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View Poll Results: DFRPG Future, as whished for by Forumites
1) Just make more. 37 22.56%
2) .pdf with POD support 43 26.22%
2a) Seperate line. 10 6.10%
2b) Integrate into the DF line 67 40.85%
2c) Finish whats available, and end further production of new material. 1 0.61%
3) Simply end all further production, and place resources in other projects. 6 3.66%
Voters: 164. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 12-11-2018, 02:35 PM   #231
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Default Re: The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game?

Yeah, in the previous incarnation of the same store they had oodles of products and parking both
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Old 12-19-2018, 03:47 PM   #232
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Default Re: The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game?

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Originally Posted by DouglasCole View Post
Personally, I don't think that's what happened.

I think that they made their plans. They said "let's condense Dungeon Fantasy into something that can have a better grab-and-go potential. We're going to learn from our Ogre experience and make it into a very attractive box set, both so you have the "all you need is in the box!" factor and appealing to the sort of folks that like boxes, which includes game stores.

They did their research, they looked at the market, and said "we think that the market will support this product at a $50 price point." And they did this knowing a single DnD book costs $35-50 depending on where you get it, and "the big three" required for characters, GM advice, and monsters costs $100-150.

They set out to make it, and the Kickstarter was launched and fixed the $50 price point.

At some point during the development process, costs . . . up-front, full net-present-value baked-in costs started to pile up.

But price and cost aren't connected. If they felt that the market would only pay in the $50 price point to hit their target, that means they could only make up the baked-in sunk costs in volume.
To those of us who don't know the market this reads like "They didn't do their research" or "They underestimated the cost of X".
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Old 12-19-2018, 05:18 PM   #233
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Default Re: The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game?

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The fact that people there couldn't agree ("Action," "After the End," "Monster Hunters," "my idea of space opera," "no, mine," "no, mine," "horror," "pulp," "superheroes," "cyberpunk," "steampunk," "this one specific license," . . .) illustrates a serious obstacle for SJ Games: Any big, expensive project based on GURPS is a risk because the system covers most genres and many styles of play, and can be adapted to almost any setting – the customer base is fragmented. We don't have everybody but That Guy saying, "We need this one thing. Take our money!"; we have people pulling in all directions. Consequently, it's best to stick with the RPG hobby's most popular genre (hack 'n' slash fantasy) for the moment, and worry about whether we have enough interest to support even that.
TSR had a more extreme version of this problem:

"Picture it this way," Slavicsek says, "it's raining money outside and you want to catch as much of it as you can. You can either make a really big bucket or waste your time and attention by creating a lot really small buckets -- either way, you're never going to make more rain." In plain English, TSR, by putting out a lot of product lines instead of supporting the main Dungeons & Dragons line, fragmented the marketplace. The same audience was giving the same amount of money to TSR every year, which had taken on the additional financial burden of creating, producing, and supporting hundreds of products. It needed to grow the marketplace, and these brand extensions weren't doing that.

---
I have PDFs of Dragon Magazine (from the DVD they put out) and when you look at the RPGs and realize how many that were advertised even for their time were very nitch. There was even an RPG that promised something like GURPS (ie play in any setting) called Anywhen Universal RP (by K Society)...which as far as I can tell never actually saw the light of day.

Last edited by maximara; 12-20-2018 at 05:03 AM.
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Old 12-19-2018, 05:22 PM   #234
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Slight difference, in the 80's it was all but impossible to determine if a game was 'good' before you bought it.

Now however with the multiplicity of reviewers online, it's almost impossible to not know if a game is 'good' before you buy it.

Note, this doesn't hold with Kickstarter, but that is it's own separate can of worms.
Yet there are millions who preorder games...ie before the reviews come out.

IMHO a plug in for Tabletop Simulator might have helped. Oh wait somebody already did that

Last edited by maximara; 12-19-2018 at 05:33 PM.
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Old 12-19-2018, 07:48 PM   #235
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Default Re: The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game?

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To those of us who don't know the market this reads like "They didn't do their research" or "They underestimated the cost of X".
Based on the Report to the Stakeholders, I vote "They underestimated the development stage costs." Phil explicitly mentioned management hours being higher than planned.
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Old 12-20-2018, 06:20 AM   #236
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Default Re: The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game?

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Based on the Report to the Stakeholders, I vote "They underestimated the development stage costs." Phil explicitly mentioned management hours being higher than planned.
Lots of things ended up costing more than planned.

I'll take my share of the blame: From 1995 to present (in fact, I really started in late 1994, so call it 24 years), I've worked on precisely one boxed set, and the Dungeon Fantasy RPG was it. I'm positive I made some bad calls on what should go in the box, especially how many books; on how thick box-sized books could get and still fit in the box; on how much content would fit in one box-sized book; and on the amount of work required to do the non-game-design parts, such as layout, art, and print-buying (all of which I've worked on zero times).

My role played out largely throughout February-August 2016. The parts between August 2016 and November 2017 had very little to do with me, so I'm not going to talk about those. I don't doubt they had at least as great an effect on costs – maybe more – but (1) I don't have the numbers to prove that, and (2) I have no desire to place blame on others, only to take my share of it.

I will say that there were "surprises" we couldn't have anticipated. The factors leading up to the changes discussed here ("reducing staff, cutting down overhead expenses, and limiting our presence at conventions") were many and complex, and not the fault of any one product line or Kickstarter. Nor were they they entirely a result of staff misjudging costs or the market, or of customers not buying enough copies. As Phil said in the linked Illuminator, these are "trying times."
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Old 12-20-2018, 10:44 AM   #237
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Default Re: The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game?

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Yet there are millions who preorder games...ie before the reviews come out.
I'd love to see references for "millions who preorder games" in this market. Because . . . well . . . just . . . wow.

Millions? Really?

Yes. I want to see any data that supports this claim.
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Old 12-20-2018, 11:02 AM   #238
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I'd love to see references for "millions who preorder games" in this market. Because . . . well . . . just . . . wow.

Millions? Really?

Yes. I want to see any data that supports this claim.
And just to throw down what imperfect data we have a bit:

I've seen the TTRPG market pegged at varying between $25-40M total, including Kickstarter, on any given year.

D&D5e seems to have roughly 40-60% of this market.

That means on the low end, $10M in D&D stuff, on the high end, $25M.

D&D books retail for $50; that means 200,000 to 500,000 book-equivalents per year. If half of that is the player's handbook, the one book everyone needs, we're talking the most popular single RPG book on the market is 100,000 to 250,000 copies per year.

Now, that's a BLOODY TON of books. But it's a near-lock that it's in a class by itself.

I should note that if any substantial part of the "D&D revenue" is a bunch of money in "not-books," then that brings the upper bound of what success looks like down quite a bit. So that's likely a truly optimistic number.
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Last edited by DouglasCole; 12-20-2018 at 11:06 AM.
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Old 12-20-2018, 03:45 PM   #239
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Default Re: The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game?

Perceptions of how many gamers there are ("Millions!"), how many dollars they spend ("Hundreds of millions!"), how many copies of gaming products publishers sell ("Hundreds of thousands!"), and how much game designers earn ("Ferraris! Huge houses with swimming pools!") have always been inflated. It's sobering when you learn that – D&D aside – a game with 1,000 fans is incredibly popular, a gamer who can afford more than $100 of gaming stuff in a year is a fantastically big spender, a game that sells hundreds of copies is doing well (and one in the thousands is doing astonishingly well), and that most game designers earn below the national median, and many live in smallish apartments and could do better on minimum wage. Games hobbyists confine reality-checking to their games, not to their hobby.

At its pinnacle, during its golden age, GURPS had perhaps 10,000 fans, most picked up 5-6 books a year, 5,000 copies was a huge print run, and at least my pay was below the national median (or even the median for editors). These days, I'd say "a few thousand fans," "a couple of cheap PDFs a year," "we haven't sold even 1,000 of anything printed in recent memory," and my pay is below the national median/median for editors by a greater margin.

I'm talking about pen-and-paper RPGs here, and more specifically GURPS. The numbers are better for D&D and its spinoffs, and orders of magnitude better for digital games. I personally know people semi-retired in their 40s after work on the digital side. I'm 51 and I won't be retiring.
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Old 12-20-2018, 07:08 PM   #240
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Default Re: The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game?

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I'd love to see references for "millions who preorder games" in this market. Because . . . well . . . just . . . wow.
Well, if 'games' includes computer games maybe, but certainly not for tabletop or board games.
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