Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.
Tag Archives: Marketing
Hobby Economics: RPGs and Bicycles
Recently Wizards of the Coast has been in the news as Hasbro laid off 1,100 people, including numerous Wizards employees. In addition to the typical bad rap a company gets from firing that many people right before Christmas the Hasbro layoffs, especially those which affected Wizards, have made a lot of people ask questions. Wizards is a bright spot on Hasbro’s balance sheet, especially in light of the recent sale of the eOne film and TV business which highlighted the weakness of the company’s entertainment division. Despite their performance, Hasbro opted to lay off people responsible for some of their greatest successes, including most of the team responsible for working with Larian on the hit video game Baldur’s Gate 3.
Although I can’t comment on the wisdom of Hasbro’s particular headcount decisions, I can say that when RPGs meet money, good things don’t usually happen. Indeed, Hasbro’s reported tabletop gaming revenue in one quarter of 2023 was $290 million, or 50% larger than the entire tabletop RPG industry for the whole year of 2022. By that math, Magic: the Gathering alone is roughly six times larger than every TTRPG combined on a revenue basis. Ouch.
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Who Is Your Game Designed For?
Role-playing games are a complicated medium. The act of reading a game is not the same as the act of playing it, which is not the same as the act of running it. This was not in fact acknowledged in the first role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons; almost nobody understood how to play after reading, and the designers were pretty much just hoping that wargamers would buy their standalone rules rather than doing anything in particular to make it so. As such, for decades, enthusiastic role-players have grabbed their books, put their heads together, and puzzled it out.
The market of enthusiastic role-players is saturated. More and more games are coming out and fewer and fewer of them are gaining the sort of traction which actually pays their designers. The centerpiece to this is the explosion of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, which grew significantly faster and larger than any previous edition despite not being designed any better than any of them. So why is that? And how do other games do better?
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RPG Market Data is a Mess
There’s a lot of reasons people say that the RPG hobby is in a golden age right now. Increased legitimacy of the hobby in general, new audiences reaching games through streaming and podcasts, and an exploding variety of types and titles of games make for a more diverse and dynamic hobby than we’ve ever had before. But what do we actually know about the hobby and how it’s growing? What do we know about the competitive dynamics of the industry, from Wizards of the Coast down to the one-man shops? The simple answer to “what do we know” is “not much”. Finding real data about this hobby of ours is a struggle—and that’s when it isn’t downright impossible.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 