NeoGrognard

I am always fascinated by the Origins Awards. Like any awards it’s filled with its own politics and strangeness…and few have been stranger than the Origins Awards, but that’s not what fascinates me. What fascinates me is that no matter the year, no matter how on top I feel I am about the RPG gaming industry, there are always surprises—games or game items that never blipped on my radar becoming nominated or winning big. I always learn something about the state of the game industry.

And that always leads me to believe that there are more RPG products out there than there is consumer demand.

It’s really not that simple, though. It’s not just the whims of crazy RPG manufactures gone crazy and churning out product, though producing RPGs is a great work when you can get it. The reason we have so many games and game supplements on the market is because the customers demand them. The RPG gamer is always asking for more. They have an insatiable appetite. Too bad they don’t have limitless pocketbooks.

To make up a statistic on the top of my head, I would say that less than 5% of RPG gamers play more than three RPGs regularly. By regularly, I mean once a month. I think I’m being conservative. I also don’t think most RPG gamers try a new RPG more than twice a year. It may be wishful thinking on my part, I think game sale are most directly affected by people who actually do play the game regularly. I think a good regular stable of regular RPG users is the difference between the long life of an RPG and a flash in the pan.

There are the fiddler gamers. The ones that want to try or read or just buy everything. But at best they are a very small piece of the pie. There is also the reader or the brand completist, self-proclaimed gamers who hardly play, but read or just collect all the titles of their favorite game brand. There are ways to manage these players. Good distribution helps. Not only does Paizo do a really good job of keeping the stable or regular players, their subscription model works wonders for locking down the reader and the completist.

An incomplete pile of the products I’ve received from Paizo by way of my Pathfinder subscriptions in the past two months. I have no idea when I will get a chance to read most of them, not to mention play them. Such is the plight of the completist.

Even the self-proclaimed RPG gamers who doesn’t play a single game in the course of a year, is often on message boards and such asking for more products. They want a Feywild book. They want more support for the Assassin. They want an RPG based on their favorite genre or intellectual property. There is a segment of the RPG gamer that is very vocal, very opinionated, and very persistent. And more often than not, companies or individuals who are interested in making companies step into that perceived demand.

Unfortunately more often than not, the internet is an echo chamber. A single voice forcefully put out there can seem louder than it truly is. When the product finally comes out, companies can be very surprised and the relatively low level of sales, or worse still, the product gets panned. That’s another secret of the loud internet proponent, they often have a strict idea of the exact product they want in mind, and are strangely intolerant of any deviation in the theoretical book that is already in their head.

More often than not, modern RPG supplements will bump up their sales with the addition of crunch—rules bits that give us the impression that they are immediately usable and desirable because they talk directly to the game, even when they are not. This near constant addition to a game also has its price. It clutters a system, sometime to the point of congestion.

Right now there are 6,298 powers shared by the various classes, paragon paths, epic destinies, feats, and races of 4e D&D. The game is only 2 years old. With the Essentials line coming out this fall, we are going to see new builds for the main classes (cleric, fighter, ranger, rogue, and wizard in the Heroes of the Fallen Lands; and the cleric, druid, paladin, ranger, and warlock in Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdom, if the  blurbs are to be believed. Maybe we are getting two new builds of the ranger?). This weekend, I ran a one-off for a group of players; most of them have Dungeons & Dragons Insider accounts and buy the newest books. Two of them are active in the RPGA. None of them could tell you the role and the power source of the seeker class from Player’s Handbook 3.

Eventually, when your player-base stops caring about the new options or feels like new options are too daunting, they’ll either keep what they have or they will find new things to do. RPG gamers can handle a lot of complexity, but eventually fatigue sets in. It also doesn’t help when you design things that the customer didn’t “know they wanted” or that are not very iconic, even when a group of players have asked for them (martial controller, I’m looking at you!). After a while the signal to noise ratio becomes so off-balanced, its hard to find the signal.

But hey, that may be the RPG game industry in a nutshell. At least that’s usually the way I feel when the Origins Awards winners come down the pike. I mean nothing disparaging to the winners and the nominees. Like many of us, I have discovered some truly great games or at least great game concepts and ideas because of the Origins Awards over the years. I just get the sickening feeling our supply is much greater than any real demand, and that’s why the game industry sees so many bubbles. May, though, the problem is more complex.