Quote from: RandallS;445066Chaosium and Palladium seem top manage.

I don't know about Palladium but Chaosium has been on life support for more than a decade. Their Lovecraft fiction has kept them afloat and essentially they haven't had the ability to radically revise CoC even if they wanted to. Getting the BRP book together seems to have pushed them to the limit for 3 years.

If you look at how Chaosium handled Stormbringer (5 editions and SB5 is significantly different to SB1) then you get the impression they would have done more with the game if they could. RQ too went through three editions in about 5 years and there are still holdouts against the changes in RQ3, 25 years later.

On the other hand, I think it's fair to say that the base system has stood the test of time pretty well so there's no great push for radical system changes.

Quote from: two_fishes;445074Ah, so the ideal RPG company success story, in your mind, is to be a tiny, struggling entity barely scraping by. Gotcha.

NO, my realistic view of an RPG company is one that manages to make enough profit for the owner to live on. The hobby is too diverse and doesn't really need enough "bought stuff" to make large companies with lots and lots  of profit possible except as occasional flukes for short periods of time (TSR in the early 1980s, WOTC in the early 2000s).

I realize that those who want to make a killing off of RPGs would really like to believe that reality is other than it is, but that doesn't change reality. It's not the hobbyist's fault that their hobby isn't one that requires all involved to spend a lot of money regularly so a set of very profitable businesses can spring up around it.

Most small businesses in the US make enough to support the owner and his family and not a whole lot more. And most new businesses either fail within a few years or never become much larger than just described.  This is true across the board, not just in the RPG industry.

The RPG industry also suffers because little or nothing they produce is absolutely required by the hobbyist. Once one has a set of rules they like and some dice, they are pretty much set for life as far as "must have" hobby items go. Worse, the industry isn't even required to produce those. There are hundreds of hobbyist-produced rules available for free, created by hobbyists for their own enjoyment instead of to be sold. Many are as good or better (rules-wise) than those produced by the RPG industry. The main difference in some cases in that the free hobbyist produced material is not produced with high production values in the packaging -- of course fancy layouts and full color pro art in a rules book isn't required for play.

Quote from: RandallS;445082NO, my realistic view of an RPG company is one that manages to make enough profit for the owner to live on.

Besides Palladium, how many rpg companies are run in such a manner where the owner can work on rpg books full time and live solely on the profits?

Quote from: One Horse Town;445062Probably a little of both - and also a healthy dose of companies who were bigger 3e 3rd party publishers finding out that they had to do a bit more work to keep hanging onto WotC coat-tails.

Naw. It's the Character Builder.

In ye olden days, third party companies tended to do one of two things: re-work d20 into their own unique game (straying very far from D&D or not so far at all) or produce lots of fiddly bits for players.

WotC didn't ken too kindly to the first, thus we have the GSL.

Although companies can do the latter, they can't incorporate their material into the Character Builder. Thus to use their product, you've got to create your character by hand. And while we're all capable of doing so and some groups still do, many of us have been spoiled by the Character Builder. Unless the new material is so attractive that we're willing to forgo using the tools at our disposal to make use of it, we're not going to buy it. And, usually, new material isn't that attractive at all - it's a rehash of something, kind of neat but eh, etc..

If Diaz really wants to sell his game, he ought to make some electronic tools for it.

Or advertise. Another part of the problem is, I think, that the d20 glut made companies lazy on the marketing front. They can no longer just plop a product out on the market and expect folks to pick it up. Especially in this economy.

Seanchai

Quote from: RandallS;445082NO, my realistic view of an RPG company is one that manages to make enough profit for the owner to live on. The hobby is too diverse and doesn't really need enough "bought stuff" to make large companies with lots and lots  of profit possible except as occasional flukes for short periods of time (TSR in the early 1980s, WOTC in the early 2000s).

I realize that those who want to make a killing off of RPGs would really like to believe that reality is other than it is, but that doesn't change reality. It's not the hobbyist's fault that their hobby isn't one that requires all involved to spend a lot of money regularly so a set of very profitable businesses can spring up around it.

Most small businesses in the US make enough to support the owner and his family and not a whole lot more. And most new businesses either fail within a few years or never become much larger than just described.  This is true across the board, not just in the RPG industry.

The RPG industry also suffers because little or nothing they produce is absolutely required by the hobbyist. Once one has a set of rules they like and some dice, they are pretty much set for life as far as "must have" hobby items go. Worse, the industry isn't even required to produce those. There are hundreds of hobbyist-produced rules available for free, created by hobbyists for their own enjoyment instead of to be sold. Many are as good or better (rules-wise) than those produced by the RPG industry. The main difference in some cases in that the free hobbyist produced material is not produced with high production values in the packaging -- of course fancy layouts and full color pro art in a rules book isn't required for play.

QFMT.

The other option popular with certain companies, is to take the IP goodwill generated by the non-profitable rpg and turn it into boardgames, CCG's, computer games, movies, novels, etc.

Nothing is wrong with a company whoring out its IP for a buck, because companies exist to make money. When the company begins to put more support into these things than the rpg that spawned them it becomes time to ask: what hobby are they serving exactly?

Quote from: Exploderwizard;445105When the company begins to put more support into these things than the rpg that spawned them it becomes time to ask: what hobby are they serving exactly?

Eating regular.

Quote from: Aos;445108Eating regular.

Hahahahaha!!  I love a good sense of entitlement appetite!

Quote from: Reckall;445021You mean that at Wizards they are about to get rid of themselves? Because the whole 4E fiasco (and, in a way, the 3.5E before it) fits your requirement.

No.  d20 was good for Wizards when they required that in order to play third party games you needed the players handbook.

When people no longer needed to buy the PHB in order to play a d20 game then Wizards lost money.  People used their system and Wizards got nothing for it.

I dont see a problem with 4e.  I have it and I like it.  The rules are much easier to understand then the 3x rules which were much more complicated

Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb;444951Dancey did not make a mistake in backing the OGL, nor did he cost WoTC money. WoTC cost itself money by later rejecting the OGL. It's really not Dancey's fault that WoTC is getting boned for its own short-sighted mistakes.

How so?  Once people didnt need to buy a PHB people were making money using the D20 system and Wizards was getting nothing for it.

That's why they went with the GSL, so they had more control and could make more money.

If they dont make money that Wizards may be sold off in pieces.  And who knows if the person who buys D&D will make another rpg or they will just use the property for other media types

Quote from: One Horse Town;444954Really, i think that Dancey and the OGL were good for the hobby in the short term, but less so for WotC.

I disagree.  I think the OGL did a lot of damage to the hobby.  The market got flooded with crap that was using the D20 system when it wasnt a good fit.

Maybe you could consider it a good thing because people went back to making games with systems that are actually made for the game (which in my opinion is a good thing)

Quote from: Daedalus;445124No.  d20 was good for Wizards when they required that in order to play third party games you needed the players handbook.

When people no longer needed to buy the PHB in order to play a d20 game then Wizards lost money.  People used their system and Wizards got nothing for it.

I dont see a problem with 4e.  I have it and I like it.  The rules are much easier to understand then the 3x rules which were much more complicated

...yeah, you didn't really need to even buy a PHB when you could reference an online SRD.  

When my group was playing 3.5 only one guy had physical books.  The rest of us used free-and-legal hypertext srds for reference.

Quote from: misterguignol;445127...yeah, you didn't really need to even buy a PHB when you could reference an online SRD.  

When my group was playing 3.5 only one guy had physical books.  The rest of us used free-and-legal hypertext srds for reference.

Right, and that is giving away their prime product for free which doesnt seem like a smart business move.

Seriously, let me get this straight. Although companies would appear to make much more money by doing "overhaul" editions that change their game in large ways, what they altruistically ought to do is consistently release "micro" editions with few changes to the game. Even though the companies that follow the latter business model are small and struggle to survive and the companies that follow the former business model are large and make enough money to support a large staff, the former ought to change their model to the latter because it is the right thing to do. Is this the argument that is being put forward?

Quote from: RandallS;445066Chaosium and Palladium seem top manage.  They don't make millions, but they consistently show enough profit to keep their owners happy. And their "new editions" are usually completely compatible with old editions and everything else they've published for the game. Said new editions are generally little more than a new layout, some different art, and a few pages of new material.

As others have pointed out, Chaosium has been on life support.  It's barely clinging to life - not exactly the kind of template I would want for an industry.

Palladium is doing better, but still has a whopping 5 or so employees (last I heard, it was Kevin, the guy who handles the magazine, the guy who handles misc. business stuff, a receptionist, and a guy working in the warehouse).  And Palladium manages to get maybe one actual book (not counting the magazine) out every six months or so.  And even discounting the fan donations from the Crisis o' Treachery, if you read Kevin's statements you'll discover that the company has subsisted largely on his father's retirement money and substantial donations from other friends and family.

Also, it has changed versions on many of its games.  Some were relatively big rules changes (P Fan, BtS, and Rifts all were big enough to require new editions of sourcebooks as well).  The BtS game is essentially still incomplete after many years have passed.

In any event, Palladium is most certainly not a company to model after either.

So yeah, the only alternative to WotC appears to be near-dead publishers who may or may not get out a book or two a year.  How is that an improvement?

Quote from: Daedalus;445128Right, and that is giving away their prime product for free which doesnt seem like a smart business move.

Exactly.  The open license did two things that were bad for business:

1) The core product you need to play the game?  99% available for free on the Internet.  That had to cut into sales of the PHB, DMG, and MM.

2) Opened the floodgates for a deluge of absolutely crappy 3rd party books.  Yes, there were diamonds in the rough, but I cannot fathom how anyone pines for the days of shelves stocked with a multitude of poorly designed and executed d20 books.  Hell, even WotC had trouble with quality control in-house; 3rd party publishers were often much, much worse.