Quote from: Tamelorn;315952Naturally, you missed my point entirely.  Young people are being brought into the hobby by a multitude of avenues that have absolutely nothing to do with the gaming industry.  Absent many of those, the same conditions that created the hobby in the first place still obtains and will for any forseeable future.  

It isn't the 'old dying men' that would resurrect the hobby should the companies go away, it's the young folks who continually recreate it anyway.  Whether or not they have an established industry ready to take and publish their ideas is relatively irrelevant.

I remember when we wargamers used to say that exact same thing.

Pundit is right: learn from history. Wargaming is not completely dead (and no, minis is not wargaming), but its a tiny, tiny shadow of its former self. Even computers and e-mail gaming have not saved it. There's a few of us still hanging on, but fewer with each passing year.

You can bring in new blood, but unless the number of new people who fully embrace the hobby equals or exceeds the number of old gamers who leave the hobby each year, the hobby dies.

Its a very simple math equation.

There is no census of gamers, but the next surest yardstick to be used is the industry of game-making's ability to turn a profit.

So, in real dollars, are RPGs generateing more money in 2008, or 2001, or 1995?

Answer that, and you see where the industry is going.

Most of us had a game we liked which went OOP. We hung tough on the fan sites. We generated & posted fan material. And the post & thread counts dwindled as the hardcore left the hobby or switched to other games. Over the years I've seen that happen again and again. That is the hobby if industry support fails: a long slow fade.

Quote from: RPGObjects_chuck;315975I've been working in this business full time since 2002.

I don't claim to have all the answers.

You sure like to wave your dick around and act like you're the coolest kid on the block, though. That doesn't make people like you, Chuck, and you know? You can be right all you want. If you're being a dick, they will not listen to you.

QuoteBut I do actually have experience in the industry to back up my claims, not just my "internet MBA".

Being an author of RPG products somehow makes you the market segmentation expert of theRPGsite? You're kidding me, right?

Quote from: Tamelorn;315681Hmm, if that were true, the industry would never have taken off in the first place - the hobby existed and was doing decently before game companies, and that same potential would still exist even if all the existing game companies and publishing went down in flames.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but I thought that when this hobby was born, TSR was there. Wasn't TSR a game company? When was that mythical time when the hobby was doing decently and TSR didn't exist yet?

QuoteThink of it this way - those 'dying old men' were younger and interested in having fun, not really in concocting a huge industry with mega-profits when the industry was born. Taking everything else away other than the advancements in IT and communications, how hard would it be for that same hobby to take off these days?

I will never forget a post by Old Geezer in which he related how much D&D sold in the 70s/80s and how much sales have declined."This hobby has imploded, dude" still resounds in my head.

QuoteGaming companies haven't really driven useful innovation in the field, the interest, drive and motivation of countless fans have.  The industry has just been the embodiment of the fruition of that interest until now.  It can well be in times to come, but if you sweep all of the jobs and companies, IP and dollars away, people still want to do what it is we've been doing, plain and simple.

Which innovations are those that were made apart from game companies? Whenever I think of an innovation, I think of the RPG in which it first appeared and the gaming company that published it.

QuoteThe future of the hobby ultimately has no dependency on profit.  It has, however, been quite convenient so far.

My ass it hasn't! Whenever an RPG has gone out of print, the number of people who play it has dwindled.

Quote from: OneTinSoldier;316003You can bring in new blood, but unless the number of new people who fully embrace the hobby equals or exceeds the number of old gamers who leave the hobby each year, the hobby dies.

Its a very simple math equation.

Yep. The massive demographic bulge of people who started playing D&D in its heyday of the early 80s is now into its 40s. The attrition rate at that age is ruthless. The second wave of players - from the 3E era - also suffers  attrition, and additionally is much more likely to take up WoW and its ilk as a substitute.

Where are the new gamers coming from? Are they joining the hobby at a fast enough rate to replace those leaving through attrition? Seems extremely unlikely.

Eventually, you hit a level where it's very difficult to find other players. And that's the key to why RPGs are so difficult to market and grow in the contemporary world; you need several dedicated players who will meet together at the same time, with some degree of frequency, and over a sustained period. Any hobby with those requirements is in serious trouble.

It's that high level of committment in time and organization, more than anything else, that probably has Hasbro's marketing experts looking to change D&D into some far more casual and more like a boardgame. And the number of people that RPGs other than D&D bring into the hobby is negligible. Certainly nowhere near enough to replace those leaving the hobby.

Quote from: RPGPundit;315657I think there's some people who might want a small salary or small profits. I know that if someone told me "We'll pay you $500 a month to write a daily blog about RPGs", I'd be pissing my pants with joy.

RPGPundit

No kiddin'.

If my job is fulfilling that big, big itch I have (in my case, say, writing comics) I'll gladly ditch the higher paying office job to be making a smaller amount of money and being extremely happy with what I'm doing.

Quote from: HaffrungYep. The massive demographic bulge of people who started playing D&D in its heyday of the early 80s is now into its 40s. The attrition rate at that age is ruthless. The second wave of players - from the 3E era - also suffers  attrition, and additionally is much more likely to take up WoW and its ilk as a substitute.

I don't know that the second wave is suffering attrition at the same rate as the first. We're still young mostly, young enough that doing other stuff doesn't mean not playing D&D, anyway. And while WoW is pretty popular, I don't know that we're losing players to it. Those I know that play RPGs don't stop playing for videogames, instead they play both.

If 4e does poorly relative to 3e, I don't see any danger in it. If D&D gets shut down altogether, I figure we've got five to ten years, assuming no new D&D or substitute in that time.

As for "casual" vs "hardcore"... I see examples of both in the people I've played with, but I don't see that their needs are so distinct that you can't cater to both in the same game line.

Quote from: Benoist;316028You sure like to wave your dick around and act like you're the coolest kid on the block, though. That doesn't make people like you, Chuck, and you know? You can be right all you want. If you're being a dick, they will not listen to you.


Being an author of RPG products somehow makes you the market segmentation expert of theRPGsite? You're kidding me, right?

Did you miss the part where I said I didn't have all the answers? That part you quoted?

No, it doesn't make me "the expert".

However, it does seem that a little experience in the industry would make me qualified to make the extraordinarily banal claim that market segmentation is a useful marketing tool.

That's all I've been saying, and in return for that, I've been called an idiot and an asshole and a dick.

It boggles me a little that the threads that get the most heat here are speculations about the nature of the hobby or threads about our perceptions of ourselves and how they're mirrored (or not) by the perceptions of others. In this case, it feels a little ridiculous for me to see people getting all pissed off about what people think the hobby is going to become.

It's almost like people feel they 'need to call people on their bullshit', but they get mad about stupid things, and the busiest threads are meta. So, what?

I think that the people that make the case that there are casual and more dedicated players are correct. Any hobby is going to have that, and anyone who derives their personal well being by how invested they are in a hobby is going to use that difference as marking of personal worth. It's why you have sneering teenagers with a lot of time on their hands making poorly configured posts on the internet about how casual players ruin gaming.

I think the number of causal players go up when the amount of buy in to enter a hobby goes down. If it's cheap, and MMOs really, really are, then you'll have more players, but they'll be less 'hardcore'. Some games can cater to both, and some really are only able to cater to one or another.

I guess posting about role playing games is a hobby of its own, too - almost entirely divergent from the subject matter of what we actually do when we game.

Quote from: Thanatos02;316079I guess posting about role playing games is a hobby of its own, too - almost entirely divergent from the subject matter of what we actually do when we game.

And it's all PvP all the time!

Quote from: Tamelorn;315952Naturally, you missed my point entirely.  Young people are being brought into the hobby by a multitude of avenues that have absolutely nothing to do with the gaming industry.  Absent many of those, the same conditions that created the hobby in the first place still obtains and will for any forseeable future.  

It isn't the 'old dying men' that would resurrect the hobby should the companies go away, it's the young folks who continually recreate it anyway.  Whether or not they have an established industry ready to take and publish their ideas is relatively irrelevant.

Arguably, in fact, said young folks have already recreated it. They play MMOs in their millions. Freeform roleplays (often but not always tied to various fandoms) spread through Livejournal like fungus, require no industry to support them, and show no signs of going away. A certain number of young folks come into the tabletop RPG world anyway, as evidenced by the surprisingly large (some would say disproportionate) number of webcomics which have strips where the characters play D&D or some such thing.