The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game?

[maximara]

Originally Posted by philreed

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.

Go to http://www.vgchartz.com/preorders/42197/USA/ add up the first 10 games. Generally you will hit a million and unless they are doing something weird that list starts at position 11 ie there are 10 games that got higher preorders then the first one listed.

Super Smash Bros. (2018) alone is near the million mark with 977,925 pre orders and there are 10 games that were preordered that are higher then that. That is $9.7 million minimum right there.

The PnP game world though is IMHO in serious decline. What GURPS needs is a way to bring it into the computer world. Since in house development is unviable then see what can be done with that is already out there (preferably open source and cross platform). This is why I prefer GURPS Character Sheet over GURPS Character Assistant as I use a Mac (the first being free is just gravy)

[philreed]

Originally Posted by maximara

Go to http://www.vgchartz.com/preorders/42197/USA/ add up the first 10 games. Generally you will hit a million and unless they are doing something weird that list starts at position 11 ie there are 10 games that got higher preorders then the first one listed.

This information is irrelevant to the discussion. Please take video game discussions to the appropriate place.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Well, if 'games' includes computer games maybe, but certainly not for tabletop or board games.

It's not at all what is being discussed and is an unnecessary tangent.

If anyone has solid preorder information -- outside of Kickstarter and crowdfunding -- on physical games in the board, card, and RPG markets, that's worth exploring.

Discussions of video games of all sorts is elsewhere.

[Kromm]

Speaking as this forum's moderator and the designer of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, I want to agree with Phil: Take discussion of digital games elsewhere.

Why?

I play (well, played . . . not so much of late) tons of digital games as well as tabletop games. I work in tabletop games, and know many people in both my industry and the digital-games business (notably at Ubisoft Montréal, which employs ~3,500 people). Here's my experience:

• My video-games-playing friends have essentially zero overlap with my tabletop-games-playing friends. Most of those in one group consider me weird for also being part of the other group.
  
  
• Almost no brick-and-mortar stores where I live sell both kinds of games. I say "almost" only because I think there might be this one place I've never been to, in a UA of 3.5 million people with dozens of games shops, that deals in both.
  
  
• While I know people who left the tabletop industry for the digital-games industry, most stopped not just working on but also playing tabletop games. Nobody I know changed industries in the other direction.

It's all anecdotal, I know, but from both a personal and professional perspective, I don't see enough meaningful overlap to bring up the topic of digital games here. The rare few overlaps that exist are exceptions to the rule, and noteworthy for being outliers. Chasing the dream of becoming one of the exceptions, one of the outliers, is a sucker's bet, and not part of "The Future of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game."

What's on-topic here are things where the bulk of the work is writing, editing, layout, and art – that is, books and the associated PDFs. Coding, graphics, sound, AI, level design, etc. is a whole other world, and one nobody in a position to make decisions here knows anything about.

[maximara]

Digging around I found this interesting statement:

"One thing that HAS been proven out based on information collected from a lot of publishers is that there are diminishing returns on supplements and sourcebooks compared to core books or core sets. Much of that can be intuited from the target audience, too - books that are only useful to GMs (like adventures, etc) aren't going to be bought by all of the players. White Wolf struck a huge chord with gamers because their splat books were useable by everyone. That's why that model has stuck around for so long." - How big's the RPG market?

This doesn't bode well for the DR series as I am seeing the same sort of book bloat I saw back with TSR's version of AD&D1-2 ala "Complete book of (class)" Yes they are smaller books with a much smaller page counts but it tends to result in a fragmented product based on what I saw in my AD&D days.

[Tom H.]

Originally Posted by Kromm

"we haven't sold even 1,000 of anything printed in recent memory,"

However, wouldn't you want to include the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game itself.

According to the Kickstarter page:
"1,587 backers pledged $176,450 to help bring this project to life."

In addition, Warehouse 23 is showing that all the extra copies are out of stock.

This game isn't specifically GURPS itself, but it's close enough. It's been noted that DFRPG drew primarily from the GURPS base. I think it should qualify as an example of a direction that inspired over 1,000 prints.

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

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.

Board Games and minis must be a much bigger market then.


Even one game, Gloomhaven, has by now done many millions. That's a very successful game, but looking through just the games I've back on Kickstarter its still 10s of millions of dollars.



At a guess I'm going to say that worldwide even just total number of board game cafes (food sales, beer, coffee and actual games) do more than $25M a year.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by lachimba

Board Games and minis must be a much bigger market then.


Even one game, Gloomhaven, has by now done many millions.

At a guess I'm going to say that worldwide even just total number of board game cafes (food sales, beer, coffee and actual games) do more than $25M a year.

Yes. The board game market is something like 100x the TTRPG market, and the video game market is 10x the boardgame market. (I then got real numbers below)

That's why folks upthread consider video games especially simply irrelevant to the discussion. In 2018 dollars, a single video game title costs more to develop and market than the entire expected total available market for ALL TTRPGs. The global video game market today - compared to the TTRPG market of $25-40M - is estimated at $90,000 to 95,000 MILLION. So anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 times larger than TTRPGs.

Board games is "only" $12,000 Million by comparison, so only 400x the size of the TTRPG segment.

And just to dot those i's and cross those t's: Munchkin is in that category. D&D and its derivatives functionally IS the TTRPG category, probably taking up as much as 80% (maybe more) of what's out there.

So all the rest of us are probably fighting for a chunk of REVENUE that represents 1/5 of the COST of a single video game title to produce.

Movies and Entertainment in 2016 was about $80B for the USA, FWIW.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by lachimba

Even one game, Gloomhaven, has by now done many millions.

That doesn't match the number I heard from someone in the supply chain. Do you have a reference to this "many millions" number? Or do you mean dollars, not units?

[lachimba]

I remember a not unintelligent comment from someone saying his worry for the D&D type RPG (of which DFRPG) is close enough was that games like Gloomhaven gave the same feel or effect of them easier and potentially better. (He went on to advocate for different types of RPGs/games)


I wonder in general whether RPGs are clawing customers out of the wider boardgame market or they are just losing them right back to board games.