Quote from: Trond on October 16, 2023, 05:15:59 PM

Quote from: Fheredin on October 16, 2023, 12:01:35 PM

Quote from: Trond on October 16, 2023, 09:31:29 AM
As a side note, MTG at one point nearly killed the RPG industry. This was one of the reasons for the huge problems for RPG publishers in the 90s (though many brought it on themselves, there was also a general shift towards more card games). I've been holding a grudge against MTG and WotC ever since  😄

I wasn't in the RPG and tabletop game scene during the 90s, but I was under the impression that the big shakeup in the RPG scene was TSR going bankrupt and being bought by Wizards, so the RPG market suffered from bad leadership until the OGL. ....

Why do you think TSR were losing money? I remember that at the time, a lot of people pointed to a shift among gamers to MtG and similar card games as the reason. ICE also tried to get on the card bandwagon, only to not be able to sell as much as they hoped, and they went bust too.

Aggressive litigation burning down community good will. TSR sued all sorts of people in the late 80s and early 90s, ranging from Mayfair games to Gygax himself and sent cease and desist orders to fans. When Magic came around, LGSes intentionally pushed MTG instead of D&D, in part because they could get more revenue from MTG at the time and in part as a form of retribution for man-handling the community.

I don't think that MTG displaced D&D's revenue; I think that LGSes wanted to protest TSR's behavior and picked MTG for their protest vote instead of another RPG because they could make more revenue with MTG. LGSes picked the winner.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on October 16, 2023, 05:43:27 PM

Quote from: Thor's Nads on October 16, 2023, 05:25:57 PM


It is FLGS that run the local tournaments, and foster the local gaming communities that buy WotC products. Games without community are dead. So WotC screwing FLGS for every little penny is killing their business.

If WOTC is betting their entire farm on digital then their communities will be online. They no longer think that they need physical gathering places for communities. When you have suits who use terms such as under-monetization and have likely never played an rpg in their lives making the decisions for a gaming company you end up with shit like this. If these idiots knew anything about the actual TTRPG community then they would know that VTT play is what you settle for when you can't get or are unable to attend, a face to face group. So they are making their primary market focus, the second tier "good enough" option of the whole hobby.

First, I 100% agree with Thor's Nads that screwing over the FLGSes is business suicide.

Second, while I understand the logic of pushing these games online, I think it's moronic if you actually think about it. Online gaming exposes you to ctompetition from video games , which makes it practically impossible to grow a player base while online. I think that WotC's own VTT is probably going to end poorly because Baldur's Gate 3 costs about as much as their VTT's subscription and there's already rumors of a VTT mod for BG3. The only future left for WotC is to slowly bleed players, both on D&D and MTG, because these games simply can't compete in the online space.

I sort of recall the TSR collapse as a combination of things. First off, the early 80's D&D bump was always a fad and TSR saw itself scrambling to return to that era of sales in the late 80's/early 90's. One response was a massive glut of material being created and released. Some good(Dark Sun, Birthright, Planescape), but a lot was pretty bad. Meanwhile Waldenbooks and B Dalton were in death spirals for their own reasons and then Magic sucked all the oxygen out of the gaming market. So when Walden/B Dalton decided to return all the unsold TSR stock back to help their own financials, that bankrupted TSR.

Even the warehouse book stores are basically dead these days. We can probably thank Magic that LGS have stayed around as long as they have. If WoTC abandons them(which looks like what will happen), I'm not sure how they'll evolve. The Games Workshop stores and places that focus on 40k/Fantasy Flight Games stuff(Netrunner, Star Wars) will likely do okay.

Quote from: Dracones on October 16, 2023, 11:40:06 PM
I sort of recall the TSR collapse as a combination of things. First off, the early 80's D&D bump was always a fad and TSR saw itself scrambling to return to that era of sales in the late 80's/early 90's. One response was a massive glut of material being created and released. Some good(Dark Sun, Birthright, Planescape), but a lot was pretty bad. Meanwhile Waldenbooks and B Dalton were in death spirals for their own reasons and then Magic sucked all the oxygen out of the gaming market. So when Walden/B Dalton decided to return all the unsold TSR stock back to help their own financials, that bankrupted TSR.

Even the warehouse book stores are basically dead these days. We can probably thank Magic that LGS have stayed around as long as they have. If WoTC abandons them(which looks like what will happen), I'm not sure how they'll evolve. The Games Workshop stores and places that focus on 40k/Fantasy Flight Games stuff(Netrunner, Star Wars) will likely do okay.

I agree, it was a combination of things that brought down TSR, not just MtG cards and the explosion of its popularity.

Petersen and Riggs in their histories of TSR make a very convincing, evidence-backed argument that the TSR under Lorraine Williams was arguably better-run than under the profligate spending and chaotic management styles of Gary & Co., but that their product publications of the late 1980's and 90's really sank the company. The actual, end cause of the collapse was the handling of their distribution agreement which caused a huge cash crunch at the end, but the profitability of TSR had already dropped precipitously and into the red due to a lousy publication strategy.

Riggs lays out with sales numbers that all of those wonderful settings and creative publications put out by TSR in second edition did not sell well at all, and were in the aggregate financial losers—despite all of our collective love of those products. Campaign settings are not money-makers at all, and divided the TSR customer base into tiny slices. The Buck Rogers experiment was a huge failure that not only lost TSR money on sales, but saw big money paid to the Williams family for the license, in a nifty insider profit scheme. Spellfire could have worked, but TSR only put enough resources into the game to lose money and did not support it well enough to compete with MtG. Dragon Dice was another hugely expensive flop. Books kept the company afloat in terms of profits during these years, but TSR did a lousy job of actually managing that division by screwing talent and not recognizing the actual dynamics of running a publishing house. As a game company trying to make actual profits off of their products, TSR was a really bad company all during second edition, despite how great it may have been creatively.

Quote from: Trond on October 16, 2023, 09:31:29 AM
As a side note, MTG at one point nearly killed the RPG industry. This was one of the reasons for the huge problems for RPG publishers in the 90s (though many brought it on themselves, there was also a general shift towards more card games). I've been holding a grudge against MTG and WotC ever since  😄

MTG at one point was keeping my FLGS afloat, while the comics market was going through a crash, and RPGs were in their usual doldrums.

The 1990s were a rough time for publishing in general.

There were widespread paper shortages that made the cost of paperbacks and comics more than double.

RPG books did not shoot up in price, perhaps due to a perception that the market would not bear it. I suspect that profit margins dropped instead.

In the sci fi book market, they basically doubled down on their a-listers to shore up profits, with the unfortunate side effect being that they stopped elevating writers from the midlists, with the exception of big fat fantasy writers. Writers like Walter Jon Williams, who should have been elevated to grandmaster status, instead found themselves struggling to stay afloat. Midlist authors like Jack Chalker found that their comfortable niches no longer existed.

Marvel Comics went into bankruptcy, and it was only their movie licenses that kept them afloat.

I've seen people saying that Disney's Lorcana (or whatever it's called) might be the white knight that can save the FLGS by filling the void left by MtG. Not sure I'd want to get into bed with Disney given what they're going through, but it's better than closing the doors...

Quote from: Fheredin on October 16, 2023, 12:01:35 PM

I wasn't in the RPG and tabletop game scene during the 90s, but I was under the impression that the big shakeup in the RPG scene was TSR going bankrupt and being bought by Wizards

No this was something very real that happened 2-3 years before any visible problems with TSR. In my city a lot of gamers just stopped playing RPGs and became MTG players. It was pretty spectacular actually. Complete change in the hobby, around '94 or '95. White Wolf was off the boil as well after being the huge fad preceding this one, so it felt like the whole RPG hobby imploded.

Quote from: HorusZA on October 16, 2023, 08:53:34 AM
I had a chat with the owner of my FLGS a little while back and he said that pre-COVID he'd get around 150 players for a pre-release tournament. Now he's lucky if 20 people show up.

He says that during COVID lots of people started playing online via MtG: Arena... and they haven't returned to buy physical cards or play in physical events. It's just so much easier and convenient to play online.

Wait till WotC shuts down those online servers. Because it WILL eventually happen. The MTG players just have not yet gotten the wakeup call other online CCG players have gotten. That these things are ephemeral and then all that money you spent on electronic cards is gone and you dont even have the cards.