What do you think will happen in the hobby next year?

Will the OSR still be king?

Will 5e keep doing well?

What will be the hot news?

Will the Outrage Brigade keep being able to cause trouble, and if so over what?

I believe 5e will continue to consolidate market share and Pathfinder will begin to visibly falter. I just don't think the latter has the right ruleset for where the zeitgeist is going.

Hopefully Chaosium's new version of Runequest will come out... and then they can get around to whatever they've got planned that's not Glorantha or CoC.

I'm still hoping for Chronicles of Future Earth for RQ6... though that's in doubt now.

5e seems to be sputtering a bit from my vantage point. No one I know around here is playing it. Our Pathfinder GM bought it but he's yet to run it. There at least one hard core min-maxer in the group who's not going to go without a fight... and half of them are bought into PF with books and software, which creates some inertia against change.

What do you think will happen in the hobby next year?

It will continue to diminish because Hasbro won't fund advertising and marketing and the rest of the "big dogs" want to sell coffee table art textbooks instead of games.

Meanwhile, the boardgame hobby will continue to grow.


Will the OSR still be king?

I must have missed the part when the OSR became king.


Will 5e keep doing well?

I expect WotC will license some D&D video games this year, especially with the WarCraft movie on the way.

As for the RPG, the only people I know who play it are the Living Forgotten Realms players and that seems to be chugging along.  

What will be the hot news?

New setting for 5e? Maybe a contest like back in 3e?

Old setting brought back?

Some established company crapping out and vanishing?


Will the Outrage Brigade keep being able to cause trouble, and if so over what?

Absolutely assured, and it will be over some stupid shit. Maybe the DriveThru reporting system will become the cause de jour.

Also, its an election year in the USA so the internets will be double dumb.

Quote from: Spinachcat;870940What do you think will happen in the hobby next year?

It will continue to diminish because Hasbro won't fund advertising and marketing

This continues to baffle me year after year. I work for a charter school and the company runs both television and radio ads. I don't know who is in charge of these things at Hasbro/WoTC, but it's a weird way to run a business to do no ads.

Quote from: Spinachcat;870940What do you think will happen in the hobby next year?

It will continue to diminish because Hasbro won't fund advertising and marketing and the rest of the "big dogs" want to sell coffee table art textbooks instead of games.

Meanwhile, the boardgame hobby will continue to grow.

Interestingly, comparing 2013 and 2015 figures from ICv2 as compiled by ENWorld here, the RPG market actually grew in the last couple of years. (And bear in mind that ICv2, by the nature of their data collection processes, are blind to direct sales and PDF sales.) $15 million to $25 million is, proportionally, a similar amount of growth to what boardgames and non-collectable card and dice gamers managed.

Interestingly, it seems to be the miniatures section of the market which is stagnating.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;870923I believe 5e will continue to consolidate market share and Pathfinder will begin to visibly falter. I just don't think the latter has the right ruleset for where the zeitgeist is going.

I think signs already exist of Pathfinder faltering - ENWorld's chart of hot RPGs, which tries to measure the extent to which different games get discussed, has lately shown it dropping from the number two spot it used to have behind 5E - right now, as far as ENWorld's RSS monitoring can tell there's more discussion of Exalted, 4E, and 3.X than Pathfnder, and World of Darkness is nipping at Pathfinder's heels.

Paizo are in kind of an impossible place with it. Major change will inevitably drive away customers who came to it precisely because they didn't want a major change away from 3.X, unless they are able to somehow cook up some genius reforms to the system which manage to simultaneously be significant and useful enough to be worth people adopting whilst at the same time being sufficiently rooted in the 3.X design ethos that it doesn't feel like a major departure. That is an incredibly difficult balancing act to pull off.

On the other hand, if they keep chugging on as-is and make no changes to the system, they doom themselves to playing second fiddle to 5E, which has established such a massive lead over Pathfinder in terms of dominance of the discussion space (as the ENWorld chart shows) and has been a sufficiently broad commercial success that it has reestablished the normal state of affairs wherein the current D&D is the 800 pound gorilla in the RPG industry. And that will hurt Pathfinder in the long run - for as long as D&D is bigger, the odds are that 5E organised play will be more widespread and more frequent than Pathfinder organised play, so those who are invested in organised play will have an increasing incentive to migrate to 5E - and as more of them migrate, the centre of gravity will shift further towards 5E, and the incentive to migrate will keep growing.

I think in the long run Pathfinder will have to choose whether they would prefer to substantially reform their system at the risk of losing that section of their fanbase which is adamantly opposed to further drift from 3.X on the one hand for the sake of trying to reclaim a position in the lead of the industry, and watching their game increasingly lose its "new hotness" shine and having to adjust to the fact that they are no longer publishing the most popular D&D variant - and the reduced ambition and narrower scope that comes with no longer being the industry leader.

What do you think will happen in the hobby next year?

Anything I release will roundly ignored.

Will the OSR still be king?

At this forum? Probably!

Will 5e keep doing well?

Until the next version comes out, most likely.

What will be the hot news?

OSR Porn movies.

Will the Outrage Brigade keep being able to cause trouble, and if so over what?

So long as you are alive, I am sure of it!

-clash

Quote from: RPGPundit;870921What do you think will happen in the hobby next year?

Will the OSR still be king?

Will 5e keep doing well?

What will be the hot news?

Will the Outrage Brigade keep being able to cause trouble, and if so over what?

These all seem likely. 5e will release a couple big new adventure books, my prediction is that one will be well received, one will have mixed reviews. One will be Forgotten Realms, one another setting, possibly Ravenloft. They might just release a Monster Manual 2 or Fiend Folio.

Paizo seems likely to continue relative decline, with a crunch-saturated game and a saturated market. They can't/won't do 5e stuff, but they might put more effort into marketing material as 'd20 generic' to 5e players (most Pathfinder stuff is very easy to use in 5e). 2017 is their 10th anniversary - I expect then they'll do a Rise of the Runelords style AP hardback that will be well received and mark a renaissance, but 2016 may be fairly quiet for them.

The OSR is pretty mature now, I expect it will continue to do well, though Lamentations of the Flame Princess may be past its use by date, judging by how lonely James Raggi looked at Dragonmeet.
Venger Satanis will put out more weird stuff, that will get unaccountably positive reviews on rpgnet and that I'll probably buy.

Quote from: RPGPundit;870921What do you think will happen in the hobby next year?

Some products will be released, some people will argue about stupid things online, and games will continue to be played.

QuoteWill the OSR still be king?

QuoteWill 5e keep doing well?

Is it doing well? Thats nice. I guess so.

QuoteWhat will be the hot news?

Something to do with the Kardashians I imagine.

QuoteWill the Outrage Brigade keep being able to cause trouble, and if so over what?

Sure, their audience will diminish more and more of course. Even RPGnet isnt putting up with their shit the way it used to.

Quote from: Warthur;870952Interestingly, comparing 2013 and 2015 figures from ICv2 as compiled by ENWorld here, the RPG market actually grew in the last couple of years.

Warthur, your penis is evil, but your numbers are nice. But I wonder if that represents new players or just current RPGers buying 5e because a new edition hit the shelves.

Well, the core 5E books came out in 2014, so the big bubble from early adopters would have been then. If 5E sales are still strong enough in 2015 to add $10 to the value of the industry that's notable in itself.

Of course, I suspect if you added together the funds raised by every 2015 RPG Kickstarter you would find that the $25 million figure is the tip of a very hard to quantify iceberg.

Pundit declares himself Dark God of D&D, launches purges to establish the Fifth Order.

No one else notices.

NOBODY expects the Uruguayan Inquisition!

(shrugs)  For the entire history of mankind, people have found things about which to be outraged, great and small.  If it isn't one thing, it's another, and if they can't find something, they'll invent something.