Have we already reached everyone?
lumpley:
Here's Jesse from another thread:
Quote from: jburneko on November 03, 2008, 11:36:12 AM
...what I've observed is a general attitude that "everyone who can be reached, has been reached."
...just last con I ran a game of Primetime Adventures and had 5 people who had never played before. About half had heard of the game and owned it but just hadn't played. That game generated at least one highly enthusiastic sale from someone who hadn't ever heard of the game and wandered in on curiosity from the description I put in the con book.
That happens about once a con for me. By no means am I reaching people by the droves. However, I continue to do this is the face of growing resistance. I am repeatedly told that I'm fighting a losing battle. That's there's no one left to reach. That I'm opening myself up to disappointing play for no good reason. It's very disheartening.
My observation is that over the past 5 years, as long as I've been involved in this little slice of the hobby, the audience for our games has been growing steadily and substantially, with no real sign of falling off. Certainly my games' sales point to that. Also my local indie rpg scene, which just grows and grows. In fact, our audience has grown about just as fast as we can logistically support. We have to keep inventing new ways to keep up with demand!
But I hear this too, sometimes, that we've reached everyone we're going to reach, that now we're just selling to each other instead of reaching outward. Am I living in happyland, la la la, out of touch with reality, that I think this is nonsense?
I do. I think it's crazy nonsense. I don't understand why people say it.
Hell, I've heard people say it who first heard of our games less than six months ago. What on earth?
-Vincent
Seth M. Drebitko:
I think the problem is not who the movement is able to reach but who the movement is trying to reach. Look at most threads regarding marketing the number one and some times only thing pushed is get active with the indie community itself. It's mostly just a mixture of people being to lazy to aggresivley market to non gamers or "traditional" gamers to instead choose a smaller sure thing. This is just the opinion of a casual observoir though.
Cynthia Celeste Miller:
I've heard people spouting off this manner of nonsense too. Often, the ones saying it are the kind of people who only play games made by White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast, Palladium, etc. and that more or less makes up their mindset about games. If a game isn't a high-budget book sold in all the book chains, then it mustn't be that great a game. So, obviously, small press indie games aren't going to reach new audiences because people want all the flash (with or without substance). At least that's my experience.
But to answer the original question, there will always be new gamers to reach. As long as gaming hobby exists, new people will be attracted to it... many of which will gravitate toward cool niche games that the big companies wouldn't touch. It's like with music. As long as there is underground music (death metal, punk in the '70s, etc.), it will appeal to a certain portion of the masses. The same thing goes with indie gaming.
Cynthia Celeste Miller:
Quote from: Seth M. Bashwinger on November 03, 2008, 03:08:26 PM
I think the problem is not who the movement is able to reach but who the movement is trying to reach. Look at most threads regarding marketing the number one and some times only thing pushed is get active with the indie community itself. It's mostly just a mixture of people being to lazy to aggresivley market to non gamers or "traditional" gamers to instead choose a smaller sure thing. This is just the opinion of a casual observoir though.
To be fair, it's not always easy to market to non-gamers, primarily due to the costs involved. Aside from going to non-gaming forums and hyping your product or utilizing banner ads, there's really not many ways to reach other audiences affordably.
iago:
I think it's worth at least acknowledging the idea that the RPG market is not infinite in size. That's just common sense.
That said, it might be effectively infinite for a reasonably solid, successful, intrinsically sales-generating property like Dogs in the Vineyard, et al.
To draw first from my own data, Spirit of the Century has sold less than 4,000 copies so far (print and PDF combined). Given the likely "cap" size of the market can best be gauged in terms of how many copies of D&D sells, 4,000 copies may well be a fairly small percentage of potential already-existing RPG buyers -- and it's taking us over 2 years to hit that mark.
For the sake of discussion, let's estimate the real size at, say, 40,000 customers (this could be wildly off, but it's solid enough for discussion purposes). If I've got another 18 years to reach the other 36,000, I'm probably going to feel like the market's infinitely sized, at least in a practical sense. If I had a kid today, that kid would be in college before the product "saturated"!
I seem to recall Vincent saying that Dogs in the Vineyard consistently sold around 700 copies a year for four years, so similar math could be inflicted upon that product.
But to get a little understanding of the guys "spouting off this manner of nonsense", if they're doing initial print runs sized at 8,000 to 20,000 (I don't know if they are, but let's suppose they do to get a sense of that perspective), their single print runs and expectation of sales represent a significant percentage of the market. For them, the market would be a lot more palpably finite.
But to us folks in micro-press land, I just don't expect we'll feel the same as them.
I'm not sure it makes either party "wrong". It just means they're feeling different parts of the elephant.
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