There’s a wide world of games out there, and from a gamer’s perspective it’s an embarrassment of riches. More games than you could ever play or even read, and altogether too many things to do and places to start. How gamers navigate the hobby is important for game designers, who are all jockeying for the dollars that gamers spend.

Everyone goes about their gaming purchases in different ways, much as they go about buying groceries, appliances, or furniture. In gaming, a hobbyist is likely to make many gaming purchases over time, and how they segment these purchases depends on what they’re trying to do. The assessment of how buyers behave with regards to their purchases is called customer segmentation, and it’s a key element of market research and strategy consulting. When you understand how your customers act, it’s easier to plan for their behavior and make more effective product and marketing decisions.

RPG purchasers, like other buyers of goods, fall into roughly three categories when it comes to their relationships to the purchasing decision. Incidental purchasers make a purchase with little forethought, often because they see something on sale or through crowdfunding. Deliberate purchasers make a purchase for a specific reason, after research or an outside event drives them to a particular item. Repeat purchasers come back and make additional purchases from the same publisher, designer, or game line, and continue to make purchasing decisions based on that criteria. In general, a seller wants to make things easy for incidental purchasers without wasting too much time or effort on their low-commitment habits, while investing more on deliberate and repeat purchasers, especially to turn deliberate purchasers into repeat purchasers. In RPGs it’s the same way, but when courting repeat purchasers is complicated and the biggest marketing tool you have (crowdfunding) is driven to encourage incidental purchases, you have some challenges on your hands.

Incidental

An incidental purchase is one made with less consideration to the specific item being bought. You want or need something, and given the circumstances it need not be something very specific as long as it fulfills the basic desires of the purchase. Some purchases are always incidental purchases: Consider coffee at an airport or food at a rest stop. Though there are always edge cases, you generally won’t walk to another terminal to get Peet’s instead of Starbucks, and you aren’t going to drive another 25 miles to get Subway instead of Sbarro.

There are a large number of incidental RPG buyers, even if it’s not a purchasing behavior you’d associate with a lovingly designed game that will take hours to learn and play. Con purchases are often incidental purchases because it’s easy to prime yourself to spend money at events. Game store browsing will sometimes lead to incidental purchases, as will spotting games (even if you weren’t seeking them out) at used bookstores. Marketing bundles, be that persistent outfits like Humble or Bundle of Holding or the more ad hoc (but often huge) itch.io charity bundles, will drive incidental purchases by lowering the price enough to make something more appealing for a sudden or impulse purchase. The advent of one specific type of incidental buyer, though, has shifted the market notably: the Kickstarter browser. Crowdfunding campaigns bring together a number of factors which make it very easy for a prospective buyer to say ‘huh, this sounds neat’ and just throw ten bucks at a game for a digital copy. If you make enough money, a twenty or even fifty dollar purchase can easily be incidental, and crowdfunding sites know this. This is exactly why Backerkit encourages co-promotion of campaigns; the number of people who will see two even vaguely similar campaigns and go ‘oh sure’ when there’s a cross-campaign reward or even just marketing message is much higher than the cost it took to code that functionality in.

Though I’m not quite cynical enough to say this is the whole reason for the event, Zine Quest and Zine Month are absolutely attempts to turbocharge incidental purchases. On the design side, the aim to get aspiring designers to commit to lower barrier-to-entry projects is very real, and should be celebrated. On the other side of the coin, though, the reason Zine Quest and Zine Month are successful in any way is because you’re opening up the smorgasbord of hobby game crowdfunding to more buyers by lowering ticket prices and helping browsers grab some physical goodies that they wouldn’t otherwise spring for in a complete game. And while this all sounds fine and good for how many games these events sell, they are the biggest reminder that Kickstarter (or Backerkit for that matter) are investing resources in their marketing, not yours. Kickstarter doesn’t care if they create a stream of non-repeat, non-reliable customers for their campaigns, because they’re creating deliberate and repeat customers for the crowdfunding ecosystem itself. Want to make money off of that? Keep dancing the dance.

Deliberate

A deliberate purchase is one where you go out of your way to buy a specific thing, often after research or other external consideration. Some purchases are always deliberate (at least for smart and sane people): Buying a car or a house is a purchase that requires strong consideration, it can’t be incidental. On the other hand, it’s also almost never a repeat purchase either: While there are some who are brand loyal when they buy their cars, the vast majority of people will completely update their consideration set every time they purchase, because the purchases are years apart from each other. Even if you’re committed to always purchasing, say, a Toyota, you won’t necessarily do something like trade in your car because the new Camry came out (there are of course exceptions, for people with a lot of money or very little sense).

This middle ground is a weird one for games, and it’s driven much more by buyer behavior than seller behavior. Generally speaking you will seek out a specific game to buy once if you’re in a group that has decided to play that game, or if that game does a specific thing that you want at your table, like emulate a licensed property. And to be clear, the reason single deliberate customers are rare isn’t because RPG purchases aren’t done with intent, it’s the opposite; liking a game, designer, or system makes you much more likely to become a repeat customer and buy more things than just that one purchase.

I do think that the most common example of marketing to a deliberate purchase in the RPG sphere is the licensed game. Licensed games are providing a specific thing that no other game can, so they’re marketing to fans of that license in order to get them to make a targeted decision. Marketing on the basis of the license is much narrower than marketing on the basis of the designer or system, but it also sees less competition because, at any one time at least, there’s only going to be one game with the given license.

Deliberate buyers aren’t necessarily rare; there are plenty of times when a person wants to buy a game and not consider further interactions or purchases. The push towards indie publishing started in the 2010s also meant that there were a ton of designers releasing games as singular objects which didn’t require investment into an entire game line. Speaking as a bit of an RPG magpie, there are plenty of times where I will embrace a concept for a game and pick it up; giving it more thought than an incidental purchase but not necessarily planning on buying a supplement or another game from that designer. Marketing to deliberate buyers, in contrast, is rare because at the price points we’re talking about for RPGs ($10-$60 per transaction), it takes almost no incremental effort at all to try and turn a deliberate buyer into a repeat buyer.

Repeat

The holy grail of customers, repeat purchasers have come back to buy from you again. They liked your game, so they want to see what else you’ve designed. Or, they enjoy your game so much they’re going to pick up an adventure or supplement to make their continued play even more fun. Not only are these purchasers spending more money with you, but they’re more willing to talk up your game, run your game, and get friends to also buy your game.

Essentially every gamer is a repeat buyer of something. If you only play one game, you’ve likely picked up every supplement for that game. If you play Blades in the Dark and love it, you may go find other games that John Harper has designed and buy those. Alternatively, you may look at other games which Evil Hat has decided to publish and pick those up. As advertising in the online age becomes oversaturated and useless, more and more buying decisions are collapsing back to just buying again from creators and companies who have already earned your trust, and that means that consistent and clear branding is more important than ever.

There are two basic ways to earn repeat purchases: Going broad and going deep. Broad means that you continue to expand your line of games, putting out new standalone titles that promise similar play philosophy and quality as your previous games. Deep means that you write more supplemental material for your existing games, giving players more resources and more opportunities to buy from you. Most publishers do both; there are precious few examples of designers with zero supplements or designers with one game and all supplements. The best example of the latter, honestly, would be Dungeons and Dragons, but when you look at Wizards of the Coast broadly their brand strategy has two prongs, Magic and D&D. Nonetheless, especially considering how Magic has been managed recently, it’s pretty clear that the ‘depth’ strategy of releasing more things within a game ecosystem is what WotC is doing.

In a hobby the size of tabletop roleplaying games, repeat customers are essential for any designer to stay afloat. Marketing to non-players is difficult enough in a normal hobby, but D&D essentially ‘blocks the box’ for most games to go directly to non-players in any effective way. Therefore, the most successful models are either to market to players pivoting away from D&D or to deepen your relationship among the pool of players who are already choosing other and more games besides D&D. This latter approach is by far the most common, with even the largest publishers having little to no brand awareness outside the hobby itself. If done effectively, a sizable game portfolio and well-designed supplement libraries can sustain a publisher for years to come. At the same time, there is no right way to design a game line, and ensuring that you keep courting new customers as you provide opportunities for repeat purchases is a balancing act.

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These three tiers are basic business school stuff. In my brief time as a management consultant this sort of customer segmentation was de rigueur because you could take internal data from the client, actually know how much different types of customers would spend, and therefore determine how much it was worth to market to them. My current job as a consulting researcher (or researching consultant, depending on the quarter and my current employer) is built on this three tier model: low-cost reports for incidental clients, consulting engagements for deliberate clients, retainer agreements for repeat clients. This tier system is, while important to think about, not exactly new; this is especially true if you read Harvard Business Review as often as Analog Game Studies.

There is something interesting and disconcerting here, and this is where the soapbox comes out. All three of these tiers of customers are made up of existing gamers. As I mentioned above, the exception here is Dungeons and Dragons, but until very recently even Dungeons and Dragons was at the whim of other cultural forces to bring gamers into the fray. Though Wizards of the Coast is marketing more deliberately and more successfully now than they ever have before, they still have relatively little control over a magical ‘fourth tier’ of RPG purchasing with untold power: the first RPG purchase. Now, most of us (myself included) probably had D&D as their first game purchase. That first purchase was driven not by some marketing juju but rather by an older sibling or friend, incidental trip to a game store, or (nowadays commonly) content on Twitch or Youtube.

That very first game has an outsized impact on whether someone who tries a roleplaying game becomes a gamer, and one of the reasons that D&D continues to be the most popular first game is because D&D is more often going to result in an accepted invitation into the broader hobby. All those supplements, all the media coverage, everything that drives D&D purchasers to become repeat purchasers does the same to first purchasers, as does the higher prevalence of D&D players around. This concentration is something I specifically talk about and worry about in a TTRPG context, but it’s hardly limited to that. In this linked essay, Rodrigo Brancatelli observes the death of ‘the middle’ across culture, splitting media into a single mass market tentpole at one end and small boutique experiences at the other. I can’t help but notice that the TTRPG hobby is following that suit, with D&D on one end, thousands of indie designers at the other, and a couple handfuls of designers struggling to maintain relevance in the middle, mostly with decades-old existing properties. In the 1980s the hobby easily supported a number of large design houses; now the biggest names are either emulating D&D or Brandon Sanderson.

The hierarchy of purchasing behaviors for TTRPGs has a hollowed out middle as well. Given the length of time required for most RPGs, one-off purchases end up being rare outside of those who collect games or read them for fun and reference. Those who do invest a lot of time in playing games will either stick to designers and publishers they know or buy more materials for games they already like. With those dynamics essentially intrinsic to roleplaying games as we currently know them, it means designers need to consider strategies that align with either incidental or repeat purchases. 9th Level Games has crafted a great strategy with their Polymorph system, allowing them to be prolific with light, punchy, and crowdfunding-friendly games. Paizo, on the other hand, has an intense but effective supplement treadmill for their Pathfinder and Starfinder systems, allowing for consistent repeat purchases and minimal marketing beyond word of mouth. Given this comparison it would be fair to assume that building a fandom of repeat purchasers is going to be what sets you up for growth. Indeed, the largest companies typically have small product portfolios. That said, one thing that will set you apart, regardless of whether you are better at attracting incidental, deliberate, or repeat buyers, is how well you attract first-time buyers.

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