Interesting Post(s) by Ryan Dancey about 4e D&D and Gaming as an industry.

[Tasha]

I saw this on Google+ earlier today.

The first post is about what happened to hose the 4e Launch.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/31...ml#post5765766

While that is VERY interesting, His first post in that thread is far more interesting and has implications to the health of both Hero and PnP Gaming in General.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/31...ml#post5765766
What is very interesting about this is the Market Research that WoTC did before the OGL and 3e. I think that this has implications about how to be successful as a game company or at least one view.

The second link which leads to the first post in the thread is expanding Ryan's views on these Articles in The Escapist. D&D Past, Present and Future
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...ts-of-D-D-Past
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...of-D-D-Present
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...Dragons-Future

Also a Link to the WoTC study.
http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfile...chSummary.html
---

[Tasha]

They talk about gaming being a social web. Where book sales happen when one person in a group buys a game or supplement, that leads to others in the group making the same purchase. I see this happen in our group all of the time. When one GM wants to try out a game system and eventually all of the players buy at least the core rule books and others buy everything available for the game. When a company has too many choices, then the web of gamers doesn't always buy everything offered. Which leads to poor sales, because most gamers aren't insane collectors like me. They only buy the books they need to play.

Now one thing that Ryan said in his post was how different Game worlds lead to slight differences in the System, which leads to fragmentation of the market, which leads to lower sales for a company.

I think that Hero has gotten around this issue somewhat by selling the Genre Books. Basically, how to use the core rules to run a game in this genre. Perhaps where they went wrong was in including too many Specific Campaign Books for a specific Genre. Did we really need 3 Fantasy Hero Worlds? and 2 Star Hero Worlds, with 2 Champions Worlds?

Perhaps Fantasy Hero should have had a generic High Fantasy world (ie Western Shores from FH 1st ed, or like Middle Earth, or Forgotten Realms) something that the majority of D&D gamers would have gotten right off the bat. Star Hero could have used some kind of Space Western setting that was a little bit Traveller with some Firefly mixed in for fun. Champions should have stuck to Champions Universe, The Space Champions game would have been better as a High Power Champions Sub-Genre book that talked about how to run a game where the PC's can go to other planets on a whim.

I realize that this is all Arm Chair quarterbacking (Game Company managing), but perhaps it teaches us something for the future.

[ercarlson1974]

Those are some awesome articles. Thank you for posting!

I sure hope tabletop gaming doesn't go the way of the dodo, at least not in my lifetime. I enjoy PbP gaming on Hero Central tremendously, but there is no substitute for in-person gaming. TRPGs also seem a lot more amenable to H&H (Handwavium & Houserulium) if you don't like a rule set. In MMOs you are stuck with the game as written.

[Peregrine]

My takeaways:

1. Overall (with exceptions), companies that A. publish TRPGs and B. are financially stable share a common characteristic - TRPGs are a secondary revenue stream. WOTC is in fact a prominent example of this, with Magic as the primary revenue generator. The problems with the D&D brand stem from A. Hasbro's internal brand management practices and B. product issues around D&D 4e, both errors, and circumstances such as the unexpected death of the primary developer of DDI. Closer to scale, GURPS is a secondary revenue stream for Steve Jackson Games; the Munchkin card game is their main revenue stream. It is doubtful that TRPGs will ever again be a primary revenue source for any publisher; those few exceptions who are managing it now will likely not continue to be successful in doing so for very long. TRPGs can continue to be part of a product portfolio, but some other product will have to generate the revenue that keeps the company going and people employed.

2. There is a special opportunity with D&D due to high brand recognition. The question that WOTC faces is, what product can become the primary revenue generator for the D&D brand so that the TRPG can be published as a secondary revenue stream? Moving forward from any other perspective (e.g. trying to make the TRPG a primary revenue generator) is a recipe for failure.

3. I have no prescriptive advice for Hero.

[Derek Hiemforth]

They talk about gaming being a social web. Where book sales happen when one person in a group buys a game or supplement, that leads to others in the group making the same purchase. I see this happen in our group all of the time. When one GM wants to try out a game system and eventually all of the players buy at least the core rule books and others buy everything available for the game. When a company has too many choices, then the web of gamers doesn't always buy everything offered. Which leads to poor sales, because most gamers aren't insane collectors like me. They only buy the books they need to play.

Now one thing that Ryan said in his post was how different Game worlds lead to slight differences in the System, which leads to fragmentation of the market, which leads to lower sales for a company.

I think that Hero has gotten around this issue somewhat by selling the Genre Books. Basically, how to use the core rules to run a game in this genre. Perhaps where they went wrong was in including too many Specific Campaign Books for a specific Genre. Did we really need 3 Fantasy Hero Worlds? and 2 Star Hero Worlds, with 2 Champions Worlds?

Perhaps Fantasy Hero should have had a generic High Fantasy world (ie Western Shores from FH 1st ed, or like Middle Earth, or Forgotten Realms) something that the majority of D&D gamers would have gotten right off the bat. Star Hero could have used some kind of Space Western setting that was a little bit Traveller with some Firefly mixed in for fun. Champions should have stuck to Champions Universe, The Space Champions game would have been better as a High Power Champions Sub-Genre book that talked about how to run a game where the PC's can go to other planets on a whim.

I realize that this is all Arm Chair quarterbacking (Game Company managing), but perhaps it teaches us something for the future.

At risk of sounding like a doomsayer, I take Dancey's information as meaning that Hero is not going to enjoy future success in the TRPG market in the traditional sense, until and unless that TRPG market as a whole expands significantly (something over which they -- and we -- have little or no control). Because it isn't just multiple game worlds that lead to fragmentation... it's also game systems.

I think there are two kinds of fragmentation at work. One is division of the overall TRPG market. Since new players are apparently not being added to the TRPG market at a faster rate than they're leaving by attrition (i.e., the market as a whole is shrinking, or at best, holding steady), that means that each new TRPG game system that comes out has to draw its customer base almost entirely from people who currently play another game system. So the more TRPG systems are out there, the smaller the audience for each one gets. (Yes, some people play more than one system, so one gamer could be a customer for more than one game, but I've never heard of anyone who plays every system, and most TRPGers I've known tend to stick to 1-4 systems they play/buy regularly.)

Unfortunately, this is an industry phenomenon. I see nothing Hero could do to change this, since they can neither force fewer companies to publish game systems, nor make the external factors driving the contraction of the TRPG market go away.

The other kind is fragmentation within a given company's own customer base, most often because of multiple worlds or multiple games for different genres, even if they use a similar core rules engine. And I do wonder whether maybe some game companies have underestimated the impact of that. For example, if you publish one fantasy world, and then later add a second that's entirely different in tone, it might be easy to assume that its audience will come from people who didn't care for your first world. And some almost certainly do come from that group. But others likely come from people who were previously buying your first world, but switch to buying the second instead of the first, because they like the second better.

For Hero, this seems like a nearly-unavoidable problem... with genres, if not with settings. As a multi-genre RPG, they have to "fragment" their audience this way (or abandon being a multi-genre game). This may not be quite as bad as it would be for other games, because after all, many people attracted to Hero in the first place were attracted precisely because it's a multi-genre system. So you may get a higher percentage of Champions players willing to buy Western Hero and Spy Hero than TSR had of D&D players willing to buy Boot Hill and Top Secret, for example. But it's nevertheless true that there are significant numbers of Hero players who only buy the Supers products, or only the Fantasy products, etc. Having multiple settings for a single genre potentially does make that even worse.

The bottom line, it seems, is simply that the TRPG pie has gotten sliced into so many pieces that traditional approaches and full-time staff have become unfeasible for many companies (including Hero). The slices are no longer enough pie to "fill them up." The only ways I can see to change that would be for the pie as a whole to get bigger (which Hero has little/no control over), or to grow the size of their slice. And even the latter seems unlikely to me, considering that the trends in the industry (Pathfinder and D&D4 now splitting the xD&D juggernaut, more and more self-publishing authors, indie games, etc. etc.) seem to be pointing toward more splitting, not less.

Granted, I suppose they could at least reduce the extent to which they split their own pie, by picking their most popular genre and setting (Champions, and Champions Universe, I would assume) and publishing only for that themselves, and either dropping support for other genres, other settings, etc., or leaving them to outside licensees (though even there, they would run the risk of other Champions products eating into their own Champions Universe products, etc.).

Or alternately, I guess they could get out of publishing "support" material entirely (or almost entirely), selling only the core rules and/or the core library, and leaving all support for genres and settings to third-party publishers. That might make the most sense, actually. Then anything someone else publishes only subdivides the audience for those support books, and anyone wanting the rules books still has to get them from Hero Games...

Hmm...

[Darren Watts]

Or alternately, I guess they could get out of publishing "support" material entirely (or almost entirely), selling only the core rules and/or the core library, and leaving all support for genres and settings to third-party publishers. That might make the most sense, actually. Then anything someone else publishes only subdivides the audience for those support books, and anyone wanting the rules books still has to get them from Hero Games...

Hmm...

Wow, that analysis sounds awful familiar. Hey, wait a minute... dw

[Derek Hiemforth]

Wow, that analysis sounds awful familiar. Hey, wait a minute... dw

From where? D&D3/OGL? Largely, for sure. But Wizards also sold their own support material for it, didn't they? (Granted, we're comparing apples and oranges in terms of market share and sources of revenue from other products produced within the company.)

[Darren Watts]

From where? D&D3/OGL? Largely, for sure. But Wizards also sold their own support material for it, didn't they? (Granted, we're comparing apples and oranges in terms of market share and sources of revenue from other products produced within the company.)

No, I meant that's pretty much exactly what we're doing right now. dw

[Derek Hiemforth]

No, I meant that's pretty much exactly what we're doing right now. dw

Ah, gotcha. I hadn't seen that actually spelled out anywhere.

[Lucius]

Ah, gotcha. I hadn't seen that actually spelled out anywhere.

T H A T

Is now the latest word in the Advanced Acronym Game.


On topic, I think we need a bigger pie. Anyone have a recipe?

Lucius Alexander

Trying to keep the palindromdary from eating the ingredients

[Derek Hiemforth]

On topic, I think we need a bigger pie. Anyone have a recipe?

A recipe, yes (or at least an ingredient). But no control over a way to obtain it.

I think TRPGs struggle to attract new players, in large part, because they require a greater prep-time-to-play-time in advance, and a longer attention span during play, than more modern and visual games like MMOs, CCGs, etc. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't think people would still get hooked on them if they tried them. I think they would; TRPGs are a gaming experience that's really different from other kinds of games or leisure activities.

What I think we need is a compelling reason to get people to try TRPGs in spite of all the things that make them less attractive than some alternatives. Nothing is more compelling to young people than wanting to be socially "in," and nothing influences what is "in" more than high-profile celebrities. I mean, Paris Hilton has gotten a whole generation of women to carry shivering little rat dogs around with them in their purses everywhere they go...

So I think what we need is some extremely high profile celebrities or movies or what have you, that presents TRPGing as a hobby in a very positive light. ("Positive" as in "I want to be like the people I see doing that," not like, say, The Big Bang Theory, where even those who love the show and the guys in it, aren't necessarily wanting to emulate them.) Something that draws favorable attention from the mainstream onto the hobby (and a lot of it, to overcome many years of negative portrayals of TRPGs as Satanic, as the activity of choice for social misfits, or both).

Certainly, if there was a flood of positive attention that got many new people to try the hobby, not all of them would stay. But some would; some would get hooked on it, just like we did. And that could be a big bump in the player base...

[JohnTaber]

[Someone hit Derek with the Rep stick. Those posts are great. ]

[Old Man]

I think that Hero has gotten around this issue somewhat by selling the Genre Books. Basically, how to use the core rules to run a game in this genre. Perhaps where they went wrong was in including too many Specific Campaign Books for a specific Genre. Did we really need 3 Fantasy Hero Worlds? and 2 Star Hero Worlds, with 2 Champions Worlds?

(...)

Perhaps Fantasy Hero should have had a generic High Fantasy world (ie Western Shores from FH 1st ed, or like Middle Earth, or Forgotten Realms) something that the majority of D&D gamers would have gotten right off the bat. Star Hero could have used some kind of Space Western setting that was a little bit Traveller with some Firefly mixed in for fun. Champions should have stuck to Champions Universe, The Space Champions game would have been better as a High Power Champions Sub-Genre book that talked about how to run a game where the PC's can go to other planets on a whim.

I don't think having multiple campaign settings was an issue so much as support. Intellectual property like Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance can be extremely valuable, but you usually have to throw some weight behind it in order to get the widespread familiarity that give it that value. It's a spiral. If people saw decent Western Shores-themed material on the fantasy fiction shelves, and in video games, and on YouTube, and in comics, and on boxes of breakfast cereal, then Western Shores would be a brand that could be leveraged. (I always did like Western Shores as a setting.) Sadly, it takes a certain amount of up front investment to try and make this happen.

I think one area that Hero Games could do better in is in publishing adventures. I know there is no volume and therefore no profit in published modules--but a big part of the TRPG community is shared experience. Many of us are still sharing stories about how we played through Island of Dr. D, or Tomb of Horrors. And published modules greatly lower the barrier to entry for new players. Right now I think it would take a determined individual to learn and play the Hero System without being taught by an older player, and we expect them to create their own adventures too.

[Tasha]

Perhaps they should work with a large Comic Publisher to publish Official Champions Universe Comics. I think one thing that both FASA and TSR/WoTC did right was create Book and Comic Tie ins for their products. There's nothing like reading a tie in book that makes me want to play in that world. esp if the book is decently written. If they ever did official comics I would hope they were tip top quality both in Artwork and Story, not like that junk that Heroic Publishing put out there under the Champions name so long ago. There has to be a comic company out there (ie Boom or Dynamite) that is interested in a comic IP that comes with a built in fan base. I am sure that Hero/DoJ tried this and there's some reason that it never happened, but like all of this armchair company running. It's quite fun to make suggestions.

[Jhaierr]

No, I meant that's pretty much exactly what we're doing right now. dw

This is something that I've been trying to figure out ever since the announcement. Thanks!

I'm curious: Is Hero Games just doing core support stuff like the "blue" books, Champions, and the primary genre books now? Or are they leaving non-Champions genre books up to third-party publishers too?

I think it's a great idea to let the settings and sourcebooks be created by third-party folk (aside from the Champions Universe).