Quote from: J Arcane;315162I dunno, maybe it's all the ALL CAPS?!?!!?!!!?! that give the impression perhaps?

Sorry for that "YES!", it obviously frightened you.

I'll try to be more gentle in the future honey.  

QuoteYeah.  If only we lived in that magical fairyland where marketing never ever affects the product.  

Shame it doesn't work that way in the real world.

Well, I did say "ideally".

Marketing is a tool and like any tool, it can be used well, or abused horribly.

Market segmentation is just one tool in the marketing toolbox that helps increase the odds you'll get your product in front of folks who want it.

Wishing for a useful tool to go away is naive at best and ignorant at worst.

Quote from: J Arcane;315180So tell me this smart guy:  How did the PS2 become the biggest selling console platform in history, despite ignoring the "Casual/hardcore" split that has become a cornerstone of this generation?  

The PS2 most definitely did not ignore that split.

The PS2 was the first and best place to get the games that appealed to the hardest of the hardcore and it was marketed appropriately for that.

Want to get your thug on in Grand Theft Auto? You can't do that right away in the wannabe X-Box, or ever in the kiddie-toy Gamecube.

Want the most overwrought fantasy experience possible because that's your flavor of gaming? Well Final Fantasy X is only on the PS2!

There's a reason why Microsoft spent tens of millions of dollars to get GTA IV at the same time on the 360 as on the PS3.

Having to wait for that game killed them with the hardcore market in competition between the original X-Box and the PS2.

This doesn't mean there weren't a ton of casual games for the PS2. You seem to believe that marketing to the hardcore means ONLY marketing to them and this is incorrect.

But hardcore gamers spend a lot of money, and Sony spent a lot of money and marketing muscle to make sure they had everything the hardcore wanted.

The marketing of the 360 shows a concerted effort to muscle in on that important demographic. They spent millions to get GTA at the same time and spent millions to insure you'd have the best experience in hardcore games on the 360.

This is why there is DLC for GTA and Fallout 3 that came out much later on the PS3. MS paid and paid handsomely to get that additional content first.

In fact, Sony and Microsoft spent so much time punching each other in the face while fighting over the hardcore that this opened up market space for the Wii to position itself heavily toward the casual market.

In their competition over one segment of the market, MS and Sony had neglected the family market.

Now they're scrambling to catch up, with initiatives like Microsoft's Family Games division and Sony releasing games like Little Big Planet.

Quote from: RPGPundit;315382I disagree. If there's no profit in the business of RPGs, then there's no future for the hobby, in the long term, besides being a dead game played by a handful of dying old men.

There probably is a small amount of profit to be made by businesses from this hobby. The problem is that few businesses will be satisfied with that small profit. They'll try to get more money out of the hobby and so doom themselves.

The problem with the RPG hobby is that hobbyists really don't NEED anything other than a set of rules (and perhaps some dice) to play. And only a couple of players in a group really even need to own a copy the rules.

Once you have sold those, everything else one might buy is optional. You don't really even need minis and battleboards for games that require them as you can make cardboard counters and draw a grid on a large sheet of cardboard. Adventures and supplements are nice for those who want them, but they aren't needed and will therefore be bought by even fewer players than buy the core rules for a game.

There are a large number of companies supplying a huge number of these optional items. No matter how good these optional items are, only a relatively few hobbyists are going to buy them. Most companies producing such items depend on the collector market for enough purchases to break even/make a profit. Collectors are really a separate (but overlapping) hobby. The RPG Collector hobby needs the industry more than the RPG Player hobby does -- which is probably why so many game companies seem to produce products aimed more for collectors than players.

Quote from: RPGPundit;315382I disagree. If there's no profit in the business of RPGs, then there's no future for the hobby, in the long term, besides being a dead game played by a handful of dying old men.

RPGPundit

This is very true. Harn is a perfect example: it was kept alive when the publisher(s) fell into pointless bickering and inept business practices by devoted fans, who produced excellent free material. However, recruitment of new GMs was low even by RPG standards, because it is an extremely in-depth setting, and the bulk of the material is OOP. The company issues are being resolved, and Harn is now coming back on line as pdfs, but it still has a long way to go. The fans saved the day, but only because the company rebounded.

There are other games with extremely devoted fans which have fallen by the wayside because the companies died.

Fan material is always a good thing (at least well-done fan material), but it is the companies which keep life in the hobby.

Pundit called: when the business of RPGs folds, the hooby itself will fade away.

Quote from: RandallS;315411There probably is a small amount of profit to be made by businesses from this hobby. The problem is that few businesses will be satisfied with that small profit. They'll try to get more money out of the hobby and so doom themselves.

Small profits are the same as small salaries: no one really wants them.

Quote from: GnomeWorks;315392That would seem to indicate, at least to me, that the zeitgeist of wargaming has largely faded from the public mind, making it the dying hobby that it is. D&D (and, by extension, TTRPGs) do not seem to suffer from the same problem.

No, perhaps not at this point, but it easily could.  

RPGPundit

QuoteWant to get your thug on in Grand Theft Auto? You can't do that right away in the wannabe X-Box, or ever in the kiddie-toy Gamecube.

You do realize that the biggest reason for GTA's success was it's massive crossover effect, right?  That both "casual" and "hardcore" players bought it with equal verve?  It's basically a primo proof of exactly what I've been saying.  

The problem is you're doing the same goddamn thing that the game media and publishers do, the same thing that makes the terms so fucking worthless.  It's not an either/or definition, it's a spectrum, always has been, with a lot of crossover and fluidity.  Real people don't fit into your invented boxes consisting only of "granny who buys Bejeweled" and "testosterone addled male who buys anything with blood and guns".  

"Casual" alone can mean anything from the people buying into the Wii Sports fad or the instrument game fad who'll never play again once the buzz dies down, to guys who just play Halo occasionally with friends, to the Madden junkies to God knows what other variation of "not hardcore enough".  It's nothing more than an insulting buzzword for "Not worthy enough for us obviously more intelligent and sophisticated 'hardcore' gamers".

And now you've taken them and tried to rewrite the whole history of the bloody generation with terms that weren't even in wide use then?  Terms that didn't really see widespread marketing use until the run up to the current generation?

Your post is fucking ludicrous, and you should feel ashamed for wasting our time with such sloppy fucking thinking.  

QuoteThat would seem to indicate, at least to me, that the zeitgeist of wargaming has largely faded from the public mind, making it the dying hobby that it is.

Heh heh.  I'm sure Games Workshop and Privateer and Rackham would all love to know that wargaming is "dying".  Games Workshop I'm sure would be very interested in this notion that it's "zeitgeist" has gone, considering all the money they pour into licensing their properties.

One PART of wargaming died, and it died because it started spending all it's focus catering only to the hardest of hardcore wargamer, and as a result everyone else got driven off and just started playing minigames or Risk.  It's one more bit of evidence that forcing your focus to a narrow portion of the larger market is only a downward spiral in the end.

Quote from: J Arcane;315478The problem is you're doing the same goddamn thing that the game media and publishers do, the same thing that makes the terms so fucking worthless.  It's not an either/or definition, it's a spectrum, always has been, with a lot of crossover and fluidity.  Real people don't fit into your invented boxes consisting only of "granny who buys Bejeweled" and "testosterone addled male who buys anything with blood and guns".  

Ok- one more time, and this is repeating some of the points I made in my first post.

Market segmentation is a very useful tool.

Just because there's crossover between hardcore and casual doesn't mean its useless.

Do all 18-30 year old males watch the Simpsons and buy the products they see there (like Grand Theft Auto and Madden games for instance)? No.

But enough do to make it statistically significant.

That's it.

All market segmentation does is make it easier for you to get a product in front of folks who are likely to buy it.

And really, what's the alternative?

Market everything to everyone all the time, in a desperate hope that some of them will buy it?

So rail against the market being segmented into hardcore and casual, segmented by gender and age, get outraged as products are aimed at soccer moms or weekend warriors.

Given that it's the way everything in the world has been marketed for decades, it probably won't change, especially since companies have seen real increases in sales as a result of targeted ads.

Just because it works in one market, doesn't mean it works in every market.

And let's face it, we're talking about fucking tabletop RPGs here.  While they're hardly "dying" as so many Mohicanists would have you believe, they're not exactly some massive and inapproachable diaspora.  It's a bunch of fucking nerds on internet forums and in comic shops buying books about playing gay ass elves and vampires.

Trying to forcibly split that market further just because you want to feel more elite than the guy at the shop who just buys a D&D book now and again is fucking suicide when you're talking about a market barely big enough to be profitable to begin with.

But you don't get it, you never will.  Just another Internet MBA trumpeting yet more banal dogma he heard in an econ 101 class in community college.  

I may not be satisfied with what they resulted with, but the one thing I won't knock Wizards over is that they've done their due diligence towards making 4e more, not less, accessible.  And last I checked they make a shit load more money than some podunk PDF publisher with 400 sales to his name.

Quote from: J Arcane;315478Heh heh.  I'm sure Games Workshop and Privateer and Rackham would all love to know that wargaming is "dying".  Games Workshop I'm sure would be very interested in this notion that it's "zeitgeist" has gone, considering all the money they pour into licensing their properties.

Miniatures Games are not Wargames in the sense that is commonly used.

Generally wargames, as an industry segment, is bits on boards, usually hex-gridded using 1/2" counters. It's branching out with games like Hammer of the Scots, into the "block games"... and into "Minis on map" wargames like Tide of Iron, Memoir: 44 and BattleLore.

Miniatures games have been a different (often very different) market segment since the 1970's.

GW, BTW, called their minis games "3D Roleplay" for many years...

Quote from: RPGPundit;315467No, perhaps not at this point, but it easily could.

Sure. TTRPGs strike me as being in a somewhat precarious position, as of late, what with MMOs and such for competition. It is possible that the hobby will die. It is also possible that it won't, and that - because of MMOs - the hobby may grow to a bigger size than in the past.

Quote from: J ArcaneHeh heh. I'm sure Games Workshop and Privateer and Rackham would all love to know that wargaming is "dying". Games Workshop I'm sure would be very interested in this notion that it's "zeitgeist" has gone, considering all the money they pour into licensing their properties.

I recognize two out of three of those names.

My evidence is purely anecdotal, but these don't strike me as names or games that are present in the wild, at least not to the same degree as D&D.

Quote from: aramisGenerally wargames, as an industry segment, is bits on boards, usually hex-gridded using 1/2" counters. It's branching out with games like Hammer of the Scots, into the "block games"... and into "Minis on map" wargames like Tide of Iron, Memoir: 44 and BattleLore.

That kind of game still exists? Damn.

Quote from: aramis;315490Miniatures Games are not Wargames in the sense that is commonly used.

Generally wargames, as an industry segment, is bits on boards, usually hex-gridded using 1/2" counters. It's branching out with games like Hammer of the Scots, into the "block games"... and into "Minis on map" wargames like Tide of Iron, Memoir: 44 and BattleLore.

Miniatures games have been a different (often very different) market segment since the 1970's.

GW, BTW, called their minis games "3D Roleplay" for many years...

Yeah, sorry, that's just not true.  They're part of the same industry, or were, and shared much of the same fanbase in those days.  I might also add that miniatures wargaming is what led to this whole bloody hobby in the first place.  

The difference is, the miniatures side found some people who were willing to make games everyone would like, instead of focusing on old fatbeards who only played Squad Leader and historics.  They're still doing it, still finding ways to keep the games accessible, with experiments in pre-painted figs, licensed properties, collectible games, branching out into more general audiences (Privateer for instance, shared a room with a legion of vidgaming companies at the first PAX).

Quote from: J Arcane;315478You do realize that the biggest reason for GTA's success was it's massive crossover effect, right?  That both "casual" and "hardcore" players bought it with equal verve?  It's basically a primo proof of exactly what I've been saying.

I think a more useful comparison is with Wii. Computer games are generally not well-suited to being just watched, though desperate enough people will do that, and there does exist an industry for it in Korea, for example.

But Wii made it more interesting to watch other people play, because you got up and jumped around and generally made a dick of yourself having fun. And people like to see other people having fun. This social shared-experience kind of fun is very much what rpgs are about.

Also, I've said it before and it's still true: rpgs were just a fad and were going to die in the 1970s, they were hated by parents and were going to die in the 1980s, they were not CCGs and were going to die in the 1990s, and nowadays they are not WoW and are going to die.

Roleplaying games have been dying for so long if they were a person we'd all just want to pull the plug for some relief.

J:
I don't know where YOU were in the 70's and 80's, but I know where I was, they were VERY separate groups... And still are. Most of the guys playing wargames looked down their noses at the guys with "the toy soldiers", and the Minis guys made loads of sport about "tweezers and cardboard"... The overlap was present, but they sold to very different crowds.  I was a cardboard type, myself.

Even their locations in stores were different... and that was true in Oregon, Washington and Alaska... in all three, the wargames were usually back aisle, and minis at the counter or otherwise well apart.

A quick look through the stats on boardgame geek also shows a tendency for minis gamers to dislike board wargames, and vice versa.

Quote from: OneTinSoldier;315413Small profits are the same as small salaries: no one really wants them.

That's certainly true, but the tabletop RPG market isn't going to produce big profits for many companies. And "big profits for one RPG company" eras are few and far between. If you are going into business for big profits, you probably want to avoid the tabletop RPG market.