I read this on Saturday at Gareth’s post Rough Beasts Starting To Slouch.... with Malcolm Sheppard about what it all means for the future of the business and I started to laugh. The reason that I laughed it that Table Top RPGs are NOT future "IP Prototyping". This a very simple reason, to the video game market table top RPG don’t exist and that is because most table top RPGs companies and setting (roughly 99% of them) don’t have a large enough audience. Think about it, if WOTC is the king of the market and they have only 1 million of active players that is really NOT a lot of people. The Halo franchise is one of the best-selling video game franchises of the last decade. Wired Magazine said during the two months following Halo: Combat Evolved's release, it sold alongside more than fifty percent of Xbox consoles and then sold a million units in four months. Halo 2's is quoted in generating $125 million on its premiere day. Halo & Halo 2 sold 14.8 million units BEFORE the release of Halo 3. Table top RPGs don’t sell anywhere near that. Hell, if you sell 100 copies on RPGNow.com you are considered to be a top seller. 100 copies. Top seller.
I worked for a small video game developer and manufacture in from 2001 – 02 called Xicat Interactive, where I got a chance to see how the video game industry really works behind the scenes. Hell, I even have credits on video games where I did quality insurance and development. Their best seller when I was there was X-Plane and it sold just over a 100,000 copies. For a table top RPG to get noticed by anyone slightly important, it would have to sell t least 25,000 which is the equivalent selling equal to Solomon Grundy #7 from DC Comics (25,905 units) or Outsiders #22 from DC Comics (22,756 units) or Incredible Hercules #134 from Marvel (25,359 units) or Guardians of Galaxy #18 from Marvel (24,875 units) or even Nova 29 from Marvel (23,904 units). And you are considered a success if you sell 5,000 copies of a RPG to a game store.
The numbers are not there. Sorry. I wish they were but they are not. So you might have to accept that the table top RPG you are working on will not be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Find a way to increase the numbers then this will all change but until then…
Talk to you later…
You misunderstood my point -- and Mal's, too.
ReplyDeleteNeither of us was talking about tabletop RPGs as IP Prototyping *for the video game industry*.... Nobody is saying that the goal is to try to get a video game made of your tabletop product, and yet that's what you (and other critics) seem to have taken away from the posts.
Odd.
Nice, post
ReplyDeleteRpg tend to be a merchandise venue for other folks IP (Dragon Age Rpg, Mouse Guard Rpg)
I do think you could grow you IP with something like an Iphone Application, not everything has to be a high end game.
Goes back to working on his Virtual Table Top pathfinder adventure.
Steve Russell
Rite Publishing
Gareth, I am missing your point. What exactly do you mean?
ReplyDeleteMy point was that the takeaway from Mal's post was his bit about the coming "post-tabletop" "third way" Next Big Thing. The fact that RPGs are effecient methods of IP Prototyping helps greatly with that process.
ReplyDeleteMy post (cryptically, I know, since I'm not laying my cards on the table yet) is more about that -- the idea that we're in the IP business, not the RPG business, and that there's a different approach we can take.
I didn't post as supposition that hey, this would be a super-cool thing in theory. I'm talking about what I actually do professionally, and what I have money in the bank right now from doing. That's a process where tabletop RPG development (in whole or in part) is part of a multi-tiered approach to fleshing out the IP.
ReplyDeleteThe main challenge isn't selling an RPG to consumers. It's selling a content development method that works well to management.
Production, distribution and release costs are folded into development and applied to its general ROI and are not broken out into a conventional revenue stream.
There are also IPs to which this method isn't suited. If you don't have a long term tentpole vision of the IP this isn't for you.