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Evil Mastermind posted:WotC never steps outside the D&D pool. The most they did was Gamma World, which got a lot of positive response, but they barely did anything with it. WotC's so focused on keeping the D&D crowd happy they won't try anything new (and probably don't have the talent to try anyway). Well, that's RPG-WotC. WotC in general has, y'know, the game that single-handedly allows many FLGSes to even exist period. And last I heard was growing by like %30 a year, which is INSANE.
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May 7, 2015 17:27
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Esser-Z posted:Well, that's RPG-WotC. WotC in general has, y'know, the game that single-handedly allows many FLGSes to even exist period. And last I heard was growing by like %30 a year, which is INSANE. Right, but that's separate from the RPG division. Yeah Magic is pretty much a money tree for Hasbro, but if D&D stopped being profitable I'm sure Hasbro would drop them pretty quick.
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May 7, 2015 17:28
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Evil Mastermind posted:Right, but that's separate from the RPG division. Yeah Magic is pretty much a money tree for Hasbro, but if D&D stopped being profitable I'm sure Hasbro would drop them pretty quick. Oh, totally. D&D's a nerd-cred brand and, at least sometimes, a licensing powerhouse. It's definitely not where WotC's making its money, and I guarantee it's not what Hasbro bought WotC for. I could definitely see D&D going away for awhile if it did poorly enough--but not forever. Hasbro doesn't like wasting IP.
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May 7, 2015 17:29
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's the thing, though: Evil Hat has more than one game line. Yeah they put out a lot of Fate stuff, but they have non-Fate games too, not to mention some board games. Fate may be their number one property, but they're not beholden to it. Yeah, exactly! Evil Hat is a good company with excellent designers. To be fair, WotC does have Magic, as well as Axis and Allies, so they aren't totally beholden to the D&D stick. Even Paizo puts out games board games like Kill Doctor Lucky. But their laser-like focus on D&D, and their refusal to consider and market other games does seem a bit myopic. As time goes on, it wouldn't shock me if we saw fewer and fewer "mega systems" like D&D, and more games like Fiasco and Lady Blackbird that you can just pick up and play. These, of course, are much harder to design and craft than copying and pasting old work that folks did 20 years ago, but with the right marketing, could become well selling staples the way quick card games like Guillotine and The Great Dalmuti have. Are they actually RPGs? Is Guillotine a card game the same way that Poker is?
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May 7, 2015 17:48
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Just a side realization: comparing how D&D evolves with other established long-running game lines is interesting. Since we're talking about Evil Hat, let's look at Fate. If you look at the various games, you can see the evolution of the base system from 2e to Spirit of the Century to Dresden Files to Fate Core. Each new game builds on the previous, and addresses and fixes the mechanical problems that people discovered through play. But every edition change in D&D except for 1e -> 2e has been a complete rework of the system. Problems aren't addressed and fixed, they're thrown out with the rest of the system and replaced by a completely different system with its own problems. And it's not just an "old game/new game" dichotomy. Look at GURPS; that's been around forever and yet manages to make fixes as new editions come out.
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May 7, 2015 18:02
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Evil Mastermind posted:WotC never steps outside the D&D pool. The most they did was Gamma World, which got a lot of positive response, but they barely did anything with it. WotC's so focused on keeping the D&D crowd happy they won't try anything new (and probably don't have the talent to try anyway). RPGs are just murderously hard to make money at (because once you have the core books and a set of dice, you don't have to spend anything else again ever) long term, which is why companies resort to things like the supplement treadmill and knitting everything together in a metaplot and tying in cross-media promotions, or go out of business, or are run by people earning sub-minimum wages as cottage/hobby enterprise.
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May 7, 2015 18:12
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Evil Mastermind posted:But every edition change in D&D except for 1e -> 2e has been a complete rework of the system. Problems aren't addressed and fixed, they're thrown out with the rest of the system and replaced by a completely different system with its own problems. The worst of 4e's problems were things they kept because it wasn't supposed to be a complete rework of the system (feats, item treadmill, pointless juggling with ability scores) or math problems (PC to-hit and defense, monster math) they haven't caught because they were rushing out the product after having an epiphany mid-development and ditching about one year's worth of work.
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May 7, 2015 18:35
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FMguru posted:WotC is focused on CCGs and boardgames, not RPGs, so it makes sense that they don't put a lot of effort into trying to diversify their RPG holdings. They've seen the numbers for RPG market size and customer spending, and they understand that they're much better off investing in growing their other departments instead of trying to launch new RPGs. WotC goes through cycles, they get on the RPG kick and make a bunch of poo poo, then it all fails to perform as well as DnD so they fire everyone who's not working on DnD. Then down the road they do it again. WotC started as an RPG company, then they made Magic, then used all that Magic money to buy a bunch of RPG lines, then shut all those RPG lines down to focus on Magic again, then they bought TSR and made a bunch of new RPGs, then shut them down. I wouldn't be surprised to see them make another attempt down the road, right now they only have three brands, they gotta come up with something new to push out. Littlefinger posted:To be fair, 4e was pretty much their attempt to fix the mechanical problems of 3e that people discovered through play, and to incorporate design 'innovations' that came after 3e's release (e.g. Tome of Battle or SW Saga Ed.). The real problem with 4e was that WotC couldn't figure out how to make money off of it. They built it with the idea that the RPG would drive blind reveal miniatures sales (which were making tons of money for other companies at the time), but the cost of materials went up and suddenly blind reveal painted miniatures were no longer a viable business for them. Most of the bad design decisions in 4e were due to the link with the miniatures line.
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May 7, 2015 19:01
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Littlefinger posted:The worst of 4e's problems were things they kept because it wasn't supposed to be a complete rework of the system (feats, item treadmill, pointless juggling with ability scores) or math problems (PC to-hit and defense, monster math) they haven't caught because they were rushing out the product after having an epiphany mid-development and ditching about one year's worth of work. Hey can you link to an article/blog that talks about this rework? It's been mentioned a few times, and I would like to read about it.
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May 7, 2015 19:08
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Just a reminder that D&D's "failure", whether you're talking 4th edition or newer, is only in comparison to Pathfinder. Compared to pretty much any other RPG, D&D is still and always has been selling very well indeed. If it's a "failure" for WotC, it's because they can see Pathfinder right there consuming money that WotC never should have left on the table. By all rights, every Pathfinder dollar could have been theirs. But the overall size of the D&D market share is still huge compared to any other RPG. It is a successful product in that sense, and (perhaps a bit tautologically) we know it is because WotC continues to invest in and develop it. If making D&D products literally lost money, they'd stop doing it. Alien Rope Burn posted:Generally speaking entertainment is ridiculously cheap compared to what it was thirty years ago... but necessities (food, gas, utilities) have jumped up hugely for the most part, which is a much, much larger problem than what you're spending on elfbooks. Hm? In the US, food is remarkably cheaper than it was 25 years ago. Gasoline costs more on an inflation-adjusted basis (barely) if you measure it by the gallon, but if you measure the cost of fuel as cost-per-mile, it's flat or lower, because national average fuel efficiency is much higher. And the cost of "utilities" is generally pretty flat, with occasional local variations (the cost of heating fuel in the northeast during a specific long cold winter, say). I suspect what you're really driving at is the stagnation of real wages over the last couple decades. But that stagnation has occurred over a period when real costs for basic survival goods and services have also dropped. To put it another way: it sucks how many people these days have to buy all their stuff at Wal*Mart. But on the other hand, Wal*Mart is selling basic stuff for cheaper than it has ever been available before, in inflation-adjusted dollars.
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May 7, 2015 19:22
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Leperflesh posted:In the US, food is remarkably cheaper than it was 25 years ago. Gasoline costs more on an inflation-adjusted basis (barely) if you measure it by the gallon, but if you measure the cost of fuel as cost-per-mile, it's flat or lower, because national average fuel efficiency is much higher. And the cost of "utilities" is generally pretty flat, with occasional local variations (the cost of heating fuel in the northeast during a specific long cold winter, say).
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May 7, 2015 19:36
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Leperflesh posted:Just a reminder that D&D's "failure", whether you're talking 4th edition or newer, is only in comparison to Pathfinder. Compared to pretty much any other RPG, D&D is still and always has been selling very well indeed. That's very true, DnD still makes WotC money, money that most of us would consider a lot. Compared to Magic though it's a drop in the bucket, which is what drives a lot of the corporate decisions at WotC, "Why should we invest in this product that makes us a few million when we could instead invest in this product that makes us a hundred million?" They also do pretty well with licensing, specifically video game licensing, and I think that might be the main reason they keep the product going. Leperflesh posted:Hm? But all of that is adjusted for inflation. I spend a smaller percentage of my income on food, but the actual dollar amount I pay at the register is more. So expecting something that cost $10 in 1988 to still cost $10 is ludicrous.
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May 7, 2015 19:46
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FMguru posted:The real things that have shot up in price in the last 20-30 years have been: rent/housing, healthcare, and education, which are squeezing the hell out of people's (shrinking) paychecks. Oh, and the need for people to save more and more for retirement, as pensions disappear. Lots of stuff is cheaper (food, clothing, entertainment), stable (energy), or ridiculously cheaper (electronics). Yes. Part of the problem when people make these comparisons is that they're rarely comparing apples-to-apples. You can look up how much a gallon of gas, or a "typical meal for a family of four," or a "typical family car" cost, adjust for inflation, and then attempt to draw some kind of conclusion about it. But... a gallon of gas literally goes much farther than it used to. Typical meals aren't the same as they used to be - the labor cost of preparing a meal from scratch has gone way way down, because more people buy prepared food (or at least, prepared ingredients): additionally, the nutritive value of food has changed over time (lots more cheap calories, but meat may be more expensive, for example). A car sold in 1930 was a piece of poo poo; they lasted for a handful of years, maybe 20k miles at the most, before they were garbage. Plus there were no highways, so the utility of a car at the time was far lower than it is today. Plus airfare today is far lower... so, should we look at how much "a car" cost, or instead, how much "transportation" costs? But wait, people travel far more now than they did (because it's way cheaper), so what about that? Some economists try to nail down some kind of average standard of living, and then examine the inflation-adjusted cost of that SOL. Even then they get into trouble. What about the two-income trap? How do you economically quantify the value of healthcare that, while vastly more expensive, is also vastly more effective? Do we adjust wage expectations for longer average lifespans? Should we factor in the much, much higher rates of college attendance today vs. 1930? This poo poo is complicated and I don't expect anyone in the TG As An Industry thread to really get deep into it. And I'm not an economist (I just have an interest) so I'm probably not prepared for a really good debate about it anyway. What I do object to though is any idea that we can simply base "how much should a thing cost" on gut feelings, foggy memory about how tough it was for me to afford a thing when I was a kid, or vague handwaving-away of inflation by tossing up some isolated and mostly irrelevant factoids about specific other goods/services/incomes or something. Here's a fact: a book of nerdgames costs around the same, plus or minus a reasonable amount, of what it used to cost in 1985, even though that book is now probably in full color with glossy pages and a cover, can be ordered and delivered in two days with free shipping from Amazon, and almost certainly contains a way loving better game. The only reason this is true is because it's become cheaper to publish books like that (in real, inflation-adjusted money). The market has set a price. Some nerdgames buyers are still willing to shell out $70 for a Games Workshop nerdgame book, but most of us aren't. We hold the prices down, and demand higher quality than we used to, and there is (apparently) a labor market willing to meet that demand despite the super-low wages it implies. Nerdgames-writers on average earn way less than minimum wage, in part because they work to spec or by the word instead of by the hour and a lot of volunteer writers providing free content are dropping the average. I'm sure there are a few full-time employees making decent money to write nerdgames (perhaps at Paizo or Wizards of the Coast) but they're in a minority. Those publishers are able to pay more because of their dominant market positions - they sell enough volume that the slim margins on a $40 hardback book can add up to enough revenue to make a real payroll. Even then, though, I expect any of those writers are passing up much higher wages for competent writers in other industries, in order to enjoy the privilege of writing nerdgames instead. Bucnasti posted:But all of that is adjusted for inflation. I spend a smaller percentage of my income on food, but the actual dollar amount I pay at the register is more. So expecting something that cost $10 in 1988 to still cost $10 is ludicrous. Yes. That's what I'm saying. You might want to go back and look at what I was replying to - Alien Rope Burn asserted that real prices have actually risen for those things, and Captain Rufus got us started off with the (effectively) assertion that actually inflation doesn't really exist or something. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:53 on May 7, 2015 |
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May 7, 2015 19:50
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Bucnasti posted:They also do pretty well with licensing, specifically video game licensing, and I think that might be the main reason they keep the product going.
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May 7, 2015 19:52
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I'm also pretty sure that if Hasbro did kill the D&D brand, they'd probably sit on it so nobody else could profit off of it.
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May 7, 2015 19:54
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Hasbro is run like the real, big-boys pants-on-legs company that it actually is. It does not tend to make the kind of boneheaded mistakes that are depressingly common in the niche trad games industry. Doing something as fantastically dumb as shutting down the most recognizable RPG IP in the world is beyond their capacity for stupidity.
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May 7, 2015 19:56
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Evil Mastermind posted:
Fixes is debateable, but I get your point.
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May 7, 2015 19:59
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Also, the drop in food prices is a smokescreen. The stuff that's cheap is the lovely hfcs processed food that is slowly killing us through increased obesity and related disease. Real food, like fresh vegetables, meats and the like are increasing in price, and even being crowded out of stores.
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May 7, 2015 20:03
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 I mean, I hear you. There are articles about the disappearance of fresh fruit and vegetables in the "food deserts" in inner cities, where food is mostly available at corner markets and fast food joints. And you can see a slight rise in the tail of that chart, reflecting modest rises in food prices over the last couple of years. But in season produce, even if it's gone up in price over a period of a few years, is still ridiculously less expensive than it used to be, due to the massively lower costs of refrigerated transportation, combined with the massively higher productivity provided by modern farming practices (both from crop yields due to modern fertilizer, pesticides, and yes, GMO strains of food, but also from mechanization). In the longer view, food in America is cheap as gently caress. And yes, that includes basic staples like corn and rice, as well as fruits and vegetables.
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May 7, 2015 20:09
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FMguru posted:I suspect Hasbro thinks of D&D like they do Transformers - a legacy nerd brand that's worth keeping around for licensing and nostalgia products to aging fans and which might down the road blow up into a billion-dollar franchise, but certainly not as something worth pumping a ton of money into as an RPG. I don't think Transformers is a good analogy. Except for a couple years in the early 90s, it's been active and very successful for thirty years, and oh yeah, has a series of CRAZY successful movies. The majority of TF product isn't collector/nostalgia focused at all--that part's only ever one of currently three ongoing umbrella toylines! In fact, Transformers has consistently been one of the top money making brands for Hazsro for quite some time. Now, GI Joe on the other hand, THAT is kept around for nostalgic older fans and maybe hopefully success later.
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May 7, 2015 20:09
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FMguru posted:I suspect Hasbro thinks of D&D like they do Transformers - a legacy nerd brand that's worth keeping around for licensing and nostalgia products to aging fans and which might down the road blow up into a billion-dollar franchise, but certainly not as something worth pumping a ton of money into as an RPG.
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May 7, 2015 20:18
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Leperflesh posted:
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply I don't agree with you, just that no matter how you compare things dollars today do not equal dollars yesterday. I learned about lot of this writing about the 1970's. It's actually quite fascinating what things went up and what things went down over the last 40 years, and the reasons for them. The rate of inflation from 1975 to 2015 is roughly 425%, but despite that some things have gone down both in absolute and relative amounts, especially electronics. Cars on the other hand have nearly doubled in cost in relative terms, but at the same time they're more than twice as efficient, half as pollutant, many times safer, perform substantially better and last much longer. Bringing this back to RPGs... I have a 1980 6th printing copy of the AD&D player's handbook. It's still got the Toy's R Us price tag for $8.94 on it. I find this amazing for a bunch of reasons: 1. By 1980 (2 years after publishing) TSR made 6 printings of the players handbook. 2. The book would cost $25.97 in 2015 dollars, which is pretty good for a 128pg black and white hardback book. 3. They sold it at Toys R Us - That's how much market penetration DnD had in 1980
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May 7, 2015 20:21
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Bucnasti posted:But all of that is adjusted for inflation. I spend a smaller percentage of my income on food, but the actual dollar amount I pay at the register is more. So expecting something that cost $10 in 1988 to still cost $10 is ludicrous. Yes, definitely. For example, I have an old stand radio I bought an at antique store. The Philco Model 645K retailed for $90 in 1936. It was a top of the line model, with shipping line, AM, and a pretty nice speaker too, as well as looking beautiful with all the wood finish and such.  Not my radio, but the same model You can get a pretty good boombox for less than $90 today, or you can spend thousands and thousands on equipment. You can also buy a much cheaper clock radio for $10. You also don't want a radio today, you want an MP3 player with audio ins and such. We've got a lot more options in 2015 than we did in 1936. But, adjusting for inflation, that $90 back then was worth $1,519.78 in 2015 money. Average wages were 50-70 cents/hour. Average annual income was about $1500/year. This radio would be a not insignificant purchase for most people, considering food and housing were eating up about $1000 of that. It'd be your entire entertainment budget for the year. (source: http://www.bls.gov/opub/uscs/1934-36.pdf ) Compare and contrast with today, where I can drop $90 on comic books and novels a month and I don't go broke. Most of us don't spend 2/3rds of our income on food and housing, and some of the entertainments we have are much cheaper. Most movies today still cost about an hour of work per ticket, but you can get more information than you could ever use and all the music in the world for less than that via the internet. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 20:35 on May 7, 2015 |
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May 7, 2015 20:25
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FMguru posted:I suspect Hasbro thinks of D&D like they do Transformers - a legacy nerd brand that's worth keeping around for licensing and nostalgia products to aging fans and which might down the road blow up into a billion-dollar franchise, but certainly not as something worth pumping a ton of money into as an RPG. I have no idea how much money Hasbro gets for the Transformers movies, but the crime against humanity that was Transformers 4 made a billion dollars last year. Regardless of how much they make, that there is a successful brand based on that alone. I have no idea how many toys and video games they move, but I can't imagine it would be insignificant.
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May 7, 2015 20:50
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An absurd amount. The brand has saved their rear end quite a few times.
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May 7, 2015 20:56
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Take a look at Hasbro's brands http://origin.hasbro.com/en-us/brands Transformers is a big one (although they do not get all the revenue from transformers movies) but there are a lot of big brands there. I wonder if D&D has ever grossed revenues higher than the gross sales of Monopoly and Candyland, taken together.
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May 7, 2015 21:17
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An Angry Bug posted:An absurd amount. The brand has saved their rear end quite a few times. Yeah, Transformers has been a solid money maker for Hasbro year after year, the recent movies are some really fancy icing on an already impressive cake. Hasbro has locked down the process of separating parents of young boys from their hard earned money in exchange for small pieces of colored plastic that will break and need to be replaced with new pieces of plastic in different colors next year. The Transformers brand reinvents itself every couple of years with new toys, new cartoons and a whole new batch of 8 year olds to sell to. This is the type of lesson WotC has figured out for Magic (appealing to and bringing in new generations of players) but not for D&D.
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May 7, 2015 21:20
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Serf posted:I have no idea how much money Hasbro gets for the Transformers movies, but the crime against humanity that was Transformers 4 made a billion dollars last year. Regardless of how much they make, that there is a successful brand based on that alone. I have no idea how many toys and video games they move, but I can't imagine it would be insignificant. As An Angry Bug says, Transformers is drat big. Basically, you know how we had that whole 80s nostalgia thing, with He-Man and Thundercats and poo poo coming back? Transformers isn't like that. It never left. Well. It was about dead (no new domestic product) for a couple years after Generation 2. But then Beast Wars hit and its been huge ever since. Hasbro ALSO has Star Wars and Marvel these days, both of which are pretty drat big too! And yeah, Transformers CHANGES evey couple years. New or modified aesthetic, cartoon, etc. Basically it keeps resetting to always be fresh. Also the current IDW comics (especially More than Meets the Eye) are FANTASTIC, but that's neither here nor there. (Tangentially, Transformers actually are pretty darn durable, not something that breaks and you have to replace it, generally. There ARE execptions, but!) Esser-Z fucked around with this message at 21:27 on May 7, 2015 |
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May 7, 2015 21:21
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MadScientistWorking posted:I'm legitimately curious as to how Transformers can be a legacy brand. It has a lot more invested into it than D&D can ever hope for. They'll keep D&D around for the same reason: the hope that they can turn it into a retro-pop culture sensation at some point in the future.
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May 7, 2015 21:36
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FMguru posted:Transformers was a legacy brand - a lingering echo of from its early 1980s heyday, enthusiasm for which was confined to a core of long-term enthusiasts. And then someone made a live-action movie out of them, and welp here comes a firehose spraying $10 billion all over everyone. Like seriously, the amount of older-collector focus Transformers has now is a RESULT of the movies pouring in tons of money! Before them the vast majority of the toys were very successfully aimed at children!
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May 7, 2015 21:39
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Bucnasti posted:Bringing this back to RPGs... Oh, yeah. It would have been '85 or '86, but the local TRU had an entire book display for D&D stuff, ten feet by six feet if it was an inch, filled with all kinds of BECMI and AD&D modules and related stuff. In another aisle they had Colorforms and Shrinky-Dinks of semi-iconic figures and monsters (not from the cartoon, oddly), humanoid and monster figures with sword-swingin' action built to a slightly beefier scale than He-Man, and D&D candy with statblocks on the back of the box up at the register. I don't know how much of it sold, but someone in the back office thought it was worthy of an aisle next to the Cabbage Patch Kids.
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May 7, 2015 21:48
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Esser-Z posted:Not actually true! It's been very succesful since the late 90s. The movies HELPED, but the toylines between 1998 and now have been very successful for Hasbro. And it was only AFTER the movies that there started being more stuff for older collectors! There was always a little, but it didn't get major effort until Classics--a timefill line between the first movie and dedicated kid-aimed toys. EDIT: Transformers always tended to do something that I enjoyed which is the type of old person pandering where kids wouldn't necessarily get the joke but older fans would. Animated had a bunch of references like Weird Al being Wreck Gar and using the original voice actor for Blur. Admittedly, Im not sure how you could translate that to the RPG industry. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 21:51 on May 7, 2015 |
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May 7, 2015 21:48
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Leperflesh posted:Hasbro is run like the real, big-boys pants-on-legs company that it actually is. It does not tend to make the kind of boneheaded mistakes that are depressingly common in the niche trad games industry. Hasbro only makes smaller mistakes but has enough stuff going on that it never really hurts them much. (Outside of the toy industry getting smaller in sales as kids mostly want electronic entertainment over plastic figures after a certain age.) Like their not Lego block stuff has mostly been a failure. Transforming sets that have you rip the entire model apart to turn Optimus into a truck. Tie ins with Zynga games which well look at that company and yeah. Doing a DnD line and mostly making generic grunt figures/ toys and not bringing out say the Baldurs Gate or Dragonlance Chronicles or 80s cartoon cast in mini figure form which would be a license to print money. They even tried model kits for the horsie cartoon which didn't succeed because little girls don't build model kits though I at least give them credit for trying to grow a niche hobby into something bigger. I suppose it didn't work with Zoids 14 years back but someone wanted to give it another go. (The closest thing I have seen to a thing to get model kits big again was Gundam Build Fighters in Japan. Where kit building is still a thing anyhow. And it's promotional show was better than it had any right to be.) But Hasbro is big and diverse so like not knowing what the gently caress to do with Heroscape can't kill them. Even if they seem unwilling to make a Transformers RPG no matter how bad people want one. 
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May 7, 2015 21:52
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Captain Rufus posted:(The closest thing I have seen to a thing to get model kits big again was Gundam Build Fighters in Japan. Where kit building is still a thing anyhow. And it's promotional show was better than it had any right to be.)
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May 7, 2015 21:54
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Well, if you count LEGO as model kits, they're pretty drat big worldwide! On that note, making actual transforming KREO kits anywhere close to the standards of Transformers while keeping the parts actually useable for other things would be hard for Lego's highly experienced builders, let alone Hasbro's newer team! And, really, it's a building toy. Disassembling to build other forms is the usual play pattern!
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May 7, 2015 21:56
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Hey can you link to an article/blog that talks about this rework? It's been mentioned a few times, and I would like to read about it. A quick googling turned up this rpg.net thread that contain some snippets of the books: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?633648-What-4e-could-have-been-a-look-at-proto-4e-info-%28also-Bo9S-was-made-up-of-4e-scraps!
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May 7, 2015 22:03
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As I recall it wasn't just that it didn't "feel like D&D," but moreso that it was unwieldy and ended up just not being as fun. Unfortunately by the time they scrapped it and started anew, deadlines were looming, so a fair amount of 4e was unpolished and not fully tested (such as skill challenges)
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May 7, 2015 22:22
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MadScientistWorking posted:Yeah that was what I was wondering. Transformers for me is one of the things I grew up on so while I never bought many toys it was something that was culturally relevant for me as I grew up because they never stopped producing cartoons. Like the sheer amount of money spent in terms of cartoons had to indicate that the brand did something which is what threw me for a loop. I just think Hasbro probably has a similar plan for D&D. Keep it alive and in print at a low level, cater to hardcover fans, and wait for the tides of pop culture to shift. Everything about 5e and the reprint lines make it seem like its being treated as a beloved nerd artifact of olde and not as something with a lot of potential to be developed and delivered to new audiences. They seem content for now to put it into maintenance mode and market to the same subset of aging grogs who have been buying the game since the 1980s.
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May 7, 2015 22:45
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MadScientistWorking posted:Wait has kit building never not been niche in the United States? Its never going away but its always been something that I remind exists when I go to my art store. Model cars were huge in the 60's and into the 70's here in America. Big Daddy Roth made a fortune licensing his crazy car designs and monster hot rods to model companies. FMguru posted:My impression of TF was that it was a smash success in the early 80s, peaking with the animated movie, and then downshifted to mostly catering to long-term fans through the 1990s (where it showed up in a lot of Gen-X pandering "hey, remember these artifacts of your childhood?" articles next to the Ecto-Cooler and the Rubik's Cubes). Then nostalgia got it going again in the early 2000s, leading to the movies, leading to it being a license to print money. My Little Pony is another property that boomed in the 1980s, went fallow for a while (except for long-term fans), and then was brought back later to huge success. Transformers disappeared for a couple years around 1990, but there have been regular releases and new cartoons consistently since then. They might not be the transformers you remember, but they're still part of the brand, they still tie into the same fictional universe and they still sold very well. They didn't start catering to the nostalgia crowd until recently. Give it 10-15 years and you'll be seeing a new wave of nostalgia for these later generations of Transformers, and the cycle will continue.
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May 7, 2015 23:23
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| # ? May 8, 2024 16:59 |
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They might could pull if off, if they ever get the movie rights untangled. Hasbro certainly wants them badly, that's for sure. http://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2015/02/meanwhile-over-in-battle-for-d-film.html
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May 7, 2015 23:23
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