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Yes, everybody is doing it. đ
Iâm with Justin Alexander: it will almost certainly fail, ie. I donât think D&D 5E will have significantly more success than D&D 4E and thus it wonât make the mystical $50 million in annual sales.
Here is what I would do.
First, Iâd decide that the business plans after the publication of the D&D 3.0 core books failed. Ryan Dancy said: We make more revenue and more profit from our core rulebooks than any other part of our product lines. The only thing that really seems to work in the very long term is to publish a core set of rules and keep publishing until there is general consensus that they need updating. If so, fix them. See Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Tunnels & Trolls. Everything else is just âa giant, self-financing marketing program to drive sales of those core booksâ (Ryan Dancy again).
Second, Iâd understand that this doesnât need a lot of R&D, support, web design, and so on. Sure, all these dudes would like a paying job in the role-playing game industry, but it just doesnât seem to work that way. Thus, *scale everything down*. Scale down to the size of Paizo, and if the market wonât bear it, scale down to Mongoose, or to a one man show. If the market picks up again, grow.
Third, I would leverage the D&D *brand*. Money can still be made, but it will be in the things surrounding the business of selling the core book. It will be in licenses to run D&D in after school programs, that kind of thing. Tavis Allison wrote On Monetizing RPG Play. Be sure to read Zak S.âs counter arguments in the comments.
For me, it all comes down to the problem Dan Proctor wrote about in 2010 on Product vs. Service and Brand Dilemmas (well, minus the pulling of legs when it comes to the âsolutionâ he proposes đ).
Product vs. Service and Brand Dilemmas
What if âDungeons & Dragonsâ were less about a product and more about an experience? What if we can dispel the entire idea of âeditionsâ from consumers of Dungeons & Dragons? The edition angle worked for a while, but the mileage on that is running out. Is there really going to be a D&D 10e? No, it just wonât work. The whole paradigm of editions suggests a ârebootâ and the expectations that customers will have to buy the exact same material again and again, though retooled for however the rules have been changed. I think we can convince people less often that our new edition is âthe best everâ every few years. This seems to lead to a significant proportion of consumer resentment.
Instead of spending big bucks on a fifth edition, Iâd *keep the old stuff available*. Theyâre all good. There is no âevolutionâ in games because there is no selection process except in the head of marketing. There is no improved Risk, no improved chess, no improved Monopoly, no improved poker â the games are just fine the way they are. If they sold well when they got released it was because they were good games. They are still good games! There are, of course, better resource management games, less abstract war games, more colorful card games â more and different games! Thatâs why it is OK to have the old and the new side by side.
Itâs true that keeping the old stuff available probably doesn't make the company a lot of money, but I think itâs important to do in order switch from an edition churn based business to a brand based business.
doesn't make the company a lot of money
Fourth, now that we have focused again on our core business, the printing of the one book and on making the old stuff available (and improve the bad scans as time goes by, accepting the help of âpiratesâ and other fans and volunteers where possible), we can act as a *curator and publisher of third party products*. Take what the {DIY do it yourself} people are doing and select the stuff you like best, procure the license to republish it, commission art, do the layout, print it, distribute it, have your own shop on the web like many of the small publishers do. Donât encourage rules bloat. Encourage adventures and settings and new things that we havenât seen yet. I like maldoorâs idea of roll your own rules: I choose the rules for my next campaign and get to buy a {POD print on demand} edition of the specific chapters and options I want, both for me and for my players. The black and white or color, stapled, softcover or hardcover, no art, line-art, glossy colors â I get to choose my own. Maybe I can upload the house-rule section for my campaign and theyâll put it in the appendix, too!
Fifth, *have a good time*! Play, talk, tweet and post about your games. There is no need for a fancy Gleemax. There is no need for your own virtual table. Use EN World to post news, grant existing virtual table top publishers the license to use your rules for their software.
Here is a comment by Sean Robson on somebody elseâs blog explaining what most of us intuit:
This, and any other edition that WotC publishes, will ultimately fail because to capture the hearts and minds of players a game needs to be a labour of love, not a labour of profit.
âŽ
You wonât make 50M or a 100M USD this way, thatâs true. It also means less jobs in the RPG industry. In my attempt to stop the shameful firing of employees before Christmas, I would have prevented them from getting hired in the first place. In my attempt to prevent the crashing and burning of a new, short-lived edition in a few years, I would have prevented it from getting funded in the first place.
Small is beautiful. I guess I donât need an 800 lb gorilla. Iâm happy with indie games (âhipster gamesâ as they were called on Fear the Boot), Iâm happy with small publishers, with {DIY do it yourself} players and referees and their blogs and their forums and their tweets and their circles. Commercialism, Consumerism â let go of your stranglehold. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
â#RPG
