415341" data-attributes="member: 59082">Yes, well said and this could describe the problem with American economics as a whole: profit before people, culture, and art. This is why I wonder if RPGs as a medium is inherently better suited to relatively small companies because once you get to a certain point--and once you sell yourself to a corporate giant like Hasbro--you start losing sight of certain things. This is why we can cross our fingers that Paizo doesn't get too big and if it does, they somehow manage to stay "small."Yes, but the point I was going to make was actually made in the next post by mudbunny: quantity of players is a separate matter from amount of product purchased. I'm in a game group of seven and I am the only one who buys RPGs regularly. I'm the only serious-to-hardcore gamer, everyone else is casual. If we look at how many 4E sales we have have contributed, five or six of the other six have purchased a PHB, one purchased a Red Box, a couple official dice, and a few had DDI for at least a month or two to get the Character Builder and I think that's it. Meanwhile I've purchased about 60% of the total 35ish hardcovers, plus a few Essentials products, plus one or two adventures, plus I had a DDI subscription for about a year and a half. So of the seven of us, I would guess that six have spent a total of about $250-300 on 4E products, maybe $4-500 including DDI, while alone I've spent about over $1,000 (and I don't even buy D&D miniatures). Now this has nothing to do with age as we are all in our 30s or 40s. But what it does have to do with is the split between the "casual" and "diehard" gamers. Going on the above figures, if you take my anecdote as roughly exemplary of that buying difference, I spend about as much money on new D&D stuff as about 10 casual players. If we take DDI out of the equation then it becomes something like 20.I may be wrong, but my guess is that a larger percentage of 30+ players are diehard than 12-20 players, at least in terms of purchasing. Yes, exactly. But this just supports what I am saying: there may be less old farts buying stuff, but we're probably buying a lot more stuff. But I think you are right, that it balances out - so we have two roughly equal purchasing groups: the 10% or so of players that buy half the product and the 90% that buy the other half. Now the thing is, that 10% is your core that are more likely to continue purchasing if they (we!) like the product. The 90% is more fickle and changeable; at best a few of them enter the 10%, but more likely their interest fades and dies.So it may be that the normal major goals of retaining old players and finding new ones are secondary as a "key to success" to finding ways to make existing casual fans into diehard fans. Or, at the least, it is equal to the other goals and probably under-emphasized by WotC. I think this key has to do with, to go back to someone's comment earlier on, offering a truly great experience that you can't get elsewhere, that isn't simply a complex board-game or a social video game.</blockquote>

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