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RPGs – Is It The End?

Posted on October 5, 2008 | 12 comments

About a month ago I did an article comparing the Web traffic of major RPG companies and communities using Alexa data.  It was interesting to see how they ranked, but of more concern was that traffic appeared to be spiraling downwards hard.  I just went and re-checked and that trend continues; over the last three months all sites are down and some sites are down by more than 70%!

What

A quick rundown on traffic change over the last 3 months –

From looking at the graphs, a couple of these properties had a big spike in the June-July timeframe that is hurting their compare.  Take a look at Palladium.  But even without that they are way down off pre-spike numbers, more than 50% easily, and continuing to decline at a good rate.

Heck, even looking through the smaller properties, the best showing is Flames Rising, only dropping by 3%.

This seems to be to be a crisis.  At the company I work for, a large computer-related manufacturing concern, we know that Web traffic is directly proportional to our company revenue over time.  If our traffic was down 50% our CFO would shit a brick.  We’re down a little due to the economy, but nothing near this amount.

Why

Why is traffic to every RPG company and community site dropping?

It’s not the school year starting, if you go look at the maximum data Alexa will give you there’s no similar drop in 2007.  Basically, everything was doing fine, slipping slightly, until June-July 2008.  Some properties got a bump then, but ever since everyone from Wizards to dungeonmastering.com is in a death spiral.

Is it “the economy?”  Well, despite all of the furor in the media (in  my opinion this is a largely manufactured crisis by the current administration, YMMV) major sites aren’t going down.  dell.com is down just 2%, for example.  You could argue that the economic problems would have a more vigorous effect especially on discretionary/entertainment spending.  But I’m not seeing that anywhere else.  Check out amazon.com‘s stats – they are down only 11%.  (They had a June bump too!)   worldofwarcraft.com is down 25%, with no June bump.  Heck, fandango.com (movie ticket sales) is up 14%.  So there is certainly some slippage overall, and you could chalk up some 10-20% of it to the economy if you wanted to (though given some of the stats I’m seeing I think that’s more excuse than reality), but why is it is much worse in the RPG realm?  Also, the dropoff has been in progress for a while and the current “economic crisis” really just got sprung on us in September.

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Underserved Gaming Genres 2: Crime Fiction

Posted on September 25, 2008 | 10 comments

Coming in second right after cop fiction in popular entertainment is crime fiction.  Whether it’s Mafia-oriented drama like The Sopranos, Goodfellas, or Donnie Brasco; gang oriented fiction like Colors, Sons of Anarchy, Gangs of New York, or Boyz N The Hood; heist capers like Ocean’s Eleven through Twenty-Nine or Reservoir Dogs; assassin fiction like The Professional or La Femme Nikita – it comes close to law enforcement fiction in popularity in the dramatic end of popular entertainment.  In fact, often it’s mixed in, either as “dirty cops” (The Shield) or dramas with both the law and crime side heavily represented (The Wire).  Conan was a thief, people!

You can play a gangbanger, a pirate (sea or space), a bandit, a Mafioso, an elegant art thief, a pimp, a safecracker/security expert, a prisoner, a con man…  So many of these archetypes find their way into other RPGs, but are consigned to a bit part.  Very few RPGs have any meaningful coverage of criminal activity.

What’s the Problem?

Crime fiction is just as underrepresented as cop fiction in the RPG market.  The most popular old saw trotted out as to why this may be the case is that “people want to play good guys.”  This is tripe.  Three words – Grand Theft Auto.  Playing a criminal in video games is way, way in.  From Hitman to The Suffering, the wide variety of crime fiction subgenres are well represented in video gaming and are immensely popular.

Besides, the crime genre is full of characters that are good enough that we can identify with them – though technically criminals, they are set up as at least partially honorable protagonists, often opposed to someone who’s “even worse” for some reason (more vicious criminals, corrupt cops, etc.).  In fact, the crime genre crosses over heavily with more traditional game setups where the ruling class is wicked or indifferent and thus being “good” is a crime – Midnight for d20 and SLA Industries are like that.  It is very seldom that the protagonists of crime fiction are utterly irredeemable super evil people.  You can be “wrongly convicted,” an undercover cop, the system may be corrupt, you’re just providing for your family the only way you can, it’s a culture clash, all the morals of the setting are in shades of grey… There’s any number of reasons why your criminal isn’t really a big ol’ meanie.

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Bit of ENnies Furor

Posted on September 25, 2008 | Leave a comment

The ENnies are a set of yearly RPG awards put on by ENWorld.  I usually like the results, though I did note that the results seemed a bit wonky this year.  Now there’s a bit of breaking news; one of the ENnies judges, Zachary the First, has resigned over what he feels are unfair practices re: publisher favoritism and lack of transparency.   The ENnies have responded already at the bottom of their main page.

My take – Zachary’s whole thing about podcasts is a little drama queeny but he has some good points, the best of which (lack of transparency, bending of rules for publisher favorites) the ENnies don’t respond to in their statement.  Although I am not privy to anything going on over at the ENnies, I’ve been involved in a lot of online RPG organizations and they seem to attract people who like closeted power.  I resigned as VP of the Christian Gamers Guild over similar behavior, and saw the same thing with the RPGA especially regarding how Living Greyhawk was run (I was an original Triad for the Yeomanry region).

Whether it’s at the President of the US level or the online group of like 12 people level, there’s a lot of people who like to hoard power and make back room decisions, it validates them somehow.   (Many of these people end up as forum mods somehow.)  And for every one of those, there are five people who enable them by not calling them on their BS.  So, I don’t know whether Zachary is “in the right” or not, but I like to see people willing to call shenanigans on a group even when it is not in their interest to do so (no more free games for Zach this year!).   I raise a Lone Star to you.  Fight the power!

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Underserved Gaming Genres 1: Cop Fiction

Posted on September 23, 2008 | 7 comments

In my Underserved Gaming Genres post, I said I would start going through some of the popular genres that seem perfect for RPGs but, strangely, are massively ignored by them for some reason.  The first of these, and the most underserved in my opinion – cop fiction!

Cop shows are part of our DNA.  From T.J. Hooker and Hill Street Blues to X-Files and Ghost In The Shell to The Shield and CSI, law enforcement fiction has often been at the forefront of popular entertainment.  You get to be a good guy.  You get to shoot people.  Hell, most of the goofy “what is roleplaying” intros that RPGs use cite the childhood play of “cops and robbers” (Has anyone really done that since the 1950s?).  But as RPG content, not so much.

There are some games where law enforcement is portrayed as one campaign option.  My first RPG, Star Frontiers, had a lot of people play Star Law officers, but this had very little explicit support in the game.  Then there are many games where your character might be affiliated with some law enforcement organization, but this is largely just character background and perhaps some color of authority, with the players “really” serving some other organization (Delta Green, Conspiracy X, Alternity Dark*Matter).  And of course in many RPGs you can play a character who happens to be a cop or FBI agent, but not really, like choosing some law enforcement character type in Call of Cthulhu – it’s just an archetype, no real law enforcement need apply – somehow your adventuring is always “off duty”.  But as for real cop RPGs, pickings are slim!

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Dog Soul Publishing: Welshing A-holes?

Posted on September 22, 2008 | 9 comments

There’s a thread on ENWorld chronicling the more than a year long quest for a freelancer to get paid by a RPG company.  He went a long time and was quite long-suffering before naming the company, and it’s Dog Soul Publishing.  Feel free to read the thread, make your own judgements, and not buy anything from Dog Soul ever.  And don’t do work for them, Deborah Balsam, or Sean Frolich, because it’s quite likely you won’t get paid for your effort.

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Mongoose Traveller Licensing Unveiled

Posted on September 22, 2008 | 3 comments

Mongoose Publishing, one of the recent publishers of the venerable Traveller universe, has released their “Developer’s Pack” that describes licensing terms for others to put out Traveller material.  And it’s groundbreakingly liberal!  But somewhat complicated, so let me break it down.   (Direct download link)

1.  First of all, the new Mongoose Traveller rules are released under the Open Gaming License (OGL), and a complete System Resource Document (SRD) is included.  So as far as open licensing allows – go nuts!  But wait, there’s more.

2.  There is a Fair Use Policy document – actually provided by Far Future Enterprises, who owns Traveller and licenses it out – that allows you to do stuff based on all previous (non-Mongoose) Traveller versions and publish noncommercially on a Web site or whatnot.  Make copies, write programs/spreadsheets to automate stuff, whatever.  They ask you don’t directly reproduce more than a page or two of rules straight out of previous rulebooks and that you post a FFA copyright notice somewhere.  There’s some unavoidable complication here – they note that they didn’t have all the rights to some art/maps from previous editions and so technically you need that artist’s permissions for those – sad, but unavoidable.

They don’t explicitly mention the ticky things that White Wolf did in their site policy, like not being able to take advertising.

3.  There is a Traveller logo license (TLL).  You get to use the logo but you have to agree to a bunch of lame restrictions – send a form in, can’t use “Traveller” in the title, avoid naughty content (sex/violence), they can ask you to destroy your stock, the whole litany of unpleasant restrictions in most licenses (though they do note that “It should be noted that Mongoose Publishing is committed to a strong relationship with third parties using the Traveller logo and that this instruction will only be given under extreme circumstances that threaten to bring the Traveller trademark into disrepute. If in doubt, third parties may always discuss potential projects with Mongoose Publishing first.”  I’m not sure it’s worth it.

4.  There is a “Foreven Free Sector” license.  This is an interesting one.  The other licenses are basically about rules.  This one lets you use the Original Traveller Universe (OTU) intellectual property (IP)!  I wish this wasn’t so groundbreaking but it is – you can publish stuff set in the OTU – Aslan, K’kree, the Empire, and all of it, in any time period.  You have to “keep it in the Foreven sector” – you can reference all the rightness of the OTU but can only develop/change this one “sandbox” sector.   This license has a similar set of restrictions to the TLL, but in this case it might be worth it; it’s like WotC letting anyone write a Forgotten Realms book as long as it’s set in Sembia.

All in all this is a pretty cool set of licenses.  I think things like the content clauses are 1970s leftover crap, but in general a) the rules are open and b) you can use the OTU even commercially under restriction and c) you can do whatever a normal fan would do under Fair Use.  Props to Mongoose and Fast Forward for this approach!  Any company that thinks it’s not in their best interest to be open like this is either delusional or WotC.

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Underserved Gaming Genres

Posted on September 21, 2008 | 6 comments

Role-playing games are a diverse medium.  Sure, mostly they are trapped in the genre ghetto of standard fantasy/horror/SF plots, but really you can play anything from a kid in the Polish resistance during the failed uprising of 1944 (Grey Ranks), a space-babe trying to win the love of a humanoid rat (Space Rat: The Jack Cosmos Adventure Game),  a slave in pre-Civil War America (Steal Away Jordan), and more.  But I can’t help but notice that three of the absolute most prominent fiction genres are severely underrepresented in RPGs.  These are:

  • Cop Fiction
  • Crime Fiction
  • Military Fiction

This seems odd, as players love to kill things and flaunt convention, and these genres are definitely the ones you tune in to on TV if you want to see someone get their ticket punched or act out.

In my next posts, I’ll investigate these genres, canvas what RPGs do exist in those areas, and examine common “problems” with those kinds of games and what, perhaps, we can do about them.

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Sales and Marketing Funnel for Dummies (and RPG Authors)

Posted on September 15, 2008 | 1 comment

Given my recent gripe about RPG companies’ Web sites, I thought I’d do the community a public service by talking a little about the ‘standard’ concept of a sales and marketing funnel and what you need to do to attract customers.

Now, even if you’re giving your game away for free, you have customers. You may or may not be less motivated to do work to get them, but if you have something that you’d like other people to get, for whatever reason, you’re looking at sales and marketing.

And though people can make it complicated, it’s not. Use the analogy of a store in the mall that wants to sell items to people in the mall. You need to help people move through a pretty simple sequence of steps. Attention, interest, desire, action, and satisfaction. Skipping any of these steps causes people to get derailed.

You don’t really need to worry about the technical terms here, unless you want to Google for more. But for the record, you want to get “leads,” “qualify” them into “prospects,” and then “convert” them down each step in the “funnel” until you “close” the “sale” and get “moolah.” Often they break up the process into “marketing,” which is the process of attracting and initially informing the customer, and “sales,” which focuses more on taking a prospect through to closing, but that’s for megacorps not your one-man thing.

Let me file the serial numbers of a certain billion-dollar company’s funnel as an example.

1. Product

It should go without saying. But unfortunately sometimes it goes without doing as well. You need a product, ideally a quality, compelling product. You don’t have to wait till you have one to start generating interest, but you need one. Sure, we’ve all seen people that get some success by combining extensive sophistry and marketing with a crap product or vaporware, but a) those are bad people and b) it’s not sustainable, unless being a scam artist is your stock in trade. The better the products, and if you have complementary products/product lines, the better.  Even good-hearted people get into this one with lighting up the marketing machine (or even taking preorders) before the product is done, and they aren’t so good with the deadlines.

2. Awareness and Interest

How do people find out about you and your product? There are a couple things that go into this, from traditional advertising to social networks to search engine optimization to reputation development. People often hear about and interact with you/your company/your game/your previous games a good bit before they decide to buy, so reputation development is key. What’s your plan here? Talking it up on forums? Pushing it at cons? Getting it sold on a lot of download sites and hoping that people will just run across it and decide to shell out $30 sight unseen?  Signing on to a license to slap a logo on it? People cold searching on “I want to buy a Wild West RPG today?”  An open beta?  A free demo download?  Trying to get comped reviews on rpg.net or similar?  Paying for standups at gaming stores across America?  There are better and worse plans here, but having a plan besides “Uhhhhhh…” is the key.

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Weather in Gaming

Posted on September 14, 2008 | 4 comments

I was sitting here in South Texas, surrounded by the mostly ridiculous Hurricane Ike frenzy, thinking about the role of weather in RPGs.  Then, I came across a good post from Advanced Gaming & Theory on the seasons and its effects in D&D and thought I’d chip in.

Weather that’s always the same is lame, especially if it’s always inoffensive.  Sure, you can use weather as specific plot points, but is it really 72 degrees and clear every other day in your campaign world when you’re not thinking about it?

I always liked the weather generation tables in the old World of Greyhawk boxed set and got a lot of mileage out of them.  Then, I ran a super long campaign (5 years) that was slow-paced and simulation/roleplay intensive, and I got the idea of swiping weather from an almanac.  In fact, at the time I had to use the print version of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, but now it’s online and ready for you to plunder.

How to use it?  Pick a place that seems like your campaign’s location.  Let’s say I think the Gran March in Greyhawk seems kinda like Lexington, Kentucky.  Pick a random year (year of your birth is good) and then line up the month/season with whatever the starting season is in your game.  Then just use it, day by day!   So in my campaign’s locale today, it’s in the mid-sixties with some morning fog.  Thunderstorms are coming next Thursday.  Of course, if you need a specific kind of weather you can totally overrule it, but it keeps a very low cost sense of realism going to have realistic weather.  I appreciate it even in WoW, when sometimes the rain’s just coming on down out there.

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Some Miscellaneous D&D News

Posted on September 14, 2008 | 3 comments

I’m ignoring most of it because I don’t like 4e, but these are of interest:

1.  The new GSL is still on a collision course with nowhere.  Scott Rouse is working on it but with Lidda gone, it’s not coming soon and when it does, probably won’t be significantly changed.   Yay.

2.  WotC may be releasing non-random minis!  This would be welcome.  The price and prepaint of their minis are great, the randomness not.  I’ve only bought about 5 packs because of that, even though I’ve desperately wanted more from playing a summoner recently.  Thought some of the commons are pretty cheap from the secondary market.

3.  More and more people are relating their 4e experiences, and learning that, as I said, the new rules are not indeed streamlined, but take even longer to run a combat.

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White Wolf Fansite Guidelines Are Annoying

Posted on September 13, 2008 | 20 comments

Well, Wizards is never going to get off their lawyered up asses to release a new GSL, let alone a fansite policy.   But White Wolf has a new one!

I don’t usually play WW games myself.  It’s not a fault of the games usually.  I feel like the people out there that play White Wolf fall into three categories – the gothy goth ‘take it real seriously’ pagan types (not my crowd), the teenagers in Dr. Seuss ‘Cat in the Hat’ hats (definitely not my crowd), and the normal gamers that play WW games like they’re D&D, all about the combat no roleplay (pointless, there’s better wargames).  I’d like the opportunity to do some WW gaming with normal-but-deep-RP people.

But while researching my article on RPG site Web traffic, I went to look at the WW site to see if I could figure out why their traffic has dropped off 54% in 3 months.  Not sure this is the answer, but I came across their new fan site guidelines (the “Dark Pack”). They try to make them reasonable, but the resultant list of rules is a mess that will inhibit fansites substantially.

They do a good job of separating the carrot from the stick.  If you do the things at the top of the page, you get to be listed in the Dark Pack links on their site, which is a good incentive-based approach.  Unfortunately, this section is just “use this standard Dark Pack logo and link.”

Then once you get into the “restrictions for all sites” section it gets a lot harder.

1.  No revenue of any sort – including no ads or Google Adwords – they specify that even your hoster can’t put ads or AdWords on your pages.  That’s a problem.   Sure, it’s WW’s “right” to be the only one making money of their content but it’s problematic when many fansites have gone over to hosted blogs or free-for-ads Web hosts.  Even LiveJournal is now inserting ads into their Basic accounts.  This effectively excludes lots of people who rely on free Web hosting or blogs of one stripe or another.

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RPG Communities Traffic Compared

Posted on September 12, 2008 | 16 comments

Did you know that you can see an estimate of any Web site’s traffic, gathered by Alexa (a subsidiary of amazon.com)?  It’s just an estimate from people that have the Alexa toolbar installed, but that’s “millions” of users and it’s generally considered valid.  I thought I’d run some of our favorite RPG communities through Alexa and see what happened!

Unfortunately, you can’t put JavaScript into WordPress so I can’t paste the pretty graph.  But you can do it yourself and verify my findings.  I thought I’d put in rpg.net, enworld.org, paizo.com, therpgsite.com, rpglife.com, wizards.com, rpgbloggers.com,and some others.  The numbers are in “percent of daily reach,” which means what percent of the internet goes there on a given day.  For comparison, wordpress.com is 3%.  (The #1, Google, is 30%).  A fraction of 1% isn’t bad – the company I work for makes tens of millions of dollars a month through its Web site and its reach is listed as .0065% (about 2 million visits per month).  The results are interesting…

1.  All of the RPG sites’ traffic has been dropping off badly.  From July to September, the leader, wizards.com, had its estimated daily reach drop steadily from .06% to .025%.  Other sites had drops too, on average all of them are off nearly 50% in 3 months!  Why is this, especially during convention season?  Perhaps it’s reflective that all the releases from gaming companies and all the news from the cons seems to be board game crap and not RPGs.

2.  Rankings!

  • Wizards was #1 by far, as expected, with 0.261%.  If they could deliver on something digital and monetize it they might be cooking with gas 😛
  • rpg.net is solidly in #2, with .0044%.
  • sjgames.com in there at .0023%!  Pyramid still keeping the GURPS crowd strong.  Woot!
  • paizo.com and enworld.org are tied at .0018%.  In fact, ENWorld used to be way above Paizo, but Paizo has been holding steady and not losing traffic (well, only 11%, which is the best of any of these) and has now crossed over to be on top.  Indicative of Pathfinder being better than 4e?  I’ll say yes!
  • White Wolf has had the worst losses.  It was as high as .01 3 months ago and has dropped off to be just below Paizo and ENWorld.  What’s up guys?
  • privateerpress.com in at .00092%, with only 36% loss over the last 3 mos.
  • d20srd.org, at .00088%!  Those boys need to get some ad revenue going!
  • alderac.com (AEG) still at .00067% despite a 57% 3 month loss.  They’re barely RPG publishers any more but I thought I’d list them.
  • peginc.com – Pinnacle Entertainment, the Savage Worlds guys, .00062%
  • palladiumbooks.com – Rifts still holding strong, at .00062% as well.

Below this, at traffic ranks below 100,000, Alexa says samples are low enough you can’t guarantee reliability.  But, it’ll show ya numbers anyway – and I see:

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