The RPG Industry : Think about Destruction

I've said before that I'm a long term table-top RPG gamer.  In fact, were it not for RPGs and those dreadful tie-in novels then chances are that I would probably not be the regular reader I am today.  In fact, up until the age of about 14 I don't think I had ever read a whole book for fun.  Similarly, I don't think that I would have studied philosophy at university were it not for White Wolf's game Mage.

I don't write about RPGs very often because I happily walked away from the online scene a while ago.  Too many arguments with too many stupid people left me feeling alienated from the gamer sub-culture.  However, I still game every week and occasionally look in on interesting RPG-related blogs.  Having some time to kill I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the RPG industry and the future of the hobby.

The RPG industry is in trouble.  Big trouble, and not for the first time.  Back in the 1990's the then dominant force in RPGs was TSR.  Owners of the Dungeons and Dragons name they had reached a point where they were publishing dozens of books a month and producing endless streams of tie-in novels for their ailing RPG settings.  Needless to say, TSR were financially doomed.  Around this time a company called Wizards of the Coast brought out a game called magic the gathering.  Acting pretty much like crack for geeks, the game's success was phenomenal and soon savvy RPG companies were putting out collectible card games as a means of funding their RPG releases.  For some companies this proved a useful tactic, for others it proved fatal but one thing was clear, suddenly there was a lot of money sloshing around the RPG industry.

Wizards of the Coast used this money to buy D&D out from the ailing TSR and after some actual market research (a process heretofore unheard of in the RPG industry), WotC decided to put out a new edition of the classic game.  This new edition boasted two notable innovations.  Firstly, contrary to the fashion at the time, D&D 3 was not about story telling or about immersing oneself in character.  It was, true to the RPG's roots, an individual-scale tactical wargame based around players deploying their characters' skills and marshaling their characters' resources. Secondly, the game was partly open source meaning that suddenly you didn't need to own D&D to put out material for D&D.  This provoked another boom as the vast market of people who only play D&D was tapped and people who rarely bought gaming material suddenly started buying it in bulk.  Companies fell over each other to bring out D20 (as it came to be known) versions of their own games while old gaming empires crumbled and new ones were built.  Essentially, it was like the wild west; anyone with an idea and enough money to get their product out there could develop for D&D.  After a while, the market stabilised and D20 coexisted alongside other games as the more savvy companies used their D20 money to keep their beloved but less profitable games going.  Then came the shrinkage as the market started to change and suddenly D20 ceased being a license to print money.  Games companies diversified and dropped unprofitable game lines but the bubble had burst.  The second largest RPG company was bought up by a videogame publisher for their intellectual property and everyone held their breath.

As far as I can tell, that breath is still being held.  The Big Crunch that many feared seems to be more of a long, slow heat death as the industry shuffles stuff about hoping for the Next Big Thing that will inject cash into the industry again.  So what is the Next Big Thing?

The fact of the matter is that the RPG industry is in trouble.  Big Trouble.  The problem is that all you need to spend a lifetime gaming is one book that will set you back somewhere between $30 and $50.  With that one book you can play a limitless number of adventures with a limitless number of characters in a limitless number of worlds.  This does not make for a healthy industry.  The only reason that the RPG industry has survived this long is because gamers tend to buy far more books than they will ever need or use as they hunt for that perfect system that never comes.  A downturn in the economy or burn-ut after buying too many useless books and that gamer will stop buying.

This is a problem because currently, the RPG industry is over-professionalised. By this I mean that there are far too many people in the gaming industry.  This is because gaming generally involves a certain willingness to write one's own material, be it adventures or house rules.  So when the gaming industry goes through one of its sudden growth periods, the companies are so desperate for content that they'll pay 10 cents a word to anyone who can do a job for them.  In fact, a friend of mine once told me a story about when he and his wife met the head of a well known RPG publishers.  During the process of chatting, my friend's wife discussed some historical research she was doing and the publisher's response was to ask her, within minutes of meeting her, to write a game for him.

The over-professionalisation has a number of unfortunate side-effects.  Firstly, it depresses wages.  At this point, most RPG writers earn less than SF reviewers for their work and they get no control over copyright for their efforts.  Because of this, many former RPG movers and shakers have taken their skills to the videogame industry.  Secondly, it encourages people to pad what they write.  If you are being paid 10 cents a word, are you going to be brief and lucid or are you going to be long-winded, over-detailed and prone to writing long sections in character?    Thirdly, it encourages anyone who is capable of producing decent RPG material to jump the fence and either get it picked up by a company or get it out themselves by self-publishing as a PDF.  Indeed, the "indie RPG scene" has exploded in recent years.  So rather than having a tightly run and healthy industry, RPGs have a huge sprawling beast that drives down quality, drives down prices and drives down artistic uniqueness by making everyone a game designer.

The interesting thing is that it was not always this way.  There was a time when gaming had a healthy amateur market.

Indeed, once upon a time, before the industry was sucking people out of the amateur sphere left right and center, there were small RPG magazines such as The Unspeakable Oath or The Black Seal which were put together by amateurs and aimed only to cover their own costs.  They catered to a niche of a niche but because they didn't cost much and were aimed squarely at a niche, they could also afford to be quite innovative and different.  In those days if you had an idea you could share it with other gamers through a gaming zine without having to deal with the faux professionalism of the RPG industry with their lousy payment and their cast iron copyright contracts.

The RPG industry is a lie.  Kept afloat by a couple of bubbles, the industry is full of fevered egos who think they are Tony Montana because they designed a dungeon that sold to 1000 people.  This is why I think that a proper industry crash would be the best thing that ever happened to the RPG hobby.  Designing RPGs should be about being an artisan, not turning a profit or being a professional.  In a hobby where an idea can take you so far, I would love to see an RPG scene that returned to being all about sharing ideas, at cost, for the sheer love and excitement of being a gamer. 

Comments

[George]

Jonathan, thanks for a thought provoking piece. Is it just me reading between the lines, or do you have Chaosium's Monographs programme squarely in your sights?

http://www.chaosium.com/article.php?story_id=53

[Dave Klecha]

What I think is maybe most intriguing about your suggestion that the gaming industry is due for a crash is that if it did crash, so few gamers would actually notice because we do have those books or PDFs that we can use to create an infinite number of games, etc. Which is not to say there would not be a lot of eulogizing and whatnot, but it's not as though this is the comics industry, say, where if it crashed people would suddenly be out of that steady stream of new content. It's not as though the gaming industry has been built around crazy great modules and a steady flow of these new stories and dungeons and whatnot, but around the economic dead-end of source books and starter kits.

I wonder if there's any future to a module economy?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

George -- I didn't know you were a gamer :-) The monographs are indeed very much part of the phenomenon I'm talking about; 40,000 to 100,000 words, no copyright ownership, no advance and you get paid 50 cents per book sold with a realistic ceiling at 500 copies.

It wouldn't work if there weren't hundreds of geeks clamoring to be published by Chaosium.

In principle, I really like the idea of the monographs especially as they're supposed to be light on rules and heavy on background. In fact, I once put together some initial work on one (it was a Cold War/early 80's Britain Cthulhu setting inspired by Edge of Darkness) until I realised that 40,000 words is an MPhil and 100,000 words is a PhD and I remembered how much work they were to get. For 50 cents a copy?

I'd happily do 2,000 words for publication for free if it was a cool magazine but that pay really is terrible.

They should do it the way indie record labels do it really. 50% of profits after recouping costs.

Dave -- You're right. I think what would end should the industry implode is the collecting/reading RPGs hobby. If you go to places like RPGnet you'll see that loads of people buy RPGs without ever playing them. Understandably they want fresh product.

[Serdar]

I don't think I can agree with this more.

One of my side projects is a web-based chat site whose focus is RPGs. A good half or more of the environments that people create there are whomped out of whole cloth (my own little room included), and are not exclusively beholden to a game publisher's material.

What really sells RPGs is not systems but background material, and as more people finally realize that RPGs are just "Let's Pretend With Rules" and that the rules are, after all, little more than a form of mutual courtesy to not stomp all over each other's feet, the rules themselves become that much less important. Once the d20 core rules came out (which didn't cost anything), a lot of the impetus to develop and market new game systems vanished -- systems are a dime a dozen, and most of them are usually really terrible at a few things.

What people care about are environments, rather than systems per se. They like having their favorite properties turned into games; the exact way those games are implemented just aren't as important, provided they just don't stink to all high heaven.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Interestingly Serdar, that's pretty much the French attitude to RPGs. The native French RPG system has always been more concerned with creating cool worlds to play in than it has with mechanics (resulting in some truly horrifically designed games if I'm honest).

However, I think that the Forge games (My Life with Master, Trollbabe etc) gained popularity precisely because people didn't like the universality of D20. I have to admit, I'm not a huge D20 fan simply because I hate rule sets that are all about exceptions and lists of powers (namely feats).

I'd be more than happy to only play BRP for the rest of my life because that's a system I like. So I think system matters up to a point.

However, I think that the explosion in different kinds of systems and the different number of games is driven less by a demand from players (the vast majority of which play D&D and that's it) than by a demand from people who like to read RPGs.

[Keith Strohm]

As the Brand Manager for Dungeons & Dragons at WOTC during the launch of 3rd edition (and later as the Director for RPGs and Miniatures), I have to say, first off, that I agre with a great deal of our host's fine post and analysis of the RPG Industry. However, I do disagree with the commenter who wrote that rules do not sell RPGs, background story does. I can tell you absolutely that for D&D, the rules do drive sales. There seems to be this sage wisdom that experienced RPG'ers like to quote while stroking their goatee: As you advance as a roleplayer, you'll leave behind the childish notion of powergaming and graduate to the mature art of roleplaying.

This does not, actually, reflect the reality of the majority of the 2+ million folks who play RPGs at least once a month each year. TSR followed a strategy whose main assumption was that Campaign Settings drove sales of the Player's Handbook--and that strategy, coupled with poor execution and a lack of business discipline, led to the near destruction of the D&D brand and business.

I think that background story may drive purchase of other, non-D&D RPGs, but I would argue that non-D&D RPGs are either almost a second industry or their player base is relatively insignificant when compared to the D&D player network.

Whenever I talk like this, I always seem to ruffle feathers, and that is certainly not my intention. I appreciate this post and the discussion.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Someone once said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato. RPGs are footnotes to D&D.

To be fair, I don't think anyone has mentioned "powergaming". My prblem with D&D is that as a player and a GM I dislike systems that are all about exceptions. D&D has a resolution mechanic and then hundreds of exceptions in the shape of feats; different kinds of attacks, special powers, buffs, de-buffs for enemies and so on. My problem isn't with the pursuit of power, it's that I find that type of game difficult to play. I don't find keeping track of lists of rule exceptions fun.

I once tried to run a game of Exalted (which uses a similar design aesthetic) and it caused me actual physical pain.

D&D has always been a bare-knuckle, crypto-objectivist fantasy in which thug-life gangstas roam the land acquiring cash and magical bling.

I have no issue with that, I just don't like having to look things up in the rule book.