Jack Spencer Jr wrote: One thing that seems to be overlooked in this discussion which I think should not be is that RPGs are very different from comic books. That is, COmics are a fairly passive entertainment. You buy the book, you read the book, you put the book in an acid-free back with an acid-free backboard and put it in a box for safe keeping and that's it.

RPGs are a more active hobby.

Hello,

Matt, I hope you don't mind that I split your post off into its own thread. The Mainstream: a revision thread has essentially said its piece, and responses (especially to side points, however important) can be considered spawned-threads, I think. Jack actually split his ideas into their own thread earlier, active vs. passive entertainment.

I think you're nailing the issue that Jack only touches - the key to successful role-playing product sales, over time, is actual and successful play. Several points immediately spring up from that.

1) Conventional role-playing sales wisdom completely disagrees. That wisdom is based on a "hotness" model, in which D&D in the late 70s, Vampire in the early 90s, and Magic/Pokemon are the Grail.

2) Role-playing typically takes a hell of a lot more time for that access to experiencing the medium to occur, in all kinds of ways.

This is what that "active" concept means to me (as opposed to the cognitive superiority or inferiority of one medium to another, which often gets brought up when these terms are discussed).

3) Access to play has an interesting relationship to access to product - as with comics, a person is very rarely going to purchase comics for the first time without interacting in some way with a comic beforehand. Reviews, editorials, mention by a celebrity, advertisement, etc, are all fine, but the surest method is an actual comic in that person's hands, that he or she enjoyed.

I think the problem, historically, is that short cuts tend to remove the very features of the medium that are most unique and enjoyable. Other, related problems are related to design and social issues. I'm hoping that several of the current threads will offer some solutions.

Matt, one thing I'm not seeing, immediately, is what point or inquiry you're driving at in your thread. I saw what it sparked for me, but I want to make sure that I didn't take a sharp left from what you were after.

Best,
Ron

A few meandering thoughts inspired by Matt's post:

If there are many RPG buyers who buy, read and shelve, are they an untapped market? Were they never interested in playing at all, or is the game just not offering the right information in the right way?

As a personal experience, I was really drawn into the example of Play in Fading Suns, where they parallel a story with the mechanics and game chatter. It made me want to find people to play with, and I did, despite my dislike of the rules. Instead of all the tedious fiction excerpts that add words and money to a game, how about every chapter starts with the play example equivalent?

Chapter Five: Equipment
"Okay, I'm going to check the area for hostiles. I rolled an 8."
"Well, I got a 9. Do you have anything that will boost the roll?"
"I have Scanning skill at +1, and the scanner itself has the 'X-ray' edge, for another +1. That'll give me one success."
"Okay, Dirk picks up a faint reading on the screen, meaning it's either small or far away."

That could be a potentially good tactic for game designers, especially those who sell over the Web. Offer a free sample of play on your site for download. Tool it a bit so that someone without the rules can see how your rules are making a certain kind of play happen.

I think this would also be a useful tool to aid Ron's "show them" strategy. Say I'm trying to motivate some folks here in Seattle to play Sorcerer at a local game store on Monday. I tell them what it's like, then say, "go check out the play examples on the Sorcerer web site." They shrug and say maybe, then check out the site, and think, wow. Then they show up eager to see how they too can have a badass demon for as little as 1 Humanity a month.

-Matt

itsmrwilson wrote: Offer a free sample of play on your site for download. Tool it a bit so that someone without the rules can see how your rules are making a certain kind of play happen.

Ron Edwards wrote: Matt, one thing I'm not seeing, immediately, is what point or inquiry you're driving at in your thread. I saw what it sparked for me, but I want to make sure that I didn't take a sharp left from what you were after.

Hi Matt,

Have you spent much time browsing around the Forge? I invite you to do so if you haven't already. You have found a community of people who, despite our multifarious differences, agree with you in full - and many of whom have published our games accordingly.

There's a dynamic interaction among game design, actual play (and its social context), publishing options (especially self-publishing, which is what we mean by "indie"), and internet presence/marketing that the Forge is all about. You have, so to speak, found the choir.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote:


1) Conventional role-playing sales wisdom completely disagrees. That wisdom is based on a "hotness" model, in which D&D in the late 70s, Vampire in the early 90s, and Magic/Pokemon are the Grail.

Hi James,

There are several aspects of your claims that can be debated. However, to avoid side-tracks, I'll stick to clarifying that I'm talking about broken sales models. Actual play doesn't track the booming sales of a fad in a huge spike. As a retailer, to think that it does is suicidal - you deep-order for time-unit B thinking that all those sales in time-unit A represent instances of successful play. The result of this mind-set is to stumble from anticipated fad to anticipated fad, gazing in rapture at the early stages of each one (if it hits at all), and staring in crushed horror and sense of betrayal, then stumbling to the next one.

All of this overlooks and fails to track the actual play that works - which may or may not continue for a given game which had its day as a fad, and even worse, completely marginalizes games which had no status as a fad at all, but are being played.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote:
All of this overlooks and fails to track the actual play that works - which may or may not continue for a given game which had its day as a fad, and even worse, completely marginalizes games which had no status as a fad at all, but are being played.

Best,
Ron

Just to throw a little devil's advocate into the mix...is actual play really an effective yardstick to use as a retailer...

I'm currently involved in a Pendragon campaign...but when I sit down to play it doesn't put any money in a retailers pocket...or Green Knight's for that matter.

Sure, if and when the next supplement comes out I'll be buying it. But that would be true if I were playing the game or not. And for years was true.

I can sit down with Avalon Hill's Advanced Civilization and play 8-12 hour marathon sessions of one of the greatest games of all time...but that wasn't enough to keep Avalon Hill in business or keep AH games on the shelf in retail stores.

I suppose that successful actual play might encourage fellow players who don't already own the books to go out and purchase them...but that hardly seems the norm to me.

So perhaps it would be useful to identify in what ways specifically actual play leads to retailer / publisher profits.

Valamir wrote: I suppose that successful actual play might encourage fellow players who don't already own the books to go out and purchase them...but that hardly seems the norm to me.

I would like to throw out a theory that playing games actually decreases sales of game products.

For example, I buy Game X and get my group to play it on a weekly basis. Game X's newest supplement detailing Kingdom A comes out 2 months later. For 2 months I've made up my own details about Kingdom A and I am not about to spend money to purchase a product which will retcon the games we've been playing so far.

Same thing if Class Book E came out several months after we started playing. We're not going to rewrite all the characters and NPCs to fit the new additional rules from the supplement.

Now if I bought Game Y and our group wasn't going to be able to get to it for a few months and a Kingdom B supplement came out in the meantime I'd be more inclined to buy and incorporate material from it.

So groups actively playing a game are less likely to bring in new material which would change the game they are currently using? So games which sit on your shelf have greater potential to be joined by supplements?

Any thoughts?

Hi there,

You are all saying golden things. My mantra for the last year has been, "Most retailers do not track sales in such a way as to perceive which games work for their customers' enjoyment." I've brought this up at the retailer level several times, usually to encounter blank looks and a few enthusiastic agreements, but never any kind of reasoned refutation.

How would they do such a thing? Should they, in terms of sustained sales or profits? These are excellent questions. I have my notions for the answers, which I'm sure are clearly born of personal self-interest. I'm curious as to others' input about them.

Best,
Ron

Its amazing, I see shelves of these non standard rpgs (anything Non D&D is in my opinion Non standard) and for the most part when you ask store owners who is playing them and how, I get the Zombie look. Dead blank incomprehension. Unless it is actually happening in the stores they have no idea about what is happening with the games they sell. Another 'brick in the wall' for my theory that to much of the fortunes of rpgs are tied to the shops.

For my part since I have largely given up on the local rpg culture, I have largely stopped buying rpg material since my long term 'good' gaming group collapsed almost a decade ago. I have been banned from a local game shop because I just occasionaly come in and read thing and disconsolately look around without buying. I'm not interested in collecting much, the last rpg material that I bought at full retail was ConspiracyX for an abortive game that I made the mistake of trying to play at a shop mostly devoted to cards and miniatures four years ago. I have 3 board feet of rpg material gathering dust that is unusable because it isn't D&D, why add to the stack? Since the rise of D20 it has become fashionable to write of people like myself as to marginal to consider, but honestly,how do they know? If they have given up like I have they won't be seeing them so they wont be on the radar. How many of the 'I outgrew it' former rpg types are simply disatisfied with thenarrow range of actual options the rpg crowd presents (as opposed to the optical illusion presented by the large number of rpg games on the shelves or they highly atypical gamers that post on rpg.net or the forge) . Nobody knows, and the status quo is too smugly satisfied to really consider the question themselves.

wyrdlyng wrote: I would like to throw out a theory that playing games actually decreases sales of game products.

Any thoughts?

Valamir wrote: I can sit down with Avalon Hill's Advanced Civilization and play 8-12 hour marathon sessions of one of the greatest games of all time...but that wasn't enough to keep Avalon Hill in business or keep AH games on the shelf in retail stores.

.

jrients wrote: Most use of supplements is totally messed up. People have bought into the notion that we _must_ follow the crappy metaplot or that MY campaign is somehow incomplete without THEIR version of realm/faction/class ABC. What a load of crap. It took me years of collecting the Mystara supplements for D&D to realize that this idea is crap. We need as a hobby to unlearn this dependence on the splat.
.

James Holloway wrote:
Well, now, to be fair, lots of people play these games. Vampire isn't some game that everybody buys just to read. Tons of games of it get played. The same is certainly true of D&D, and, I imagine of Magic (they play it a lot round here, anyway). Not so sure about Pokemon... I never saw that being played, and I think it's telling that it's the only one of that list of games which was not enduringly popular.

So I agree with you that to be successful, games need to be played, but I suggest that those games are successful for precisely that reason.

- James

Hi there,

OK, the bile is beginning to appear - which, at this point, for the Infamous Five and the Five-Spawn threads, is what I expected. There are a lot of emotions and tensions underlying the connections among these threads. Sooner or later, they'll appear, and things will get more "feely" around the Forge than usual. This is fine, actually, as long as the context is clear.

So, let's look at this thread specially. It's about the importance of play, especially relative to Publishing. And what's showing up, of course, is that tied to that is the importance of play, if any, to the purchasers of the books. But it's not the 1:1 correspondence that would indicate what we'd all like to see, which is that Product User Demand drives Retail Success drives Publisher Success. It ain't that simple.

b_bankhead's frustrations are consistent with what I perceive across the whole hobby: that the importance of play is mightily fragmented across the customer base, and practically nonexistent upwards through the publication/distribution tiers.

Best,
Ron

Now that I've settled down a bit from my last post, I'd like to ask some questions. How important is customer dissatisfaction arising from actual play to sales?

I see 2 basic variants:

1) Jeff's a lousy GM, so Dave buys the rule book to start his own campaign.

2) Jeff and Dave are both unhappy with the rules or setting so they buy a different game to play.

Clearly there's plenty of marketing aimed at unhappy players, such as Tasilanta's motto "No elves" or the standard among D&D ripoffs "Now 500 classes! 300 races! Over ten thousand magic items!"

And there's the purchase of supplements by people actually playing the game. How much of this behavior is an expression of dissatisfaction as well? Some people aren't trying to get the next chapter in the metaplot, but are hoping the new supplement will help an ailing game.

Something interesting to bring up in the regards to actual play and sales;
RPGs do not work with planned obscelence(sp?) in the way physical items can.

As has been stated, there are hardcore 1st edition D&Der's out there, who will never change. They have no reason to buy anything else ever again. Likewise with any satisfied gamer who feels completely and totally satisfied with whatever they have available to them. Certainly books and dice may wear out, but books can be copied or scanned, and dice take far to long to destroy in order to make much of a profit.

Most real world objects break, wear down, or become incompatible with the network of things they must work with, while rpgs deal with imaginary things. Imagination doesn't need replacement parts, doesn't get "incompatible" with your new OS, and is adaptable to fit any and all fashions.

I'd have to say, a complete game, that is satisfying, will result in less sales over a long period, not more. Even more scary to companies seeking profit, is if the "dirty little secret" that anyone can make a roleplaying game got out, that sales would plummet even further. Of course, the likelyhood of this is about the same as everyone making their own music, own cloths, or growing their own food.

In reality, the fact is, games are supported by actual play, which is a social activity. D&D blew up with its tournaments, Whitewolf with its live action games. Both of these are focused around encouraging the social aspect of the games, in order to increase the amount of play, as well as introduce new folks to the games.

Both also use a form of obscelence with their metaplots or endless supplements of rules or setting in order to provide the illusion that you must stay "up to date" with the game or else become lost. This idea has been perfected in the Magic/Pokemon collectible card game boom, although anyone can still pull out a set of Alpha cards and have a good time. The illusion of having to upgrade, update, and supplement a game is where a great deal of the money ends up going, and contributes to the illusion that 20 new classes is really innovative.

I'd say the smartest idea would be to encourage and support an active social group of players, and to focus on that. Look at the popularity of Amber despite having no new supplements in years. The second part would be to find products that would cater well to the evolving group, perhaps merchandise, magazines, or other items that aren't necessarily extra rules or editions.

Chris