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dwarf74 posted:Frankly, it kinda looks like WotC has been making GBS threads the bed for a while. What is going on out there? DM's call? But really, it looks as though they are just keeping "a product" on the market. Giving away things for free costs money, you know!
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Jun 22, 2015 22:01
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dwarf74 posted:And yet 5e seems, by the numbers, to be quite successful. What is going on out there? What are the numbers?
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Jun 22, 2015 22:02
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I noticed there wasn't anything from FFG either, but that would have probably required them to give out dice too.
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Jun 22, 2015 22:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:What are the numbers? Nobody knows. Sweeping declarations by grogs about how great/lovely an RPG release is selling is a constant source of irritation for me. People extrapolate based on how well the game is doing in their local game store, and then get into some thread on a forum and start treating the plural of anecdote as data. Games Workshop is a publicly-traded company, so you can actually look in their financial reports and find sales data. Hasbro does not break down sales data for its subsidiary, Wizards of the Coast. Some companies brag about sales numbers, so occasionally you'll get something like "we sold over 20,000 copies of X this year! Woo!" but on its own that sort of statistic isn't very reliable either. So you can look at articles like this one and Mike Mearls is saying sales are good, but what exactly are they, how do they compare to the direct competition, are they taking into account international sales which may not involve simultaneous release, what books exactly are we counting as part of a core release, are we counting a sale of a bundle with the PHB, DMG, and MM as a three sales, or just one? Etc. etc. etc. (Coincidentally, the infographic on that page is a wonderful example of absolutely atrocious infographic construction. That's not how you use a line chart god loving dammit.)
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Jun 22, 2015 22:33
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moths posted:I noticed there wasn't anything from FFG either, but that would have probably required them to give out dice too. they've done 2 free star wars adventures so far, but last year was in the summer. i have no idea why they don't do free rpg day
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Jun 22, 2015 22:39
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Leperflesh posted:(Coincidentally, the infographic on that page is a wonderful example of absolutely atrocious infographic construction. That's not how you use a line chart god loving dammit.) Why not just have a pie chart with years Seriously has he never seen a timeline though banned for img-timeline
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Jun 23, 2015 00:33
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Leperflesh posted:Yeah. There's millions and millions of non-gamer ordinary schlubs who have heard of D&D and would buy a copy for their 12-year-old for their birthday, but has never so much as set foot in a game store. I bet 5e sells massively on Amazon. I am highly, highly loving skeptical that 12 year olds in the year 2015 are asking for D&D for their birthday presents. Skylanders, sure. Steam gift cards, XBox Live gold cards, whatever new video game catches their eye, sure. Dungeons & Dragons, not a chance in hell. What's out there that's pushing D&D to the young kid set? What ad campaign or pop cultural touchstone aimed at that demographic is getting kids to go "oh man this D&D thing sounds super rad, I want this?" Millions of non-gamer schlubs may have heard of D&D, but that doesn't mean they're buying it for their kids, or even for themselves. D&D is, at this point, an also-ran in the "competing for peoples' hobby dollar and time" competition behind video games, board games, card games, plastic spaceship games, fantasy sports, and recreational drinking. D&D may be doing gangbusters by elfgame standards but I would be legitimately shocked if that translates to "actually for-real doing good."
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Jun 23, 2015 03:10
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They're a big fish in a small pond, sure. I was only ever talking about "by elfgame standards." Of all the elfgames, D&D has the most widespread and enduring popular name recognition. I bet D&D is better known worldwide than Magic: The Gathering.
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Jun 23, 2015 03:19
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They sell D&D at Target now, and it's not like they just give away shelf space for shits and giggles.
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Jun 23, 2015 03:20
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However well it's doing, 5th does seem to be intended by Hasbro as the minimum maintenance edition, with a small staff putting out a minimal amount of adventure material. I'm not surprised they're not putting money into Free Rpg Day.
Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 03:25
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The 5e Player's Handbook is #113 in terms of book sales right on Amazon. While that's not setting the world on fire, it's pretty damned impressive. Compare with something like the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game at #3,633, Dungeon World, which is #29,157, or 13th Age at #362,872. Of course, these are pretty imperfect numbers that only tell us how a title is selling in a very immediate sense on only one site, and as such the newest book is going to naturally do better. It could be that most of the 13th Age purchases go directly through Pelgrane or as part of their Kickstarters, as well. But at the same time, #113 is not a number that's easily scoffed at, even if it is still well below Dragons Love Tacos or Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies: The Real West. During the nineties, I remember some decent numbers coming out where D&D was over 50% of the hobby, and with the death of White Wolf as a major publisher (who used to get about 30%), I imagine Paizo and Wizards of the Coast could easily account for 4/5ths of RPG sales. I'm just spitballing here, of course, but that's the kind of difference in scale we're looking at.
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Jun 23, 2015 03:35
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Leperflesh posted:I bet D&D is better known worldwide than Magic: The Gathering. I would take that bet and you'd probably lose. Magic: the Gathering's 2012 earnings report had it placed somewhere around $200 million and they've pretty much reported nothing but growth, and it's not like this is some surprising come-from-behind story either. Magic is translated into multiple different languages whereas I don't believe D&D is even getting its Japanese translation anymore now that WotC didn't renew the license for the company that had been translating D&D into Japanese for years. Yeah yeah, you can buy D&D in Target now, welcome to Magic for the last however many years, they sell M:tG packs at Wal-Mart, gas stations, and grocery stores. Magic is what keeps a ton of game stores afloat all on its own. Magic is stupid loving popular, it makes real big-boy money. It's not some dinky little niche game stuck in a closet with a team of 8 people, it is a serious widespread game that pulls in nine figures worth of money per year and I am incredibly doubtful that D&D has the same worldwide cachet that Magic does at this point.
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Jun 23, 2015 03:35
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Kai Tave posted:I would take that bet and you'd probably lose. Magic: the Gathering's 2012 earnings report had it placed somewhere around $200 million and they've pretty much reported nothing but growth, and it's not like this is some surprising come-from-behind story either. Magic is translated into multiple different languages whereas I don't believe D&D is even getting its Japanese translation anymore now that WotC didn't renew the license for the company that had been translating D&D into Japanese for years. Yeah yeah, you can buy D&D in Target now, welcome to Magic for the last however many years, they sell M:tG packs at Wal-Mart, gas stations, and grocery stores. Magic is what keeps a ton of game stores afloat all on its own.
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Jun 23, 2015 03:47
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Kai Tave can we talk about this without so much hostility? I think what you're discounting is that there is an entire generation, now in our 40s, for whom Dungeons & Dragons was synonymous with nerd gaming. D&D was everywhere. It was in the news. They sold red box basic D&D at Sears! It went all over the world. It was huge. And there have been multiple D&D movies, bookstores have had shelves full of D&D novels for decades, Now, yes, it's definitively eclipsed by Magic, and Magic is sold in Target, and people who get into Magic spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on it. I get that. But I'm not talking about customers, I'm talking about brand penetration. Ask a random guy in Bangladesh, or Viet Nam, or Mongolia, or Peru, or Uzbekistan, if they've ever heard of D&D, and I bet there's at least a 50% chance they have. Obviously I have no statistics to back this up. I'm just going based on what I know about brand recognition and penetration. Brands that have been sustained for 40 years on an international level have generational persistence. Katy Perry probably outsells Madonna 10-to-1 or better. But worldwide, Madonna is probably better known. And Elvis is even better known, even though he obviously hasn't been making music or touring for decades. The D&D brand is the Elvis of nerdgames. It's Coca-Cola. It's Marlboro. It's John Wayne.
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Jun 23, 2015 03:48
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MadScientistWorking posted:Isn't it the case where RPGs in Japan are probably bigger in Japan than M:tG but D&D doesn't hold that spot? I know there is an anime coming out that is effectively based upon an actualplay but I don't know what the system is. The replay you're talking about is Red Dragon, and they made a whole new RPG system for it. From the Japanese Wikipedia page it's apparently a roll-under percentile system. So yeah. In any case the anime adaptation starts airing on July 2nd.
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Jun 23, 2015 04:05
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Ewen Cluney posted:I'm not really sure where M:tG fits into the Japanese market, but the impression I get is that although it has a sizable following, various Japanese-made CCGs are a lot bigger. Magic is incredibly popular in Japan, and Japan and China consistently do really, really well in Magic tournaments. Wizards actually has very strong connections in Japan, to the point that when a manga author asked if they could do a Magic-based manga, Wizards literally offered to make a new game for them to base the manga on. And that's how Duel Masters/Kaijudo was born, though it was discontinued at the end of last year.
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Jun 23, 2015 04:08
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Leperflesh posted:Kai Tave can we talk about this without so much hostility? Jesus Christ dude, I used to moderate an internet forum with way stricter rules for hostility than Something Awful dot com and people could still use swear words over there. D&D had its boom and then it busted, full-stop. D&D has brand penetration, yes, in the sense that it is a brand that has continued to endure where, say, pet rocks have not. But that brand penetration is almost entirely bound up in, as you point out, people in their 40's many of whom have a disproportionate view of D&D's actual popularity, still bringing up poo poo like Pat Pulling's Satanic panic like it just happened yesterday. Yes, once upon a time D&D was sold at Sears. It ain't anymore. Hell, D&D used to be no-poo poo the most popular Christmas gift in the country! Like 25+ years ago. D&D has indeed had multiple movies...none of which were at all successful in any meaningful sense. I mean the Transformers movie franchise is arguably just as awful, maybe even worse, than D&D's movies (arguably) and yet they make gazillions of dollars in spite of all that where D&D's movies have fairly clearly not. The strongest elements of D&D's brand penetration that exist in any sort of contemporary sense are: A). D&D video games, many of which are fondly remembered as classics even by people who have never elfgamed, and yet I'd still point out that it's been many years since a D&D video game really took the gaming world by storm, and B). Forgotten Realms novels, which make the New York Times bestseller list. The adventures of Drizzt Do'urden sell very well, enough to keep R.A. Salvatore in work probably until he gets tired of writing them. So that entire generation for whom D&D is synonymous with nerd gaming frankly doesn't count for much. The penetration of a brand that's managed to cling to existence mainly through inertia and stubbornness doesn't, I would wager, stack up favorably next to the brand penetration of a vastly better selling game with bigger worldwide spread and robust ongoing support. Yes, D&D has decent brand penetration for an extremely niche game. My point is that Magic isn't an extremely niche game. It's the opposite of a niche game, so when you say you bet Magic has less worldwide recognition than D&D does I'm willing to bet you're wrong. And since you don't really have any sort of statistical evidence to back it up, I'm going to suggest that the game that regularly pulls in nine figures and has multiple international translations is doing better on the brand penetration front than an 8 man operation that can't be arsed to participate in Free RPG Day. edit; I'm also very skeptical that D&D has as much international exposure as you're claiming. It's not even close to the same level as McDonalds or Coke.
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Jun 23, 2015 04:08
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On the topic of brand penetration, though, even now I often use it when trying to explain to people exactly why I'm busy on a Sunday. "Come to my X/Y/Z this Sunday" "I can't, I'm playing tabletop games?" "What?" "You know, like D&D. Not D&D, but like it." Everyone involved in this conversation is in their mid-20s, and it totally gets the point across. I've also found it's a much easier pitch to say, "Come trying playing D&D" than saying "Come play this game you've never heard of where we're all in the Apocalypse and poo poo's fun". E: My point is that even people in my age group have a strong concept of what it is. When I was 10 or 12 or whatever I was asking for a D&D book for my birthday, and reading them and playing them. It's still alive. And when you're 12, you don't know that there's loving Apocalypse World or whatever because you're playing with your idiot 12-year-old friends and you aren't going to get mom or dad to spend 30 bucks on a game that may or may not be better to play than D&D. This may have changed a bit, due to the proliferation of the indie RPG and the ability to download PDFs and read them first, but I doubt a 12-year-old who is a year into a 4E campaign is going to pick up 13th Age without someone showing it to him. And most people never see it beyond that, beyond hearing about what D&D is from their friend in middle school. And for those people, the ones who have never been in a game store, Apoc World doesn't really exist in their mind at all because D&D only exists as "some poo poo some nerds do". And when they have a nerdy kid who asks what it is, they get him the D&D book, because they aren't going to buy him the one with the guns or the one with the naked chick on the cover or the one that they've never heard of. QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 04:16
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Yeah; complete anecdote...but every time I try to tell a friend or coworker just what it is that I'm up to on Tuesday nights the conversation goes something like this: "Well...its like D&D but I don't actually use that game. Its a different tabletop RPG. Yes, there are others."
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Jun 23, 2015 04:18
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Leperflesh posted:Kai Tave can we talk about this without so much hostility? I read that as emphasis more than hostility. The generation in their 40s has already been disregarded. Suppose (generously) that a guy ambles into a store, dimly recalls the joy and wonder of 70's/80's Dungeons and Dragons and then drops $150 for the PHB, DMG, and MM. It's a best-case scenario for D&D: the literal prodigal fan's return. It's a rare, one in a thousand thing... and at most it sells three books. Magic the Gathering routinely makes more than that off a guy buying two boxes of boosters. Or two guys each buying a box of boosters. But it's silly to think of it in these terms because your LGS is going to sell nearly every box they ordered before the next expansion hits. Two customers aren't going to buy a booster box for every trinity of D&D books sold - a dozen boxes are going to get sold. D&D is absolutely iconic, and today it's wisely being leveraged as a brand more than a game. But World of Warcraft is equally resonant. The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies are more ubiquitously tied to fantasy than the books. Warhammer is synonymous with fantasy and sci-fi miniatures wargaming, but they're coasting on inertia and sunk-cost fallacies. If you ask someone under 30 where Orcs came from, I'd bet that more often than "D&D" they'll say the Peter Jackson movies, Warcraft, or Tolkien's books. e: Or Warhammer. moths fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 04:28
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moths posted:
But . . . they do come from Tolkien's books.
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Jun 23, 2015 04:41
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Well if we're sharing anecdotes as evidence when I was in middle school and high school some 17+ odd years ago not nobody was playing D&D at school but drat if you couldn't swing a cat without hitting someone playing Magic. Hell, I found out that people played Magic by finding a card someone had dropped in the locker room. Vaguely nerdy dudes knowing that D&D is shorthand for "that one weird game with the dice and stuff, cool, gotcha" doesn't equate to those vaguely nerdy dudes buying and regularly throwing money at D&D, nor does it equate to 12 year old kids asking for D&D books for Christmas or birthdays. I mean look, if D&D's vaunted brand penetration is so amazing then why is it a dinky 8 man team? Why are products being delayed because the guy writing them has jury duty? How come they can't manage to get a simple digital character app put together? poo poo, FFG managed to put up a cross-game dice app for all their Star Wars stuff that's slick as hell, but WotC somehow can't get a glorified spreadsheet put together? I feel like D&D's "brand penetration" is constantly being oversold mainly by people who are already soaking in "nerd culture" and therefore see it referenced and brought up all the time so yeah, of course it must still be enduringly popular instead of a shambling shadow of its former self propped up as a legacy brand by a company that keeps it around more to milk spinoffs and ancillary products than the actual game itself. Like I said, those Forgotten Realms novels make bank.
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Jun 23, 2015 04:41
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homullus posted:But . . . they do come from Tolkien's books. Nah, William Hope Hodgson introduced oD&D-style pig-nose orcs in 1908 with House on the Borderlands. Tolkien can probably take credit for christening them "orcs" though.
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Jun 23, 2015 04:48
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Kai Tave posted:Well if we're sharing anecdotes as evidence when I was in middle school and high school some 17+ odd years ago not nobody was playing D&D at school but drat if you couldn't swing a cat without hitting someone playing Magic. Hell, I found out that people played Magic by finding a card someone had dropped in the locker room. First, I agree, you don't see D&D being played anywhere and there were always groups of kids in middle school and high school spending their lunches playing Magic. Part of this is portability, and part of it is because Magic, as you've said, really is a larger industry. Second, the people I'm talking to aren't "vaguely nerdy dudes". They're normal people in bars. They know vaguely what it is. The same is probably true of jivjov's work situation. My point was that it's still got name recognition among people who don't know the first thing about tabletop gaming, which is why its name sells books and video games. Third, you're right, none of that equates to people throwing money at D&D. I agree that D&D is totally a shambling shadow of its former self propped up as a legacy brand by a company that keeps it around more to milk spinoffs and ancillary products than the actual game itself. 4E made some decent headway coming back, from what I can tell, but it has all been too little, too late. Hasbro has seen it, and they're distancing themselves hard from any risk of investment. Nobody here is arguing that D&D is making huge profit margins. But they are making decent ones compared to, say, Apoc World or FATE or 13th Age. Even now, in its shambling state, it's hard to find a FLGS that has a weekly schedule without a D&D Adventures or whatever on it that also does FNM. To be sure, though, one of those makes 'em a lot more money. QuantumNinja fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 04:58
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Kai Tave posted:Well if we're sharing anecdotes as evidence when I was in middle school and high school some 17+ odd years ago not nobody was playing D&D at school but drat if you couldn't swing a cat without hitting someone playing Magic. Hell, I found out that people played Magic by finding a card someone had dropped in the locker room. I got into elfgaming entirely because I used to teach other kids to play Magic in junior high and one of them invited me to his D&D group. When I was in high school, our school had an area that the students just called 'The Magic Hallway' because students would meet there to play cardgames all the goddamn time, while my RPG group was a relatively isolated thing. I think It's partly a matter of the fact that Magic isn't played in 4 hour sessions.
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Jun 23, 2015 05:27
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D&D has a much higher cultural penetration; Magic is much more successful as a business. This is mainly because of D&D's age and when it hit, as opposed to necessarily how much money it makes. It also comes along with the fact that D&D tends to breed more long-term fandom than Magic due to the relatively low amount of ongoing investment required. Just think about how video games would look massively different without the slow-crawl impact of D&D across the whole industry, and I'm not talking licensed games. I'm talking the whole RPG genre, XP mechanics, classes, and other related mechanics that essentially just go back to D&D. It's probable somebody else would have stumbled across the same mechanics, but later, and to lesser impact.
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Jun 23, 2015 05:29
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Alien Rope Burn posted:D&D has a much higher cultural penetration; Magic is much more successful as a business. This is mainly because of D&D's age and when it hit, as opposed to necessarily how much money it makes. It also comes along with the fact that D&D tends to breed more long-term fandom than Magic due to the relatively low amount of ongoing investment required. Just think about how video games would look massively different without the slow-crawl impact of D&D across the whole industry, and I'm not talking licensed games. I'm talking the whole RPG genre, XP mechanics, classes, and other related mechanics that essentially just go back to D&D. It's probable somebody else would have stumbled across the same mechanics, but later, and to lesser impact. I'm not arguing against the idea that D&D has cultural penetration, I'm disputing the idea that it's the Coke of nerdgaming and that if you ask a dude in Uzbekistan if he's heard of D&D then it's a coinflip he'll say yes. Like yeah, D&D was very influential to video games, I 100% agree with that, but I'll put down money that Final Fantasy has more cultural penetration nowadays than D&D does. Also apropos of nothing I wasn't sure about this so I did a quick Wikipedia check, but Magic: the Gathering is now 22 years old, Alpha first came out in 1993.
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Jun 23, 2015 05:40
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Kai Tave posted:I did a quick Wikipedia check, but Magic: the Gathering is now 22 years old, Alpha first came out in 1993. gently caress I am so loving old. Guess, in college, how much weed I traded like a thousand Alpha/Beta cards for? In retrospect, not enough 
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Jun 23, 2015 05:45
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Kai Tave posted:I'll put down money that Final Fantasy has more cultural penetration nowadays than D&D does.  The caster spell slots are obvious, but the bestiary is pulled almost entirely from the monster manual (to the point that a lot of them, like marilith and the mind flayers and beholders had to get renamed in the US version...)
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Jun 23, 2015 06:06
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Asimo posted:This is a rather hilarious example to give considering the first Final Fantasy was almost literally "Dungeons & Dragons: the jRPG" with just enough filed off to not be worth suing over. Yep, you're exactly right. Meanwhile, however, a remake of a Final Fantasy game that's 18 years old by this point that was just announced at E3 caused people around the world to collectively flip their poo poo in a way that D&D hasn't been able to manage for nearly two decades now, if that, so maybe D&D should be trying to rip off Final Fantasy this time, wait no that would be too anime videogame MMO. Oh well, maybe when that dude gets back from jury duty things'll turn around.
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Jun 23, 2015 06:13
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Alien Rope Burn posted:D&D has a much higher cultural penetration; Magic is much more successful as a business. This is really all I've tried to claim. The question was, how is D&D still selling books when there's been essentially zero marketing? And the answer is, basically, momentum and cultural memory. Kai Tave posted:Jesus Christ dude, I used to moderate an internet forum with way stricter rules for hostility than Something Awful dot com and people could still use swear words over there. Nothing to do with swearing. It's just that instead of disagreeing with me you're piling on like I've insulted your mother. Relax. Even if you're certain I'm wrong, it's not a big deal. quote:edit; I'm also very skeptical that D&D has as much international exposure as you're claiming. It's not even close to the same level as McDonalds or Coke. I didn't mean to imply it had that level of brand recognition on an absolute scale. Only that, compared to other nerdgame brands, and I'm including Magic there, it's way out ahead in terms of brand recognition on an international level. D&D is a permanent part of Americana and pop culture. People and movies and games and books and even politics and religions still reference it on a routine basis. That cultural memory is enough of a substitute for a marketing budget that Wizards can still sell a substantial amount of D&D books. We don't know exactly how many, but we can tell by Amazon rankings (#1 the week 5e came out, and still quite high) and sales figures at game stores and presence on shelves at Target that it's selling quite well for a roleplaying game. I'll repeat myself one more time. I never claimed D&D was or ever outsold Magic. I am only making a claim about brand recognition. You can say "hey I play D&D" to anyone and they will not respond with confusion, like "huh? What's D&D? I've never heard of that." I don't think you can say the same for Magic.
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Jun 23, 2015 06:13
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D&D's real problem, historically, is that they didn't capitalize on their brand in the late 70s and early 80s when they should have. They pretty much let the burgeoning video games industry raid their cultural cache, and even before the LotR/Hobbit movies a lot of people were associating D&Disms with the first video game they saw them in, not with D&D directly.
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Jun 23, 2015 06:13
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D&D's actual real problem is that the people managing the game have repeatedly flushed it down the toilet with incredibly poor business management, terrible (or no) marketing, mountains of awful add-on products, hilariously poor licensing decisions, and all the other pathetically bad nerdgame business practices elaborated in this thread from its first page. 5th edition despite whatever success it is enjoying in sales numbers is just the latest in a long, long line of similar missteps.
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Jun 23, 2015 06:18
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Leperflesh posted:
And I am 100% sure you're wrong about that. The idea that you can't tell some guy at work "yeah I play Magic," a 22 year old best-selling multi-hundred-million dollar game with international exposure out the yin-yang and booster packs sold at 7-11 and Safeway, and have them understand what you're saying to them without you having to explain it is kind of an absurd assertion. I'm not sure where you're coming from with the idea that Magic does not somehow have brand penetration at least equal to, if not greater than, D&D. Magic isn't Katy Perry, Magic has been around for 22 loving years now, with multiple foreign language printings, and it's continuing to grow. That's not "flash in the pan" in whatever analogy you'd like to use.
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Jun 23, 2015 06:22
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Yeah I know that's 100% what you're convinced of and without evidence neither of us is going to convince the other so I'm done. Feel free to have the last word.
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Jun 23, 2015 06:29
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I tend to agree with Kai Tave, while it's true that to most people "Roleplaying game" = D&D, it's also true that to those same people "Trading Card Game" = Magic, and trading card games are a much bigger industry (by an order of magnitude) both in terms of money made and number of players than RPGs. It's very likely that more people are actively playing magic in 2015 than have ever played any RPG at all. If Magic hasn't already surpassed D&D as a cultural institution it will soon. D&D stays afloat by selling the same game to the same people who've been buying it for 35+ years, and those people are moving on or dying off. Magic stays afloat by bringing in fresh batch of new young fans year after year. If you ask a teenager today which one they are more familiar with, they'll say Magic. What D&D needs to do is reinvent itself to go after those young fans, who are primed for something like roleplaying games like never before, but like Kai said that would be too anime/videogame/new-fangled for the old farts who keep buying new PHBs every five years.
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Jun 23, 2015 07:01
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According to the Magic the Gathering wiki, Magic is presently published in "English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish." Meanwhile, Wizards of the Coast recently sent out a letter to various licensed translators of D&D stating that they aren't interested in continuing their arrangements anymore. Hobby Japan, the company that did licensed translations of D&D 3E and 4E for the Japan, were one of the first ones to make the announcement that they wouldn't be able to produce a Japanese translation of D&D Next, while other foreign market translators are reporting the same thing. WotC has declined to elaborate or make any announcements concerning when or if they'll be releasing or licensing out any version of their latest D&D in anything other than English. Here's an ENWorld thread on the matter. I can find no information at this time which suggests that there are any sort of current plans to translate D&D for non-American markets at any point in the near future. BRAND PENETRATION baby, woo! Yes sir, one of these games is surely an enduring cultural icon that everybody around the world knows of and one is a dinky little fly-by-night fad that causes anyone that isn't a diehard turbonerd to scratch their head in confusion.
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Jun 23, 2015 07:03
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Leperflesh posted:This is really all I've tried to claim. The question was, how is D&D still selling books when there's been essentially zero marketing? Of course there's marketing. What did you think that "playtest" was, anyway? Ultimately though they do spend very little on marketing, of course. Of course, I have to wonder why they'd bother, given the tendency for nerd media to fall over their goddamn selves to cover every new major release with zero critical thought or commentary.
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Jun 23, 2015 07:17
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Honestly I'm not sure you could really successfully market a traditional tabletop RPG these days. The time for that has kind of passed, for better or worse. If you really wanted to break out into roleplaying business now you'd want to try and take advantage of the ways most people these days actually RP, in chat rooms and in tumblr blogs and group fanfiction and other almost entirely freeform formats. There's thousands upon thousands of blogs and forums and everything doing roleplaying. The problem is, these are often done by
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Jun 23, 2015 07:33
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I wonder how Jeremy Crawford, D&D designer, feels about John Tarnowski, D&D 5e consultant, calling Blue Rose a fascist game. I don't believe Crawford is involved with the Kickstarted revival of the game, but it strikes me as very weird.
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 07:36
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