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Sampatrick posted:The technically correct answer is Wizards of the Coast even if it ignores a lot of things. The more realistic answer is that if you're not producing D&D you shouldn't be in the RPG industry unless you're a wizard and have somehow managed to make World of Darkness popular once more. Wizards of the Coast is not an RPG company, and I'm willing to bet good money that D&D is kept around for the licensing just as much as anything.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:07
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Mors Rattus posted:Please, do point to the RPG company that is running on a strong profit margin. Chaosium, maybe?
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Feb 15, 2018 00:08
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S.J. posted:Wizards of the Coast is not an RPG company, and I'm willing to bet good money that D&D is kept around for the licensing just as much as anything. I mean, D&D 5e has by all reports sold incredibly well. WotC is mostly a TCG company but they also have the most successful RPG on the market right now.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:10
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FFG but again, not really in the same way that applies to WotC.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:11
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Sampatrick posted:I don't know that I would use D&D 5e as a good comparison - it has had quite a few supplements and adventures at this point and has had an absolutely massive volume of sale compared to pretty much every other RPG out there right now.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:28
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Thank god we got a pair of lovely phone games instead of Obsidian's Vampire the Requiem, or at least Crusader Kings 2 but this time with Dragonblooded Exalts.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:43
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See, the thing is that if you think Onyx Path is teetering on the brink of extinction, so is pretty much everyone else in the industry. They’ve been making their current model work for years, but the doomsaying about Kickstarter has never gone away.
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Feb 15, 2018 01:30
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Mors Rattus posted:See, the thing is that if you think Onyx Path is teetering on the brink of extinction, so is pretty much everyone else in the industry. They’ve been making their current model work for years, but the doomsaying about Kickstarter has never gone away. I don't think that's a particularly contentious position. The RPG industry is pretty awful at this point and has terrible long term prospects outside of a few major players.
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Feb 15, 2018 01:44
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Sampatrick posted:I don't think that's a particularly contentious position. The RPG industry is pretty awful at this point and has terrible long term prospects outside of a few major players. The RPG industry is changing, and Kickstarter is one of the major drivers to that. Now that we're a few years in, the benefits and drawbacks of the Kickstarter model are more obvious, but it's overall a boon for the industry. Now there's far less waste than there used to be. The revenues may be lower, but so are the costs. The margins are the same they've been since the 90s, if not slightly better, for your moderately successful RPG companies, and that's all they need. They're much less likely to fail now, entirely because if you can do Kickstarters right, your risk is relatively low: You know how many people want to even think about buying your product before you print a single thing and you can set the minimum amount of cash needed so that you don't end up losing money on your product. These two things are big killers of new companies in the hobbies realm. The long term prospects for the industry are fine, even possibly good, if you accept that it will definitely not look like it did in the 90s.
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Feb 15, 2018 02:55
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thelazyblank posted:The RPG industry is changing, and Kickstarter is one of the major drivers to that. Now that we're a few years in, the benefits and drawbacks of the Kickstarter model are more obvious, but it's overall a boon for the industry. Now there's far less waste than there used to be. The revenues may be lower, but so are the costs. The margins are the same they've been since the 90s, if not slightly better, for your moderately successful RPG companies, and that's all they need. My issue with this is that it works fine for now but ten years down the line, where are the new players coming from? The RPG industry has become more and more insular and I honestly have no idea what's going to happen as the playerbase gets older.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:06
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Drama students and video game players, same as always.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:13
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Subjunctive posted:Drama students and video game players, same as always. Increasingly live play fans too, I'd bet.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:16
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Sampatrick posted:My issue with this is that it works fine for now but ten years down the line, where are the new players coming from? The RPG industry has become more and more insular and I honestly have no idea what's going to happen as the playerbase gets older. I don't know how you're posting from five years ago, but if you can sell this technology, you can single-handedly save the industry. Well known podcasts/actual play shows like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone are picking up RPGs and selling them to people. Evil Hat noticed a ridiculous % bump in sales to Monster of the Week after it got played on The Adventure Zone. The hobby is, for the first time in a long time, actually growing at more than a glacial pace. I don't understand any person who fears that the industry will not exist in 10 years. There are things to worry about in the hobby and the industry, but viability isn't one of them. Unless we define viability in a real old sense like "number of physical books in your FLGS".
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Feb 15, 2018 03:18
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Yeah, I actually got tapped to DM a group of complete newbies because they watched Stranger Things. This is not a Dark Time for RPGs.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:23
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Might be one for the people writing them, though, which isn't the same thing.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:26
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According to people here the RPG Industry should be dead like in 2012 lol. It's too much doom and gloom for something that has been actually growing little by little.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:31
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Anecdotally, I have seen interest in tabletop RPGs at an all time high. Non-gaming friends and coworkers have been asking me about RPGs way more in the last year than I ever heard growing up, men and women both. I know a lot of people who started playing after hearing the Adventure Zone or watching Stranger Things. And really good, small games are getting published via Kickstarter and DTRPG.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:32
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FishFood posted:Anecdotally, I have seen interest in tabletop RPGs at an all time high. Non-gaming friends and coworkers have been asking me about RPGs way more in the last year than I ever heard growing up, men and women both. I know a lot of people who started playing after hearing the Adventure Zone or watching Stranger Things. And really good, small games are getting published via Kickstarter and DTRPG. There's five times as much ORGANIZED rpg groups in my city than ten years ago, all using social media to communicate and do stuff like events and such and the local game dev scene + translations and localizations are way more dynamic than in the 90s and 00s. Like hot new stuff such as Blades in the Dark getting official translations and releases every month or so.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:35
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FishFood posted:Non-gaming friends and coworkers have been asking me about RPGs way more in the last year than I ever heard growing up, men and women both. same, but replace "RPGs" with "literally only D&D"
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Feb 15, 2018 03:43
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Countblanc posted:same, but replace "RPGs" with "literally only D&D" TOO REAL. I've currently running a D&D game purely because of people who listened to TAZ and wanted to play D&D. Comrade Gorbash posted:FFG but again, not really in the same way that applies to WotC. Also from what I've seen with how they rotate staff around, their RPGs are as much about getting fresh ideas/experiments for their gold mine of star wars products.
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Feb 15, 2018 03:57
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kingcom posted:TOO REAL. I've currently running a D&D game purely because of people who listened to TAZ and wanted to play D&D. It's like boiling a frog, after awhile turn up the heat and they'll be full indie gamers eating chicken wings to resolve bluff checks.
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Feb 15, 2018 04:05
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"It's been
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Feb 15, 2018 04:18
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Plutonis posted:According to people here the RPG Industry should be dead like in 2012 lol. It's too much doom and gloom for something that has been actually growing little by little. I've maintained for a while now that the RPG hobby is in a good, stable place, especially for independent creators, because while Kickstarter doesn't prevent people from doing really dumb poo poo with their money, it does mean that you can make a game and know before you commit your life savings to publishing it whether or not you have an audience to publish it for. Even if it doesn't actually become a livable career model where you can quit your job and write RPGs all day, so what? That's not really any different than it was 10-20 years go, and even when White Wolf was a fully fledged company writers still made jokes about the pay being lousier than just about anything else you could be doing with your time. I don't really foresee the coming of some revolutionary new RPG that causes a massive TRPG fad the same way that White Wolf did in the 90s, but I also think that as long as liveplay podcasts and crowdfunding exist that the hobby will continue to trundle along, and that the current state of things is way better for creators since they don't have to rely solely on trying to make it by sinking their life savings into ordering 10,000 copies of their fantasy heartbreaker and only selling five or signing on with a publisher offering a penny a word for their efforts.
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Feb 15, 2018 04:20
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LongDarkNight posted:It's like boiling a frog, after awhile turn up the heat and they'll be full indie gamers eating chicken wings to resolve bluff checks. A D&D club just formed on my campus and I kind of want to join in just to turn them away from the dark side and towards better, indier RPGs. But then I, a goddamn 34 year old man, would have to interact with a bunch of annoying as gently caress young 20-something nerds and the idea of doing that makes my skin crawl.
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Feb 15, 2018 04:28
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I've slowly turned family and friends and shown them the breath of tabletop games, where they once though stratego and risk was the pinnacle of gaming, they now ask me to bring Chinatown and FCM at gatherings.
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Feb 15, 2018 04:46
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Quixotic1 posted:I've slowly turned family and friends and shown them the breath of tabletop games, where they once though stratego and risk was the pinnacle of gaming, they now ask me to bring Chinatown and FCM at gatherings. Nice, but Stratego IS the pinnacle of tabletop games. It just happens to be the kid version, while the adult version is called Napoleon’s Triumph.
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Feb 15, 2018 04:54
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I don't talk to normies
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Feb 15, 2018 04:55
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Plutonis posted:I don't talk to normies The restraining order is harsh, but fair.
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Feb 15, 2018 05:15
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LongDarkNight posted:It's like boiling a frog, after awhile turn up the heat and they'll be full indie gamers eating chicken wings to resolve bluff checks. One day, I'm already giving out 'spend these
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Feb 15, 2018 05:44
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There's a couple people who managed to go simultaneously indie and full-time, I think, but the rate is probably just as tiny as that of the video game industry. I think Kevin Crawford (Sine Nomine publishing) went full-time just off sales and Kickstarter, but it helps firstly that he tapped into several partially overlapping markets in the industry with his products (OSR, people who like the idea of Traveller but want something lighter, people who like the idea of Exalted but want something lighter, as well as sidelines into Cthulhu too) and also has the magic talents of "knows how to do his own layout including art-blocking" and "has a professional work ethic".
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Feb 15, 2018 08:07
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thelazyblank posted:The RPG industry is changing, and Kickstarter is one of the major drivers to that. Now that we're a few years in, the benefits and drawbacks of the Kickstarter model are more obvious, but it's overall a boon for the industry. Now there's far less waste than there used to be. The revenues may be lower, but so are the costs. The margins are the same they've been since the 90s, if not slightly better, for your moderately successful RPG companies, and that's all they need. Honestly, print-on-demand has been one of my favorite things about the current industry. I've bought half a dozen games from DTRPG POD at this point, and they've all be real good.
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Feb 15, 2018 08:11
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Idran posted:Increasingly live play fans too, I'd bet. The thing is, the industry needs the hobby but the hobby really doesn't need the industry. In general, outside of D&D and (when it was in its prime) World of Darkness few RPGs actually mint new roleplayers - other roleplayers have nearly always done the legwork there (with podcasts and actual play streams doing a fantastic job these days). If every single RPG company shuttered tomorrow, hobbyists would step up to replace most of them really quickly - especially since most small press publishers are basically hobbyists anyway.
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Feb 15, 2018 08:36
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Warthur posted:Plus good ol' word of mouth. Can confirm. And here's the thing about kickstarter: you know how we basically all agree rpgs are underpriced? To get into a game store, you generally need to sell books at 30% RRP or so to a distributor, who sells them at 50% RRP to a game store. So unless your book print quality is extremely low or you're pumping out a lot of them, you have essentially zero chance of even getting your book to shops in the first place. Kickstarter backers are the indie RPG buying public, for the most part. Obviously you should still have webstore/amazon presence post-campaign so people who hear about the game through word of mouth can pick it up, but kickstarter has been bloody miraculous for the indie side of the 'industry'.
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Feb 15, 2018 09:02
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This thread is almost 5 years old, and it's long since evolved from a place to take KS thread derails into its own thing. So, I'm going to go ahead and reboot it. Here is the new thread! I'll close this one soon, so continue this discussion over there if you don't want it to fall into the archives.
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