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Old 02-15-2018, 04:13 PM   #1175
HunterS
Marketing Director
 
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Join Date: Jan 2016
Location: Austin, TX
Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

Quote:
Originally Posted by zuljita View Post
Upon discussing DFRPG at 2 different stores here in Austin (the home town of SJ Games), I learned both times that management had never heard of it. One of the stores decided to order a copy based on the look and feel of the product once he held it in his hands. This was a guy who when I first mentioned DFRPG said "It's too hard to sell against D&D and Pathfinder, I don't order other RPGs". The demo I ran at another store got people who weren't even a part of the demo to buy a copy just from looking at the material.

This game may have had a chance to take off if it had been given more time to build a bit of word of mouth steam or some marketing dollars. It's only been in retail channels for 4 months so far right? Why are you calling it failed with so little time to build any buzz? There are ways to generate buzz before the product hits the market, but, I never saw any marketing for the product outside of GURPS fans and authors pushing the product. I saw facebook posts, by SJ Games, but never did I see targeted advertising, despite the fact that my digital footprint makes me an *easy* target for DFRPG advertising.

The market for RPGs compared with other types of games is somewhat different. They take more time to produce, to learn and to play. RPGs have a different life cycle. Treating the DFRPG box set the same way you treat Nanuk or Revolution limits its ability to succeed and prevents the wider GURPS world from growing as well.

Personally, I'd ask you to reconsider the decision to never reprint. It's an excellent product and I'm proud to be able to show off the products in the wild. It gets difficult to Demo a DF GURPS game at my FLGS if most of the material I'll be using, they can't sell.
We ran targeted ads for Dungeon Fantasy, using most of the RPG metrics as potential parameters, as well as unboxings, frequent articles and promotion via the social media channels. The Kickstarter campaign itself is one of the bigger ways to push the marketing buzz for a game that are out there; building in an audience and generating a desire for those that didn't take part in the campaign. We also ran a lot of back end support for it through retailers; if they don't know about it, they don't care or aren't looking, most likely the former based on what we've learned about FLGS stocking habits when it comes to RPGs.

4 months is an eternity in the gaming world currently, as Phil pointed out in the report and on the thread, this isn't a slow-burn market we're working in. We're talking 6 weeks for games to make an impact; 4 months is generous. We never say never, so who knows, but it's highly unlikely we're getting one any time soon as per Phil's info.
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