Quote from: ggroy;390272Wonder if they've been taking their cue from music and movie companies, where they're trying to score "home runs" (ie. Britney Spears, N'Sync, New Kids on the Block, Boston, Duran Duran, Nirvana, etc ...) instead of "base hits" (ie. everybody else).

Absolutely.

The investment of effort and capital isn't different.  Base hits require lots of work too.   However, home runs make x10 profit.

Quote from: thecasualoblivion;390467I'm really tempted to speculate whether they're going to have the RPGA adopt D&D essentials.

Nope.  LFR will exist as "Advanced Play" for those who want more the casual Encounters play of the Essentials.  

Quote from: Thanlis;390503Third, WotC just finished letting go of LFR -- they're not even requiring WotC approval of new modules any more. It's 95% of the way to being completely fan-owned.

I haven't heard about this.   What's going on?

Quote from: ggroy;390617If the open gaming + OGL thing had never happened with D&D in the early-mid 2000's, would tabletop rpgs have burned out even earlier?

Nope.  

3e sold like hotcakes, OGL went to the bargain bin.

Ditto about the LFR.  How are they going to factor in player exploits/achievements if modules can't be approved?  Just advance the metaplot without actual-play input?

Quote from: Spinachcat;390654I haven't heard about this.   What's going on?

In short: this.

Quote from: Peregrin;390615Steering this back on topic a little bit, do you think there's anything that the RPG hobby could learn from video-game companies in terms of garnering new players, or do you think we've already burned out past the point of salvaging the industry?

Too late IMO. Would like to be pleasantly surprised, though.

Quote from: Spinachcat;390654Nope.  

3e sold like hotcakes, OGL went to the bargain bin.

What I was thinking of was the tabletop rpg industry in general, and not just 3E D&D specifically.  Even without open gaming + the OGL, the 3E D&D core books would probably have still sold well.  But what would have happened to the other 3PP companies?

For the then upstart rpg companies like Mongoose, Green Ronin, Necromancer, Fast Forward, Troll Lords, Malhavoc, Goodman, etc ..., they most likely would have:

- never exist at all (ie. Mongoose, Fast Forward, etc ...)
- published a fantasy heartbreaker (ie. Troll Lord's "Swords and Sorcery" rpg)
- published a new rpg without using the 3E SRD (ie. Green Ronin's "Mutants and Masterminds")

For companies like Pinnacle, Chaosium, Alderac (AEG), Atlas, etc ... and other established rpg companies which jumped onto the d20/OGL bandwagon, most likely they would have continued chugging along and producing new supplements for their existing non-d20 rpg games (ie. Deadlands, Call of Cthulhu, Legend of Five Rings, etc ...) and/or producing new rpg games without using the 3E SRD (ie. Spycraft, etc ...).

It's hard to say whether any of these existing companies, would have went into freefall in the absence of open gaming + OGL during the early-mid 2000's.

Question of the day: should computer game companies fire their audience? Gamasutra paints the picture of an unhappy and toxic medium where developers, journalists and consumers have three things in common: dissatisfaction, frustration and resentment.

Select quotes:

QuoteOf course, the common stressor that developers and journalists together face is the video game consumer, primarily the core gamer. But the audience has a bone to pick, too – they’ve been promised revolution and given merely low-risk iteration. They watch helplessly while the industry seeks new ways to monetize them, casualizes their beloved properties so that a disinterested "everyone" can play (whether a game whose audience is as specific and passionate as StarCraft II’s needs to worry about "accessibility" is a fair question for the traditional audience to ask, for example).

User policies are implemented without too much apparent regard for enormous swaths of feedback, and gamers are consistently told by a more mainstream culture that their hobby is irrelevant, cannibalized in big gulps by Facebook and iPhone.

In this vicious cycle, where each of three parties continually fails to satisfy the others on which it most crucially depends, it’s easy to see the seeds of bitterness sown – angry developers lash out at one another in the public forum, fatigued of rivalries or disillusioned by the likelihood that they will be jettisoned from their home base like so much depleted material when their project doesn’t make targets.

Games media resents and condescends to its audience, and in many cases even develops aggressive vendettas against aspects of the industry it feels make appropriate targets. And the consumer seems terminally unhappy with them both.

QuoteMore and more developer sources I talked to suggested that fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one’s employer and questioning one’s career course is frighteningly common in the game industry. That being the case, it seems natural that elements like emotional detachment, anxiety and a lack of fulfillment make their way, even subtly, into the products the industry creates and into the ecosystem around the industry and its audience.
...
The average end user might not have any idea how games are made, but they may, on some level, be reacting to a thread of unhappiness on the creator’s side when they respond with constant negativity or dissatisfaction. Or not. Games media and developers alike know that gamers couldn’t give a damn.

QuoteCore gamers are demanding, entitled, obnoxious, sexist forum trolls. Of course, that’s not entirely true, and it’s probably not even a small part of the picture. But it sure seems like a sufficient summary sometimes from the view of a games journalist, who’s tasked with navigating the gap between an unhappy developer culture and a consumer culture that seems equally toxic.

"I thought I was talking to people who were like me," one of my colleagues said to me recently about the decision to do the work we do. "Like I could do my childhood friends a service somehow by going in this world we loved and bringing information back out. But sometimes it feels like I’m being attacked every day by commenters and I realize these people aren’t like me at all."

Like it or not, though, consumer hostility points to important facts: the audience isn’t being served well by the products it buys or by the media tasked with addressing it. Just as many developers are thrown young and underqualified into a pressure cooker, so are many writers.

Familiar? It should be. Also relevant in context of Peregrin's question in #229.

[edit]Ho ho ho, there is even a comment by... dun dun... long-time RPG industry vet Lewis Pulsipher.[/edit]

It's not just the RPG gamers, its everybody anymore, as the Joker said "this town needs an enema".  But really the world does.

I haven't met an online MMORPG player or any online gamer who was mentally stable I think the damn world is crazy anymore.

Crazy FUN!