Quote from: GrimGentIncidentally, for the last month Changeling: The Lost has been the bestselling RPG in this country: it's been holding the #1 spot on the list of the most popular products at the local chain of gaming stores ever since it was released. D&D comes in at #9 with the PHB.

That actually proves the point.  A book that has technically been in print since the beginning of our hobby holds a spot in the top 10.  Lots of new games have a time in the spotlight, and then fade away...while D&D products continue to sell at an impressive rate untill they go out of print for a new edition.

If you were a publisher, would you rather have a book at #1 for a month or two and sell 100,000 copies, or have a book that stays on the charts from the day you print it till you stop ptinint it selling 50,000 copies a month?

P.S.  I better add that those numbers are purely fictitious, stated simply to make the point.

Quote from: grubmanA book that has technically been in print since the beginning of our hobby holds a spot in the top 10.  Lots of new games have a time in the spotlight, and then fade away...while D&D products continue to sell at an impressive rate untill they go out of print for a new edition.

It's a steady seller, true. You can generally count on that PHB being somewhere in the top 15, even when the list otherwise isn't overwhelmingly dominated by D&D.

Quote from: KrakaJakI think this should be addressed:

I DO NOT think the "RPG Industry" relies on D&D. I think if D&D 4 tanks...then RPG's wil be fine and another game (or group of games...evening out the marketplace a bit) will fill the RPG void.

I somewhat agree, but not quite. The reason that Wizards are able to support the behemoth (by RPG industry standards) that is D&D is that they've got the cash and infrastructure to back it up: they can afford to print massive print runs of major rulebooks, they can convince the distributors to buy those books in large quantities and distribute them to both game stores and the mainstream book industry in large quantities.

If D&D sank like a stone, I'm not sure that there's very many RPG companies at all who could step up to the bat and fill the gap - at least not immediately. White Wolf are the only company who really operate on anything approaching Wizards' scale, if the charts in Comics and Games Retailer are to be believed, and I don't think all those suddenly-disenfranchised D&D players are going to switch to the World of Darkness or something: those who have any interest in those games probably already own them. World of Darkness sales may remain strong - they might even get stronger - but they won't match current D&D sales.

In the absence of an obvious replacement for D&D immediately appearing on the scene, two things will happen:

a) Firstly, those gamers who are only interested in D&D will shrug, stick to their D&D manuals, and stop buying new RPG products. This will cause the market to shrink, probably significantly.

b) Secondly, those gamers who want to buy new products will diversify. They won't all go for one particular game - they'll go for dozens of different games. The ~50% market share that Wizards enjoys will fragment and be scattered amongst a dozen different competing companies - and because no one company will get the lion's share, no RPG company will acquire the funds necessary to give the support to their flagship game that Wizards gives to D&D.

The demise of D&D won't immediately cause the death of the industry, but it will badly damage the marketplace, which will inevitably cause the industry to shrink. Game shops will close or reduce the selection of RPGs they carry. People will have to turn to ordering stuff online more often, because of the disappearance of Friendly Local Game Shops. The RPG hobby will, therefore, lose much of its visibility (especially since D&D will disappear from the shelves of mainstream book stores): people will only stumble across it if they actually google for it, and they'll only know to google for it if they already know what they're looking for. The hobby will therefore gain less new blood, and will shrink, thus compressing the market even more.

Perhaps the contraction of the market will force enough small companies out of business for a larger company to gobble up their market share, to the point where a single game line establishes dominance, which will allow its publisher to make enough money to support it more, which will mean more product coming out and renewed interest from distributors, which will mean that the industry will begin to grow again. Perhaps the howling war of competing publishers will tear the industry apart and it will die. But the death of D&D would herald a very dark time indeed for the RPG industry, and it's by no means certain that the industry will survive that. No sane person wants to risk that.

Of course, it probably won't happen. If D&D flops as an RPG, Hasbro will either a) sell it off or b) keep the trademark for the profitable miniatures game and computer game licences, but will probably be inclined to licence the RPG rights to some other company if the approach is made correctly. White Wolf can probably afford to acquire the licence, and they'll put out a new version of D&D and hopefully learn not to make whatever terrible mistakes Wizards made to kill D&D, and the industry will survive. The D&D trademark is valuable, at least in gaming industry terms - too valuable to kill off.

Quote from: GrimGentIncidentally, for the last month Changeling: The Lost has been the bestselling RPG in this country: it's been holding the #1 spot on the list of the most popular products at the local chain of gaming stores ever since it was released. D&D comes in at #9 with the PHB.

Think that might have something to do with the fact 4E was announced a couple weeks ago?

Quote from: HaffrungThink that might have something to do with the fact 4E was announced a couple weeks ago?

Probably not: it's not as though PHB is usually at the top at other times, either. But it's interesting that out of the actual RPG books, the only other D&D product on the list is The Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk. Both Warhammer (Tome of Salvation) and GURPS (Martial Arts) have one book each in there. WoD has five.

(Hmm. #15 is Tähti, the new Finnish game about teenage mutant popstars in a girl band of the near future. That's a little unexpected.)

Quote from: GrimGentIncidentally, for the last month Changeling: The Lost has been the bestselling RPG in this country: it's been holding the #1 spot on the list of the most popular products at the local chain of gaming stores ever since it was released. D&D comes in at #9 with the PHB.

Which country are you in , Grimgent?
(YOu don't have an identified location in your profile)


Every month of those Comics & Games Retailer charts - D&D/D20 is the topseller.  I really doubt that in 2 month's time  the charts for either September or August will show D&D dropping out of #1.


- Ed C.

Quote from: KoltarWhich country are you in , Grimgent?

Finland. Things are a tad different over here: while all in all D&D undoubtedly remains the most popular single RPG, it's nowhere near the only alternative even for beginners, and the general public is more likely to associate gaming with LARP than it.

Dude, its Finland. Making statements about gamer-trends based on what's going on in Finland, or that Finland has any kind of protagonism in the RPG Industry at all, is a bit like claiming that "Madonna must be very unpopular because relatively few people in Burkina Faso know who she is", or "my poll taken at a BDSM Fetishists Convention indicates that vanilla sex is relatively unpopular worldwide these days".

Indeed, the very fact that D&D has a presence in Finland at all should speak just how significant D&D's presence really is.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditIndeed, the very fact that D&D has a presence in Finland at all should speak just how significant D&D's presence really is.

Well, let's not forget that around here someone interested in learning more about RPGs can visit the local libraries and find translations of Forge games rather than D&D. Actually, it's more probable that he'd find RuneQuest than D&D, since most libraries seem to have translated copies of that available. You can expect the average young Finn to be reasonably skilled in English (since our educational system isn't too shabby), but for children that sort of easy access might make all the difference.

And it does bring up a point, that D&D's role in the industry in english-speaking countries is something entirely different than it's role in non-english speaking countries.  My LGS carries a pretty complete line of french rpgs (both french-produced games and translated games) and WotC has a much smaller footprint on those shelves.  It's still pretty big, but nothing like the english shelves, which is about half Wizards products.  If the french rpg industry is anything like the french (well, belgian) comics book industry, there is a whole lot of stuff going on out there that most of us have never heard of.  

If D&D were to die today, I think it would really hurt the retail outlets and the larger online stores, but I don't think it would hurt the hobby at all (as was mentioned above, D&D players would just keep doing what they are doing and others would still have tons of great gaming options).  I suspect the second-tier companies would benefit, though it would be tricky and depend on some strategic marketing and smart business decisions to take advantage of the vacuum left by D&D.  Some would get hurt too.

After it all washes out, I don't think the industry would be dead.  It would morph and grow into something else.

And it could be possible for D&D to die, if it wasn't profitable and Hasbro strangled it, but wouldn't sell it to anyone for a low enough price, there might not be a buyer with the capital and competencies to revive the line.  That happened post-TSR and it was only because of the massive success of Magic that WotC was able to buy D&D.

Quote from: GrimGentWell, let's not forget that around here someone interested in learning more about RPGs can visit the local libraries and find translations of Forge games rather than D&D. Actually, it's more probable that he'd find RuneQuest than D&D, since most libraries seem to have translated copies of that available. You can expect the average young Finn to be reasonably skilled in English (since our educational system isn't too shabby), but for children that sort of easy access might make all the difference.

Holy crap, that is awesome.  Man, you can't even find D&D books in the library around here.

Quote from: KoltarWhich country are you in , Grimgent?
(YOu don't have an identified location in your profile)


Every month of those Comics & Games Retailer charts - D&D/D20 is the topseller.  I really doubt that in 2 month's time  the charts for either September or August will show D&D dropping out of #1.

I believe the difference between the C&GR charts and the ones GrimGent is citing is that the C&GR charts cover entire game lines - so the "Dungeons & Dragons" entry in them covers every single manual, supplement, and adventure put out by Wizards for D&D - whilst GrimGent's charts cover individual products.

So, it's entirely believable that the PHB could zoom up and down in GrimGent's charts, even though when you take entire game lines into accounts D&D is number one in C&GR all the time. (In fact, the fact that the PHB is nigh-always in GrimGent's charts says a lot - it means that there's plenty of people, every month, who want additional copies of the core D&D books, which says fabulous things about the game's health.) At the same time, a product can zoot to the top of GrimGent's chart and still not be the best-selling game line in a particular month if there aren't any other products for that game line selling.

Quote from: walkerpMan, you can't even find D&D books in the library around here.

I couldn't find those, either. I'm not entirely sure why, but none of the libraries in this town have ever stocked D&D. Still, they do have Pendragon, Ars Magica, Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu, Dark Conspiracy, and so on.

Quote from: GrimGentI couldn't find those, either. I'm not entirely sure why, but none of the libraries in this town have ever stocked D&D. Still, they do have Pendragon, Ars Magica, Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu, Dark Conspiracy, and so on.

Which town are you in? What section are RPGs in? Not that I have a right to expect much, but I haven't had much luck finding anything I can read in libraries since moving to Finland.

It's cool that Finnish libraries have enough funding that they can buy gaming books that hardly anyone will read just because, I suspect, one of the guys who works there is a hardcore RPG player.

However, I have to wonder how useful it is to able to borrow an RPG for a couple weeks at a time. I mean, if you're going to actually play the game, you need the books on-hand every session.