Table Top Industry Defeatism

[Username17]

So I've noticed the general acceptance among roleplaying enthusiasts that the entire industry is doomed. To accept that the new normal for a game's sales is outrageously bad compared to where things were just a few years ago. This seems very strange to me.

What set me off of course was people claiming that Onyx Path was an industry leader that was doing well. That's insane. Onyx Path has major products that sell a few thousand units and minor products that sell a thousand. Like, one thousand. And it has a development schedule that is literally years behind for products that are already supposedly funded and finished. In the last decade of White Wolf's existence (1996-2006), it sold more books every year than Onyx Path has sold during its entire run. Fourth Edition D&D was shit canned and the head of D&D fired every single year for its entire run because it only sold hundreds of thousands of books in a ten month period. To say that V20 is a "success" in the "current marketplace" with its 7,900 likes on Facebook is to accept that the market place is a thousand times smaller than it was a decade ago.

So... why and how would the industry have shrunk so much? The usual vague claim is that somehow internets have eaten up everything and the old economy is fuxxored. But how can we take that claim seriously? People downloading didn't make the music industry or the film industry go away. And more importantly, electronic books sales are still less than 1/6th of the book sales market. Sales of e-books is growing, and until this year (where physical book sales are growing again), physical book sales have been falling. But we haven't reached parity yet. E-books aren't 50% of the market, let alone the 99.9% of the market required to account for a one thousand fold drop in book sales. The reality is that overall, sales of books just aren't that bleak at the moment, with yearly sales up almost 5% from this time last year.

Have the genres that inspire RPGs dried up and blown away? Well, the Twilight novels sold over 120 million copies and the Harry Potter novels sold nearly half a billion, so that seems unlikely.

Is nerdiness just not "cool" the way it was in the early two thousands? Again, with the Avengers movies being a billion dollar a year industry, that seems like a difficult argument to make.

It is an undeniable fact that the games that dominated the scene in the years 1995 to 2005 just don't have as a big presence anymore. The latest editions of D&D, World of Darkness, Exalted, Earthdawn, Call of Cthulhu, and Shadowrun are punchlines to jokes. They have put up sales numbers that would be rounding errors of the sales of past editions. But if the industry is floundering, I think we have to go to the simple fact that all of the major products are floundering rather than invoking some magic inevitable doom for the industry as a whole.

The products we have out right now are shoddy, bloated, unfinished, and poorly marketed. If Ford Motors decided to stop advertising and make rickety Model Ts with a skeleton crew, we wouldn't be surprised if their sales tanked. If all the auto manufacturers did that kind of shit at the same time, we wouldn't be surprised when people bought less new cars.

Sad as it is, we are in a dark age of role playing because the industry is producing garbage that people don't want to buy. Not because people wouldn't buy products from the industry if there was good stuff to be had.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

OK, that's the problem. That doesn't really indicate there is anything specific that the fans can do to fix that, or that any of the industry players are going to "within the next decade" decide to notice that they done fucked up and should possibly consider having actual standards in the name of printing more money.

If "not producing bullshit shovelware that no one cares about" was an easy mistake to avoid you'd think some indie vanity press would have managed to avoid it. I'd have guessed the primary entry barrier is the marketing budget, good fluff isn't horribly expensive to get written.

[RadiantPhoenix]

So finish up After Sundown, get some artists and marketing, and make a splash.

[tenngu]

So I've noticed the general acceptance among roleplaying enthusiasts that the entire industry is doomed.

The products we have out right now are shoddy, bloated, unfinished, and poorly marketed. If Ford Motors decided to stop advertising and make rickety Model Ts with a skeleton crew, we wouldn't be surprised if their sales tanked.

I mean you kind of answered your own implied question.

[MisterDee]

In a sense, I think the Geek Renaissance is partly to blame: there's so much quality geek entertainment being produced that people don't have the time and money to invest in RPGs.

But the main problem remains that there hasn't been a good RPG major release since D&D 3.x (if we include Pathfinder in the 3.x umbrella.) And there hasn't been anything to make D&D relevant in any format whatsoever since what, Baldur's Gate 2?

Sure, there have been mediocre-to-terrible games, mediocre-to-terrible FR books, and some flat-out terrible movies. Those aren't gateways to the hobby.

[virgil]

Why would every major company in the industry near simultaneously fall down and crap their pants?

[OgreBattle]

Is nerdiness just not "cool" the way it was in the early two thousands? Again, with the Avengers movies being a billion dollar a year industry, that seems like a difficult argument to make.

Avengers is a big budget Hollywood action movie series with lots of explosions and Robert Downey Jr., but the success of the movies doesn't mean squat for the geekier, niche hobby of buying comic books. If you google "NY Comic Con" you'll find a full page of movie, TV show announcements, hollywood celebrity sightings, and maybe maaaaybe on page two there might be something about comic books and comic book creators.

[hogarth]

So... why and how would the industry have shrunk so much? The usual vague claim is that somehow internets have eaten up everything and the old economy is fuxxored.

The usual argument I've heard is that video games have eaten up the time and money that might have been used for tabletop RPGs -- not necessarily for the hard-core player, but for the casual player.

From a NYT article before 5E came out:

“If all you’re looking for is fulfillment of your wish to be an idealized projection of yourself who gains in wealth and power by overcoming monsters, there are lots of ways to do that nowadays,” said Tavis Allison, a game designer in New York who has made his own role-playing game, Adventurer Conqueror King. “In the ’70s Dungeons & Dragons was the only game in town.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/arts/ ... input.html

[darkmaster]

I think part of the problem is a culture of mediocrity in the community of creators. The creators are lazy and uninspired, and will trumpet anything as a success, and if you hear a lie often enough you'll start believing it. But you know what? I'm not too pessimistic. D&D 4th came out in 08 and that's as good a place s any to say the bad times started. We've been in these doldrums for nearly a decade, a renaissance in table top gaming is due. And it's not going to come from the big names and it's probably not coming from the arrogant pretentious inidy dev. Most likely someone who is actually good at making games is going to start a company to make money and they'll advertise their product and become popular and then most likely a bigger company will buy them but maybe by some miracle they'll say no and the silver age of gaming will begin.

[erik]

I mean you kind of answered your own implied question.

The structure of an argument is that first you define a problem and then you try and give an explanation or solution.

Why would every major company in the industry near simultaneously fall down and crap their pants?

They didn't. This happened over the course of a decade, and it is a fairly incestuous industry, so if one conclave of people only has shitty ideas then that can be pretty pervasive. And it really hurt not just D&D, but the entire industry, when D&D destroyed one of the largest role playing organizations on the planet. That's thousands of less people going to Cons and bringing in new gamers via RPG Cons.

One more data point in favor Frank's argument that there is room for blockbusters in tabletop gaming would be Gen Con. That convention continues to get stronger every year even with D&D completely shitting the bed.


An argument can be made for another reason for the industry's decline than that the people in charge of making things are shitty and only capable of creating 200 + page magic tea parties. - Leisure preferences have shifted.

You could say, yes, erik, Gencon is bigger than ever, but as you noted TTRPG is a lesser portion of that, and it is because people prefer to do other things regardless of the craftsmanship of the games. Try and run a game without people being distracted by smart phones. It can be hard to get a bunch of friends struggling to remain employed to match schedules for 4+ hours regularly.

With 10 years of shitty games a generation of kids are being raised without exposure to worthwhile RPGs. The only way kids will get exposed to a decent RPG is if their parents show them an old one, and that's a lot more of a niche than if there's decent product being actively promoted and produced.


I do, however, agree with Frank for the time being, as I still think there's a well of consumers who remember decent RPGs and would enjoy supporting them. But that number shrinks every year and it gets incrementally harder for TTRPGs to revive. I don't think the door is nearly closed yet on it, but if the state of the industry is magic tea party with shitty authorial direction and massive word bloat for the next 20 years then we can call a time of death.

[silva]

Don't know, I always saw the RPG market more as a fringe than anything. Booms like the one occurred in early 2000s are more exceptions than the norm, really.

I, for one, not being a fan of D&D, am more happy today than 15 years ago - at least now I have games with a wild range of styles and flavours, instead of one monolithic style with bazillions superfluous supplements with the sole objective to milk money from customers.

So, no thanks, I prefer the industry as it is now. Regardless of the profit it is making.

[Almaz]

There's probably lots more RPG sales in _aggregate_, that is, the RPG industry probably makes more money in total, but there's a thousand tiny RPGs now. I think a lot of that has to do with the surge in indie games and also the falling down of D&D, and then, yes, mismanagement of White Wolf, displacing the largest players. And then other ones that could have been contenders, like SJ Games, turned to Munchkin and other things. I don't think WotC or Onyx Path are likely to recapture the sales they had before, but it's an excellent time for new entries into the market, because your competition is also weak and just starting out.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Ideally, we'd get a quality game that was able to break out of the crowd of new slush and revive the idea of 'good mechanics' as the core of an enjoyable system. The very incestuous community of mostly mediocre designers has been selling Stormwind and Oberoni and their cousins to cover their asses for so long that it's become an alternate reality that they and their apologists live in. That whole community needs a cattle prod in the ass.

But such a game would need more than just solid design. It would also need a strong pitch, good art, and a well-managed marketing campaign to drum up interest before the release and maintain it after the release. Also some sort of OP apparatus to build it to a critical mass. It's not a huge undertaking, but it sure ain't a small one.

[silva]

I can't see how "quality" or "good design" has anything to do with selling in a hobby that's even more subjective then the music industry. Really, the 1st boom in the early 80s was lead by AD&D, Traveller and Runequest/BRP, while the 2nd in the 90s was lead by Vampire and Shadowrun.

Are you still defending "quality" is a factor here ?

But then this is the norm across all industries. "Success" is more a product of marketing campaigns and mass appeal than anything. Otherwise Planescape Torment and Sid Meier Alpha Centauri wouldnt be selling shit numbers while Call of Duties and WoWs are selling by the millions, nor would Miles Davis put a mere fraction of The Spice Girls numbers.

There's probably lots more RPG sales in _aggregate_, that is, the RPG industry probably makes more money in total, but there's a thousand tiny RPGs now. I think a lot of that has to do with the surge in indie games and also the falling down of D&D, and then, yes, mismanagement of White Wolf, displacing the largest players. And then other ones that could have been contenders, like SJ Games, turned to Munchkin and other things. I don't think WotC or Onyx Path are likely to recapture the sales they had before, but it's an excellent time for new entries into the market, because your competition is also weak and just starting out.

This.

[Almaz]

I dunno, I think there's actually been an increasing demand for higher mechanical rigor, ever since 3e D&D. It hasn't been helping WoD products any, since they don't really "do" that. What kind of "higher mechanical rigor" matters is indeed subjective, as some people lean harder towards lightweight things, and some towards more crunchy things, but the demand for more tightly-designed, well-constructed mechanics is probably higher than it ever has been for RPGs.

[Aryxbez]

I'm glad this wasn't a thread of being told why we should give up on the RPG industry or such. So if there's hope, I'd say Paradox has shown some promise with buying White Wolf, and Fantasy Flight with Rokugan.

One of the major things that needs to get revamped is the pay per wordcount thing. RPG's would be encouraged to not have as high a wordcount if they weren't paid by the damn word. I definitely feel like we haven't gotten some games that while can be considered "Rules-heavy" hasn't minimized the word count to be substantially smaller than all those bloated rules-lites.

One of my hopes here, is we ourselves get some ideas discussed into some conclusions. Fire up a five man team to be on the same page, and slam out the next big thing. Obviously marketing is the stupid hard thing. I long for the day some entrepreneur played D&D & other good RPG's, missing that hires some stupid good designers to make a Fantasy RPG with modern design sensibilities.

[K]

I wonder if computer games are killing TTRPGs through attrition of talent. It seems like the only people who care about building more elegant and expressive game systems are deep into CRPG design jobs and not fiddling with TTRPGs for a fraction of the pay.

[silva]

I dunno, I think there's actually been an increasing demand for higher mechanical rigor, ever since 3e D&D. It hasn't been helping WoD products any, since they don't really "do" that. What kind of "higher mechanical rigor" matters is indeed subjective, as some people lean harder towards lightweight things, and some towards more crunchy things, but the demand for more tightly-designed, well-constructed mechanics is probably higher than it ever has been for RPGs.

Yep. The early 2000s were a water divider of sorts. Both D&D3 and the Indie/Forge crowds helped to establish "design standards" - even if those are different between the crunch and light crowds - that resulted in more cohesively designed games and drove everything that came later.

[Dominicius]

There is also the issue that most DMs are fucking terrible. I've said this before and people blew their shit back then but DMs should actually be paid money per session and gaming companies should seek out good DMs and promote the heck out of them. Maybe even pay them themselves.

A good DM is worth more than the best Lets Player out there and the video game industry maintains very close ties with those people. The fact that companies do not reach out to find suitable DMs for their products and does not promote their growth is a huge failure of communication.

[Username17]

As Erik points out, the different companies took a long time to spiral down, but I think it's also important to note that they didn't all go down at the same time. White Wolf tried and failed to kill Dungeons & Dragons with Exalted. Then White Wolf blew up their own campaign setting to gamble on a World of Darkness reboot and lost because nWoD was shit. Then they recapitalized by getting sold to an Icelandic videogame company, but the new management had no idea what to do with any of the properties and just let everything fester while bloated shovelware dribbled out (concentrating on trying and failing to make a Vampire video game). Then they licensed it out to one guy who happened to be an old White Wolf employee and he scrounged up cheap and even negative cost labor to make stuff at whatever rate he could.

It's a series of bad choices and disasters that are each followed by a significant downramp in the available resources for the next fiasco. These days, World of Darkness titles aren't capitalized at all - there's just a guy putting out kickstarter calls and if enough rpg.net idiots throw money at him, he takes some of that money and hires some freelancers to hack a pdf together when they have time. But at no time could the failures be attributed to "the state of the industry." First Edition Exalted failed to get the sales numbers that were predicted because 3rd Edition D&D was selling millions of books. Time of Judgement was a catastrophe because people hated it, not because 2004 was a time of great failure for 3.5 D&D.

The tale of Shadowrun is similar, and spread out over an even longer time frame. FASA was broken up and the IP sold off to different companies, basically because the owners wanted to do other things. Shadowrun hasn't been owned by the people making Shadowrun books for like 14 years, and the game line has been repeatedly plagued by license disputes and capital shortfalls by the license holders. Skipping all the FanPro and WizKids drama, Shadowrun is currently licensed out to some guy who operates all the capitalization out of his personal bank account. And he drove out all the writing talent some years back when he decided to buy a new house for his family instead of paying the writers and artists for a few months.

D&D is a different story in that they have corporate overlords who apparently react to failure like they were Darth fucking Vader. 4th edition actually wasn't short of funds or under capitalized. It hit its ambitious release dates for the first entire year, had really high production values, and filled shelves with disciplined hardback books. And it failed only by the standards it had set itself. It still sold hundreds of thousands of books, that was just literally an order of magnitude or two less than the target. Essentials was a rush job of course, and it had so many less resources in terms of time, money, and staff because the corporate overlords were mightily unpleased with how poorly 4th edition had done relative to what it was supposed to do.

These death spirals have hit all the major table top RPGs. But none of the fiascos that led to retrenchment and lower resources were caused by a recession or alien attack or the rise of video games or anything external at all. Each fiasco was just a bad product line or an embezzlement scandal internally. Hell, if you go back to TSR's bankruptcy in the 90s it happened when TSR was still selling hundreds of thousands of books and had positive cash flow. It was just bad management that ended up leaving them with money tied up in projects and unable to be spent keeping the lights on in an immediate sense.

There's probably lots more RPG sales in _aggregate_, that is, the RPG industry probably makes more money in total, but there's a thousand tiny RPGs now.

No. There have been a thousand tiny RPGs running around since the early 80s. Sales are just incredibly shitty across the board compared to what they used to be. When D&D sells well, indie games also sell well. When D&D is shitting itself and selling close to nothing, indie games also suffer. The table top market is just smaller than it was a few years ago. By a huge amount. But the same was true several times in our history. It's just that each time D&D or World of Darkness has come through with a big selling idea. Except this time they haven't, and the RPG marketplace has been in free fall for like half a decade because of it.

-Username17

[Dogbert]

Another problem is the fandom itself, because the first step towards solving a problem is accepting there is a problem in the first place, and the fandoms still clinging to the diminished giants are rabid with a denial inversely proportional to their game's current state of "greatness." Paradox acknowledged that the biggest problem of old WoD I.Ps is that no one was up to date of what was going on with them because no one gave crap anymore, and that's the right attitude, but in order to clean house, they'd have to make moves that will probably alienate the current rabid dogs fandom and I'm not sure they're willing to take their chances and burn the docked ships.

Other than that, the problem we have is not the fall of Rome, but the absence of something else big enough to take its place after all this time. d20 rose to prominence by Borg-assimilating the competition, so when d20 fell, the Tower of Babel the industry had become fell with it. Yet, I still stand by my opinion that 4E was the best that could happen to the industry, because WotC removing themselves from the map allowed everyone else to flourish (within their means to flourish, that is). An industry needs to finish crashing if it's ever to be reborn (I'm looking at you, videogame industry).

Paizo could become the new Venice, but they have yet to fully appropriate d&d's name and glory. Lisa Stevens made a move for greatness with the MMO but then she hired all the wrong people with the wrong vision, and the result was a turd not even her could spin into a smash hit, so after this I don't think Paizo will be making this kind of moves, at least for now. Perhaps she should have commissioned an animated film instead as their next step of brand recognition.

[brized]

Anything that's going to be the next D&D or oWoD is probably going to want to use the OGL. And if it does, that new contender needs more capital than Paizo to keep up with their production values and marketing. Otherwise Paizo will just come in and do what they did with D&D 3.5.

Maybe their resources already got tanked by the MMO fuckup; otherwise it probably won't happen until Pathfinder 2.0 comes out and design-wise everyone finally realizes the emperor has no clothes.

[Dogbert]

Maybe their resources already got tanked by the MMO fuckup

Not really, Stevens set Goblinworks as a separate entity precisely so Paizo themselves didn't get hit in the eventuality the game failed (and it did). She made this one mistake, but do not underestimate her.

[Longes]

Another thing that should probably be mentioned, is that the RPG market is still very young. Kids who bought AD&D are still alive and run AD&D games on Roll20. Learning a new system is an investment of time and money, and if you are over 20 and you really like AD&D or oWoD or Warhammer, then there is a massive quality barrier the game needs to overcome to convince you to buy it.
Ultimately, a RPG book has two things in it: a system and a setting. If you really like the setting, then you'll accept the edition change and will transfer from L5R 3e to L5R 4e and will buy the new books. But if the setting got Time of Judgement, then there's little incentive for an oWoD MC to move on to nWoD, because his favorite setting changed.
When a new game comes out, it needs to appeal in terms of setting to a sufficiently large audience, and then it needs to have a system good enough so that people who already use a similar setting switch to this new system.

What I'm trying to say is that the market got saturated. If you want fantasy you use D&D edition you grew up with and don't run to pick up 13th Age or something. If you want urban fantasy you run WoD. Sci-fi is kind of underrepresented, but even there you have a pick of six different 40k games, Stars Without Number, Traveller, etc.

[MGuy]

Perhaps she should have commissioned an animated film instead as their next step of brand recognition.

Why HASN'T anyone tried to do a cartoon tie in? That kind of exposure really, really would help the industry. Vin Diesal being talked to about playing in some kind of D_D movie helps a bit but nothing captures the young people like cartoons. I believe that's why starwars has like what, 3 maybe, 4 animated SW series under their belt now? I know the thing that even got me to TRY the game was an episode of Dexter's Lab and because I got into it a number of my friends did and a number of their friends did.