Quote from: daniel_ream;894059No, they aren't.  (You too, OG).  At least not as a universal.  You guys are clearly cheap, and I have no doubt that most of the people you play with are cheap.  But I live in an upper-middle-class, whitebread suburban city where the median gamer age is about mid-30's.  Spending multiple thousands of dollars a year on miniatures games, Pathfinder hardbacks, and board games is not unusual here for tabletop gamers.

One of the most rapidly expanding business models around here is board game cafes, where people pay a $5 cover to get into a cafe with tables, tons of games you can play, and light snacks you can buy.  Go once a week and you're paying more than $20/month just for a place to play and a game to play there. And these places are doing booming business.

Maybe, just maybe, a bunch of crusty old grognards with mediocre incomes isn't a good general description of tabletop gamers.  It isn't the 1980's any more.

The typical adult model railroader is in his late 50s or early 60s, just like me.  The average spending is about $2000 a year.

I really don't count in the gamer demographic because I just don't spend money on games, I spend it on other things.

"Don't want to spend money" is not the same thing as "don't have money to spend."  I'll drop $80 for a digital control decoder with sound for a model locomotive without batting an eye, but I can't imagine a game that would get me to drop $80.

Actually, I dropped double that on Star Wars d20, and I dropped that much on the WoTC Star Wars starship miniatures until I discovered that the game for the miniatures is pure shit.

Quote from: daniel_ream;894059Maybe, just maybe, a bunch of crusty old grognards with mediocre incomes isn't a good general description of tabletop gamers.  It isn't the 1980's any more.

Maybe, just maybe, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.  Late 50s to retirement, the "Empty Nester" demographic, has a huge disposable income.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;894097Actually, I dropped double that on Star Wars d20, and I dropped that much on the WoTC Star Wars starship miniatures until I discovered that the game for the miniatures is pure shit.

No, I'm sorry, shit is still useful as fertilizer. It was worse than that.

Quote from: daniel_ream;894059One of the most rapidly expanding business models around here is board game cafes, where people pay a $5 cover to get into a cafe with tables, tons of games you can play, and light snacks you can buy.  Go once a week and you're paying more than $20/month just for a place to play and a game to play there. And these places are doing booming business.

Maybe, just maybe, a bunch of crusty old grognards with mediocre incomes isn't a good general description of tabletop gamers.  It isn't the 1980's any more.

Newflash for you Timmy. Gamers have been renting game space since probably before RPGs. For 5$ I could reserve a library meeting room for our weekly games for a month. And before that a previous local group had been doing the exact same for years before dispersing and I picked up.

Apparently that is how one or two conventions got started. Renting space to play.

Board gamers do the same and have been doing it quite a while as well. Used to be and still is that game stores had a gaming room in back. At least one D&D documentary shows that way back in the 80s and 90s.

Everyone pitch in for renting a meeting place? Sure.
Everyone pitch in for buying new supplements or modules? Sure. That goes way back.

Demanding every player everywhere to hand the DM 4-8$ a session because yours are mooching is asinine.

Though not as bad as a few designers who were demanding that the playtesters pay them for the honour of playtesting the game. Or publishers who make designers pay them for the wonderful privilege of having their game looked at. EVERY TIME THE GAME IS SUBMITTED IF REVISIONS ARE REQUESTED.

No. I am not joking. This has and is happening.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;893276What if it cost $15 a month to play D&D? The latest game rules could be read only electronically while logged into the D&D website. Would you pay to play the latest version? Or would you stay with 5e (or some other previous version) forever?

Absolutely zero interest in electronic access only for $15/month.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;894099Maybe, just maybe, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.  Late 50s to retirement, the "Empty Nester" demographic, has a huge disposable income.

Oh I wish.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;893276What if it cost $15 a month to play D&D? The latest game rules could be read only electronically while logged into the D&D website. Would you pay to play the latest version?

No, I would not.  Not a chance.

Eh, why the hell would I do that?  If it was to have an on call DM to run whenever I wanted, perhaps I'd give it a shot.  But if he/she was in a call center in India I'd probably cancel very quickly.  

I know some a guy over here in Asia who is trying to get an all English game started as a language class.  I think he is charging roughly $30 a 4 hour session per player, pricewise that is not too bad, but I am sure if it has caught on for him.

Quote from: AsenRG;894089I don't think Ravenswing has a mediocre income, though. I think he just has the system and setting he intends to play.

No, I see no reason not to be forthright: I'm pretty much broke.  I was when I started playing tabletop again in 2003, and a hobby for which I'd already owned thousands of dollars worth of gear (and had somewhat fortuitously let my fiancee talk me into not throwing it out) held attractions.

I do have the system and setting I intend to play, of course.  For those without Asen's superb memory (hell, he remembered in one thread that I had multiple cats, several months after I mentioned it offhand), I have been using just that setting and just that system for over 30 years, through good times and bad, from owning three houses to living in a shotgun flat to everything in between.  Expecting that to change is a mug's game.

Only a moron would imagine that income is all that much of a barrier against system-hopping.

Because Gronan's right, and Daniel doesn't know what he's talking about.  I never said gamers were broke.  I said they were cheap, and threads screaming about the Awful Cost Of Gaming have been common enough over the years for me to be in a sticky folder all their own in the saved threads bit on my hard drive.  Like this one.  Or this one.  Or this one.  Or this one.  How about this one?  Or this one? ...

Claiming that it isn't there because one prefers to make snide cracks?  Eeesh.

Just some info: 4e had the disaster of the virtual table, and the DDI in general.  Wotc is well known for being stingy in pay (about 1/3 of industry average IIRC) and somewhat shortsighted with their digital offerings, even with products that are a literal printing press like MTGO.  Their support is atrocious and they never got 4e Digital off the ground.  I recall an interview with some of the staff e-developers that lamented that they were always two steps back on platform selection: .net and a platform that was abandoned by MS half way through.  By about 2009 or so (or whenever the iPad was released), they stated they could not have tablet support as they were still tied to MS even after they switched development platforms right before mobile took over.   They even shut off access to the free portions of DDI right when the "evergreen" new player friendly 4e Red Box and Essentials line was released.  All the people involved in that decision should have been immediately fired.

Their bad practices go all the way back to the out of house developed 2e Tools collection that was generally functional and is still useful to lots of folks.  Of course, Wotc kicked that team to the curb with their 3e Tools and they have never gotten back up to speed.  IIRC MTGO was developed out of house, but Wotc folded it back in and it has never been as stable as it was before.  

Wotc seems to have spun off D&D digital development again so maybe there is hope yet.

At the moment? No way.

Now if they would want to pay me $15 a month to play it I would have to reconsider.

Quote from: Ravenswing;894199I never said gamers were broke.  I said they were cheap, and threads screaming about the Awful Cost Of Gaming have been common enough over the years for me to be in a sticky folder all their own in the saved threads bit on my hard drive.  Like this one.  Or this one.  Or this one.  Or this one.  How about this one?  Or this one? ...

All you've demonstrated is that gamers like to complain about how expensive the hobby is.  You haven't demonstrated one way or another that they won't spend money on it, and the two are not correlated.

There's a another thread on this very site that indicates that many of the responders are spending multiple hundreds to multiple thousands of dollars per year on gaming, and this site self-selects against Pathfinder, 4E and miniatures gamers, groups which have a lot of overlap and IME trend towards the upper end of the annual expenditures histogram.

Quote from: Ravenswing;894199
  I never said gamers were broke.  I said they were cheap, and threads screaming about the Awful Cost Of Gaming have been common enough over the years for me to be in a sticky folder all their own in the saved threads bit on my hard drive.  Like this one.  Or this one.  Or this one.  Or this one.  How about this one?  Or this one? ...

Why are all your examples only from one source, RPG.net?

What I have seen about 5e doesn´t look worth 15$ once for me...

Quote from: jeff37923;894376Why are all your examples only from one source, RPG.net?

Because (a) I was active on TBP for nearly a decade and several thousand posts, (b) I saved a lot more of my own posts to threads then than I have in the last couple years, so that (c) When I went Googling for pertinent threads, I had text strings to do it with, because (d) I wasn't going to spend hours hunting and pecking through entire site histories for an ephemeral Interwebz discussion that none of us will remember two weeks from now.

That being said ...

Quote from: daniel_ream;894355All you've demonstrated is that gamers like to complain about how expensive the hobby is.  You haven't demonstrated one way or another that they won't spend money on it, and the two are not correlated.

There's a another thread on this very site that indicates that many of the responders are spending multiple hundreds to multiple thousands of dollars per year on gaming, and this site self-selects against Pathfinder, 4E and miniatures gamers, groups which have a lot of overlap and IME trend towards the upper end of the annual expenditures histogram.

... let me get this straight.  You're inferring that this forum is more representative of the RPG base than TBP is?  I'm thinking myself that if I draw conclusions, I'm going to go with the site that has fifty times the traffic this one does, whatever TBP's other bumps and warts.

In any event, judging from the overwhelming hostility to the premise in this thread, I've got a whole lot more reason to think that tabletop gamers aren't going to pony up to a pay-for-play model than you have any evidence to the contrary.