Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;645611Kiero and Xech have it. RPGs are over as a business/pop culture thing. No one with business acumen will invest in them, and it's for good reason. The return isn't there.

A variety of quite popular kickstarters say otherwise. The only thing stopping RPGs from being a whole lot more profitable is an ubiquitous failure to understand the unique pleasure they bring. These aren't MMORPGs, these are not boardgames, these are living adventures.

It's all in the marketing, kids.

Quote from: The Traveller;645616A variety of quite popular kickstarters say otherwise. The only thing stopping RPGs from being a whole lot more profitable is an ubiquitous failure to understand the unique pleasure they bring. These aren't MMORPGs, these are not boardgames, these are living adventures.

It's all in the marketing, kids.

The trouble with RPGs is that they are in thrall to RPG gamers.

The problem with rpgs is that they have a boom / bust cycle that's fueled by apathy and ignorance on the part of the gamers and the industry.  The market goes up and everyone dives in with new product and the market floods out and dies down again.

The great thing about the crowd funding movement is that it kills the gate keepers dead.  The stores and distributors no longer control who can get into the market and the manufacturers can no longer count on the stores and distributors to limit new competition.

So, those who wake up and produce great new stuff should do well and those who wallow in their nostalgic slop will hopefully die out as the should have long ago.

Quote from: The Traveller;645616A variety of quite popular kickstarters say otherwise. The only thing stopping RPGs from being a whole lot more profitable is an ubiquitous failure to understand the unique pleasure they bring. These aren't MMORPGs, these are not boardgames, these are living adventures.

It's all in the marketing, kids.

I have my doubts about that. When you consider the opportunity costs involved, if you have a million bucks to invest, why would you invest it in an RPG? From a business perspective, all you can see is an illustrious history of decline, product fumbles, and steadily-increasing market fragmentation. Your bricks-and-mortar retail options have been steadily dwindling for decades and show no signs of reversing, and your biggest historical bulge of buyers are in their forties these days.

WotC gambled its favorite internal organs that they could break open a wider market of players with their new edition. They made the precise sort of push to widen the player base that everybody's been asking for since the D&D cartoon went off the air. Many of these same people then bewailed their efforts as utterly stupid, but WotC paid the money and took the chance, and it has not visibly paid off for them.

I don't see a lot of reason to believe that the next company that comes along is going to be able to find the magic marketing words where WotC failed. The fad happened at the right place and the right time. Things have changed since then, and I'm not seeing any sign that we'll experience such a craze again.

My buddy was explaining to his son's friend what D&D was. The kid is 11, reads voraciously, watches fantasy TV shows and movies, but has never heard of D&D.

Once my buddy told him how D&D was different than a boardgame or a video game and here's what the kid said, "That's awesome. I love video games, but you don't get to use your imagination. I would love to play something like that!"

I highly doubt this kid is unique. I bet there are a million of them in the first world with enough disposable income to join the hobby.

Quote from: jeff37923;645595Considering that they have beaten down D&D in sales reports is advertisement enough.

How is that reaching non-gamers? Nobody but the most hardcore RPGers online know about sales reports.

Beating WotC is a major accomplishment and I suspect Pathfinder will outdo 5e as well. Which is why on every survey I send to WotC, I always tell them to buy Paizo immediately.

Quote from: jeff37923;645595As far as 2nd or 3rd tier companies, where would they market besides Kickstarter or banner ads?

Why not advertise in video game mags?  In the 80s, video games advertised in Dragon.

What about teen mags? Or science mags? Or movie fan mags?

Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;645611RPGs are over as a business/pop culture thing. No one with business acumen will invest in them, and it's for good reason. The return isn't there.

That may be true for people looking for tens of millions of dollars, but what about cranking out some adverts to get 10,000 new Shadowrun players?

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;645613People are buying enough already on Drive-Thru which has plenty of everything.

Drive-Thru is a micro-niche. Their customers have to be the following:
1) People who know about Drive-Thru
2) People who want PDFs.
3) People who already play RPGs.

DT customers are a subset of a subset of a subset. But maybe it it makes sense for DT to advertise to expand those subsets.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;645613The masses only want their World of Warcraft.

Let's say that's true. If 80% of the potential new RPGer market is lost to MMOs, what about the other 20%?

If there are only 1 million potential gamers out there, why not reach those 200,000. Just imagine how much our hobby would rock if we got 200k new gamers.

Quote from: The Traveller;645616It's all in the marketing, kids.

Yes. That's what's puzzling me. It's primo season for hunting new customers.

WoD did it in the 90s when 2e was stale. Today we have a larger population with more marketing opportunities and RPGs are still a unique hobby.

Quote from: Piestrio;645619The trouble with RPGs is that they are in thrall to RPG gamers.

That's why I bring up the marketing and advertising question. There are probably x10 the number of potential RPGers than current RPGers. Those are the people who need to be reached via advertising.

Quote from: David Johansen;645622The great thing about the crowd funding movement is that it kills the gate keepers dead.

Except that Kickstarters only talk to the already converted. Zero brand new gamers and very few, if any, lapsed gamers are trolling Kickstarter looking for interesting new RPG games.

Potential gamers don't even know the hobby exists.

How would this person/business distinguish itself from what is already happening? Pathfinder still has a strong publication schedule. They may no longer be shiny and new, but they are delivering consistency. DCC is still drawing lots of attention. Swords & Wizardry is being well supported by FGG. So what room is there for someone else to take advantage of that is not already being filled? 'Cause I'm not seeing it.

Quote from: SineNomine;645632From a business perspective, all you can see is an illustrious history of decline, product fumbles, and steadily-increasing market fragmentation. Your bricks-and-mortar retail options have been steadily dwindling for decades and show no signs of reversing, and your biggest historical bulge of buyers are in their forties these days.

Sounds like the boardgame market before their current boom. Or the minis wargame market before Warhammer hit the scene.

Quote from: SineNomine;645632WotC gambled its favorite internal organs that they could break open a wider market of players with their new edition. They made the precise sort of push to widen the player base that everybody's been asking for since the D&D cartoon went off the air. Many of these same people then bewailed their efforts as utterly stupid, but WotC paid the money and took the chance, and it has not visibly paid off for them.

Except that WotC did not do the advertising.

4e was built for online gaming. It was a great system for an online game table and WotC was just about to make that happen until they shut down the project and committed 21st century suicide. The lack of an official game table to play D&D 24/7 online in 2013 is just moronic.

4e marketing was a joke. There was no outreach to new gamers, no attempt to put a D&D in the big box stores and absolutely no level of advertising compared to what is given to Magic or Hasbro products.

I agree that D&D's moment in the sun is gone. But there are stores devoted to Hello Kitty, RC cars, model trains and that shit ain't fresh either.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;645635So what room is there for someone else to take advantage of that is not already being filled? 'Cause I'm not seeing it.

Non-gamers
Lapsed gamers
Gamers not on RPG forums

Quote from: Spinachcat;645636Except that WotC did not do the advertising. .

4e marketing was a joke. There was no outreach to new gamers, no attempt to put a D&D in the big box stores and absolutely no level of advertising compared to what is given to Magic or Hasbro products.

I agree that D&D's moment in the sun is gone. But there are stores devoted to Hello Kitty, RC cars, model trains and that shit ain't fresh either.

I seem to recall plenty of marketing, including tv spots.

Quote from: Spinachcat;645638Non-gamers
Lapsed gamers
Gamers not on RPG forums

The whole "lets get non-gamers" thing is a bust. That ways lies madness. It assumes the "non-gamers" would ever be interested in gaming. Far to many people who might look like that untapped market, just aren't and never will be interested. Far too many companies have tried to reach them, with little success.


Lapsed Gamers and Non-forum goers are something to consider, but many of the latter are lapsed because of time/family constraints. It is easier to hop and WOW for two hours than get five busy friends together on the same day. Of course for me, the latter is worth about ten thousand times the former, but I admit to being a bit strange that way.

Quote from: Spinachcat;645638Non-gamers
Lapsed gamers
Gamers not on RPG forums

RPG designers will never capture those markets, because:

Quote from: Piestrio;645619The trouble with RPGs is that they are in thrall to RPG gamers.

Pretty much everything we dedicated RPG people say or think about RPGs and how to market them outside the hardcore is corrupted by our distorted vision of what RPGs are like. And that goes double for RPG designers. They've lost the ability to see the game from the perspective of someone who either has never found anything of interest in RPGs as they are currently designed or tried RPGs and just didn't catch the "bug" (or were even turned off to RPGs from their encounters with RPG gamers.)

You know, it has been said here a thousand times. Write a simple, elegant system that uses commonly available dice and both print it cheaply for sale and make it available for free download to eReader and as PDF.

There are already tons of them out there.

Man, H&H wouldn't even exist without the D&D vacuum.

Quote from: Kiero;645579Because PnP RPGs are already well into the long tail of their product cycle.

this is precisely it.

RPGs are available everywhere there are thousands of micro products filling every avaibale niche. The sheer number of RPG products is astounding however the market is a certain size. So you have saturation.
There are a small number of people, like folk on here, who will buy a game of a certain genre just to see what its about or how a mechanic is implented. There are those crazy collectors who will part with money for reprints of stuff they already have or stuff that was somehow at the forefront of the market, like the OD&D reprints. But these are fanatic collectors and don't make a hobby.

The pnp RPG format is self limiting. You have a system where the players can create their own content easily and it's as good as professional content. Imagine if CoD was produced and all its players could easily make up new missions on the fly for minimal invested effort. How would that affect sales of CoD2. What if it wasn't just the content that was user creatable but the rules engine could be tweaked to add extra weapons vehicals, locations, move it to outerspace, add alien races, make it play like Star Wars or Memento, or batman.
That is the trouble with selling RPGs. They work by encouraging the imagination of the players, but players with imagination quickly realise they have no need for any more rules. So you can't sell them product. That is why so many new commercial games have gimmicks because you can sell gimmicks.
Pathfnder found a trick, they created the adventure paths partially to appeal to those players that thought somehow 'professional' content mattered, they will always represent a subset, but more importantly it creates a culture of shared experience. Something that Ben refered to in a post an age ago was that the classic D&D modules represented a shared experience. Somthing
that brings a culture together and I think that there is validity in that.
I suspect it was one of the main forces behind living Greyhawk, the RPGA and all that the sense of being part of a group with shared experience and lets be honest allowed a subset of men who were never going to shine as the star quarterback or the guy that made the million dollar deal to shine as the guy that beat the Dragon King in blah blah adventure module.

So Pathfinder is exploiting that gap, the MMO forums exploit the same gap as to the various Computer RPGs walkthroughs and recorded record to beat level XX on CoD etc .

The trouble is that the actual stuff that goes on at the table doesn't need any of it. Put aside the shared experience angle and anyone of us could create a rules system and play with their mates/kids etc because what happens at the table is unique. It is therefore very difficult to see where the money is from an investors perspective.

Take SJG for example. A perfect case in point. GURPS has been one of the best selling most popular games for nigh on 2 decades. However SJG makes exponetially more money from Munchkin. A game which builds on the tropes of D&D but works in a much more traditional Board game paradigm.

Take WotC Magic revolutionised games in the same way that D&D did it created an entirely new thing. It created a thing that you could also sell because they controlled the content. Because of it Wizards literally saved the D&D brand but all they get from Fans is hate hate hate. Why do they bother? the Wizard guys bought TSR because they totally loved D&D They sold it to Hasbro because they also love $300 Million and Peter Adison can now play games all the time and not have to worry about running a company
- he bought Gen Con as a hobby ....surely every gamers dream?
Now Hasbro didn't buy Wizards for D&D they bought it for magic and Pokemon. I imagine if they had wanted too Wizards could have pealed off D&D and excluded it from the sale and run t independently but they didn't probably because as Wizards they had nevery made any money from any of their RPG lines pre Mtg.

Anyway just my opinion.

Quote from: Spinachcat;645634Let's say that's true. If 80% of the potential new RPGer market is lost to MMOs, what about the other 20%?

They are playing the free-ish MMOs like Star Wars and Star Trek.  The general masses do not tabletop role-play.  Magic cards or pogs are more their thing.