I have a theory about RPG market structure that makes a lot of people uneasy when they first hear it. It might make you feel a little uneasy, but hear me out; it’s probably not what you think.
The RPG market is structured like a terrorist group.
Now what I don’t mean is that their goals or methods are similar. I’m just looking at the structure. Both are made up of people, passion, and a fringe intellectual pursuit or activity.
An RPG gaming group is made up of a small, rather dedicated group of people centered on a de facto leader (the GM). Usually the GM is more passionate about the game than the players are, keeping up on supplies, news, and rumors. The rest of the group has one or two people who share an equal or nearly-equal passion for the game, but the others are mercenaries, hangers-on, or people with close personal connections to the group leaders.
Morlocks! Take a non-RPG gamer and send them to a convention, and I think this is what they see
Often the group meets in secret, and only reveals its presence to other groups within safe locations (game stores, conventions, online chat groups) and by secret key-words or signs (“I did say Vecna, sir. Do you know where I can find his eye?”). Some of its members are defiant, spreading their word on the internet; others are terrified of being caught. There is a central organization, but with it comes bickering over the movement’s best interest. That central organization is often seen as bending to economic (“you just want to sell us new books!”) or political will (“Hasbro made you do it!”). Passion makes individual leaders entitled to the primacy of local ideas (or the interpretation of founding ideas), which sometimes cause splintering.
I’m not saying this merely to shock (the the shock value is entertaining), I think this realization is important in understanding the RPG market. The problem is no one knows what to do with the D&D brand, because one can figure out the D&D market. And it is not just D&D. I think this is true for other RPG companies, maybe even more so because the market is smaller.
When I worked at Wizards the skinny was that D&D had brand recognition somewhere in the 90th percentile. Brand touted it to the RPGA during multiple conventions. There was hard evidence for these numbers in multiple studies. This always confused the marketers who came to Wizards from outside the RPG industry. If everyone knows your game, just beg, borrow, and steal to get them to buy it. Or at least that’s how the conventional marketing wisdom worked. Usually, often too late, they found that this impressive number has a bit of a back bite—more than half of those people know of D&D as something stupid, dorky, and done in the basement by nerdlings who have never had and will never have sex. While tabletop RPGs sit squarely in the middle of the geek hierarchy, in the greater social hierarchy it’s down there with going to porn conventions.
In other words it is anathema to those who don’t see it as a successful strategy for procreation or resource gathering, to put it purely in pseudo-Darwinian terms.
But we have to ask where this recognition comes from, and for that we go back to the 80’s machine. Even in those heydays, no more that 3% of the U.S. population played D&D. And then in 1985 the 60 Minutes program hit. Keep in mind that 60 Minutes seems passé to most of us, but it was one of the highest rated TV shows in American history. What it said about D&D was what the majority of Americans believed about D&D. When mass violence and suicides perpetrated by d20-weilding morlocks did not become an epidemic of biblical proportions, it was relegated to the status of an adolescent refuge of the maladjusted. Scared as they were at the thought the devil was channeling his energy though some black and white manuals with the occasional set of tits (or boobies as we never called them), they felt foolish when reminded that the devil isn’t real, and trivialized that which made them feel foolish. And then momentum takes over.
So while D&D has 90% brand recognition, the grand majority of those people just know it’s a game that dorks play. There has been no consistent branding, no appealing point of entry (well, not since the Dragonlance novels launched), no reason to learn any more. In reality there is no more than 20% positive brand recognition and as much as 70% negative brand recognition. With digital game and film rights in the shitter, a rival brand (splintered from the parent company by the parent company) that seems more responsive to player needs, and has the advantage of being the underdog, it becomes crucially important to know how each of those segments are structured and how they will react.
Realizing that the majority of people who recognize your brand are at best ambivalent toward it, and that the buying minority loves the brand but not necessarily its custodians, is the first step in understanding the brand and how it differs from the game. And by understanding it, we can better understand how to change it.
You know: I came back to this article to read off the bit about the market being like a terrorist group to others, and I just wanted to say that it’s pretty spot-on. I’ll probably be referring to this in the future quite a bit.
That’s all.
I suspect 5th edition timing rests completely on Essentials. If Essentials does not have legs, then they incorporate the lessons learned (hopefully) and out comes the new edition. But Essentials makes things murky, The obvious choice for a new edition would be to combine 4E with 3.5 aspects, which Essentials already does. Do you again go in a bold new direction?
The idea of PH as beta is interesting. In the MMORPG world, everything is beta and updates. It is a little different when the books end up being out of date or the casual player keeps getting corrected at the LFR table because they are again using something “pre-errata”. Even in 3.5 I saw a player using the old Righteous Might cheese and saying “I didn’t pay this much for these books to then go and use errata.” DM nodded and let him use the old rules. LOL. Anyway, my question being whether this day and age supports continual updates and beta-quality releases. I think the answer in the current format is “no”. At some point there are too many updates and too much invalidation of the purchased product. If the tools and digital books were continually/punctually updated, maybe that could change. I would probably bet on it, but I could easily be wrong.
I posted this on Twitter, but I will here as well. I get that tabletop RPGs are a small niche, and one that generally has poor brand recognition (as you’ve made clear). I wonder, though, if there have been examples of such “nerd niches” breaking out into the larger mainstream to become “un-pariahed” . If such examples exist, it would provide a template to moving games like Dungeons & Dragons out of the basement and on to the “normal” game shelf.
Comics, off the top of my head…or at least comic book characters, but comics were able to market out everywhere (movies, TV., toys, games) and haven’t been afraid of online offerings. I think what we can learn from comics is that you fight small battles of attrition. Wiz-bang confuses the terrain. Paizo has done a very good job of winning the small battles for the last few years, and their persistence has paid off.
I’m very curious as to how and why a company that is owned by perhaps the largest game company in the world doesn’t use this to their advantage. And I understand that normally parent companies (at this scale) tend to sort of not get too involved, as I work for a small company that’s part of one of the largest multinationals in the world and see it every day.
But still, the marketing for D&D is pretty horrible, if the aim is to grow the game and shake off stereotypes and misconceptions. I’ve said this before and I’ve been called a mad ranter for it, but where’s the marketing aimed at kids for D&D? It seems that the game has aged along with its 80′s audience of 8-10 year olds, and we are now living through the “approaching middle aged” epoch of D&D where things have to be simpler and more accessible to the hardcore demographic (quick once a week encounters, all sorts of digital tools to make prep really easy and quick, delve format to allow faster 3-4 hour nights, etc…). Of course, this is all wild and baseless speculation on my part, I am by no means an expert nor an insider…
I just can’t comprehend why the marketing muscle of Hasbro isn’t pushing D&D up kids noses on cartoon network, nickelodeon, etc… The clone Wars would be a perfect show to have ads running in, Hasbro certainly capitalizes on the built in audience for their marketing, yet D&D sits around like a stepson with no love. Why WOTC doesn’t push for that is beyond me, (unless they do and we don’t know it of course).
In the 80′s we had Red Box in the toy stores, we had a Saturday morning cartoon to sell the brand, and the game was on everyone’s consciousness. Even the opening scene in ET had kids playing D&D in the kitchen table, or at least a role playing game that I assume was likely D&D. D&D is no longer really part of the popular culture, and marketing has a responsibility to get it out there and make it so. Advertising on gaming store windows with stickers and in blogs ain’t gonna do it. There needs to be tv, there needs to be product placement in tv shows or movies and there needs to be ads made for kids that make D&D seems like something they’d like to try. I can’t just depend on us passing it along to our kids.
This is just my little humble opinion and of course I have no idea how the corporate dealings between Seattle and Rhode Island work, but I guess it’s just what I see as a fan who wants this to thrive and not die.
I could give you all sorts of reasons that I sussed out during my time at WotC, but I think the real answer is a lack of will. No one really wants to. I used to rant about this at meetings and was often treated like petulant child for it.
If that is truly the case, really due to simply a lack of will, then they deserve whatever is coming. Sorry to say that.
That’s just an inexcusable way to run a business.
newbiedm,
I think lack of will is not quite the reason. Its more of institutional inertia. When companies get big or are purchased by big companies there are layers of resistance that you have to overcome to get something new/untried through the gate.
That is why you see 5 bazillion versions of monopoly out there. Its easy to clone and shove out the door. Its also not burdened by being a niche market, boardgames are an generally acceptable form of entertainment that doesn’t have the huge negatives associated with the brand.
To get D&D’s negatives reversed would require a lot of money and leadership that would be willing to go down in flames doing it (and as a budding accountant, valuing intangibles as brand recognition, whether positive or negative, is incredibly subjective and makes cost benefit analysis difficult).
Further, as SRM has pointed out, Movies, TV, and eGame rights are a ginormous help in this endeavor and that venue has been closed off by the sale of those rights to 3rd parties.
I am curious how you would compare the initial 4E to the Essentials approach in terms of design and marketing. Does one of them do a better job than the other at understanding the brand and demographics?
Sort of. Essentials does a better job because it takes into account the updates and complaints that people had about the initial launch of 4e. In many was Essentials is the release of 4e, while the old PH was the beta.
This is one of the reasons that I think 4e should move to a better and more rigorous e-book model. Paizo does it really well. You want an updated PH? Download it. You want an updated Rules Compendium? Download it. Put D&D on a regular edition schedule, better e-book and online support, and integrate that with the products sold in stores. But that’s a whole ramble.
I think there was a shock at 4e because everything in the invested player’s collections was seen as nearly useless. The rules had changed. The setting had changed. Fuck, we blew up the Forgotten Realms. The FORGOTTEN REALMS! You took a game that has a large group of fans who enjoy their proficiency with the system and the genera (even though they can be a pain in the ass about it sometimes) and tell them to learn all new shit, they are going to get grumpy. They needed something to latch on to, and 4e’s handholds could be pretty meager at times. If the main base seems compromised, gamers run into the hills and sometimes splinter.
Essentials works very hard to put some of those handholds back in. Personally, I like it, but I’m a D&D wonk. I don’t know how many minds it will change on the Paizo side of the board, and I don’t know how many of the super invested 4e fans will see it as a cop-out. My guess is not very many of either. Wizards does not want to understand why Pathfinder is doing so well (and in a strange twisted 1997 version of the TSR / Wizards of the Coast relationship) denies to the last that the upstart could be doing so well. The funny part is Paizo is doing it with Wizards’s game. Dancey is the Khan of that star ship on a five year mission.
That means Essentials strength lies in its ability to make new fans—usually not a winning proposition in tabletop RPG marketing.
I think there is a chance we might see a 5th Edition in less than five years.