Now that Gen Con Indy is over, I was thinking about the state of indie RPGs and of the RPG hobby in general. Besides the Indie RPG Awards, I was inspired by two threads: Steve Dempsey started thread on the Story Games forums about the state of indie RPGs, and on theRPGsite, "Bloody Stupid Johnson" made a thread on Gen Con Event Breakdowns.
RPG Awards
In the ENnie Awards and the Origins Awards, the Dresden Files RPG took top place. In the Indie RPG Awards, Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World was the big winner - taking Game of the Year by a large margin and also netting two other awards. In the Diana Jones Awards, Jason Morningstar's Fiasco took top place.
Convention Play
Gen Con Indy was apparently a big success. An ICv2 report says that Gen Con Indy broke previous attendance records, with 36,733 attendees.
To see what was played, "Bloody Stupid Johnson" analyzed the schedule of games at Gen Con Indy 2011, and broke them down by system. For each, he had number of scheduled games, maximum number of players, and total hours.
D&D (all editions): 436 games , 10469 max players
Pathfinder: 251 games, 3258 max players
World of Darkness (LARP): 17 games, 2715 max players
Legend of the Five Rings: 30 games, 1008 max players
HERO games (various): 104 games, 769 max players
Shadowrun: 97 games, 718 max players
Call of Cthulhu: 98 games, 657 max players
Star Wars: 71 games, 442 max players
Savage Worlds: 71 games, 442 max players
GURPS: 18 games, 121 max players
World of Darkness (tabletop): 17 games, 76 max players
Palladium: 6 games, 47 max players
Indie RPGs*: 55 games, 1216 players
The status for indie RPGs is hard to measure. I count 35 specific games of the recent indie RPG trend (Dresden Files, Dread, Don't Rest Your Head, FATE, Mouse Guard, etc.). However, there are 20 identical slots of "Games on Demand" for any "indie RPG" with maximum 48 players.
Note that there are no numbers for how many games got their maximum number of players or even how many ran at all. So this is more a measure of interested GMs than of players. Interesting point that I took out of it were the resurgence of HERO games, that World of Darkness has shifted almost entirely to LARP.
Edited to add: The breakdown of D&D into different editions may also be of interest.
4th Ed. - 232 games, 8325 max players (including 188 RPGA games, 7742 max players)
3.5 Ed. - 77 games, 1291 max players
2nd ed. - 17 games, 60 max players
1st ed. - 110 games, 793 max players
Sales
Most RPG companies don't release their sales numbers. However, there was interest last October because Evil Hat released its sales figures at the same time as its Dresden Files RPG made ICv2's top 5 RPGs in hobby store sales. (ICv2 depends on self-reporting from hobby stores, so its rankings are prone to error, but they are still significant.)
Fred Hicks of Evil Hat posted Q3 2010 Sales Numbers post, showing a combined 3061 DFRPG book sales through "distribution orders" and 4427 DFRPG book sales total. Cyclopeatron's blogged about the ICv2 Q3 2010 sales. I can't do this for other quarters because Dresden Files didn't again make the top five. (If someone paid a bunch they could get the ICv2 full report - I don't). For comparison, Vincent Baker posted his 2010 sales numbers, showing that Apocalypse World sold 174 copies total in Q3 2010 - an order of magnitude less. On the other hand, countering the ICv2 numbers, author Shane Hensley commented that Savage Worlds product sales were 3-5 times bigger than the reported Dresden Files sales.
(For historical perspective, Gareth Skarka noted that his game Underworld sold 7500 copies in 2000.)
About Indie RPGs
Dresden Files has both taken mainstream awards and is selling an order of magnitude more than any indie RPGs. However, it is doing so mainly through the traditional distribution network - not the direct sales that most indie RPGs do. While I don't have sales numbers to confirm, I suspect that the best-selling indie RPGs would be Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard. However, these also have traditional distribution. Also, although Mouse Guard is solely written and copyright by Luke Crane, it is printed and distributed through Artesia author Mark Smylie's company Archaia Press.
Along related lines, I note that last year, indie RPG authors Rob Donoghue and Ryan Macklin helped freelance write the Leverage RPG for Margaret Weis Productions. Also at Gen Con Indy, Margaret Weis Production announced that they will be created a Marvel Heroes RPG line - a very major license.
The short form is, the current community of indie RPGs have started to merge with the mainstream. Even if they aren't really #5, Evil Hat have become a success in mainstream distribution - like previous author-founded companies Steve Jackson Games, Palladium Books, and even TSR. Authors of the current indie scene are being recruited for freelance work. However, the bulk of the indie RPG scene remains a small corner of RPGs as a whole - as evidenced by Fiasco and Apocalypse World. Whether you see this as indie authors gaining ground or selling out may depend on your point of view. *
Edited to add: The Dresden Files RPG was primarily written as work-for-hire and thus should not be considered indie. That mostly matches up with my point, that Evil Hat who published many indie games now also has a non-indie success.
About RPGs In General
The sales numbers I included above provoked some controversy. Gareth Skarka, in his October 2010 post Tabletopocalypse Now, predicted the "utter systemic collapse of the tabletop games industry within the next 5 to 10 years at most." He cited low sales numbers, and moves by White Wolf towards online play. Malcolm Sheppard added his own post, noting the decline of Google searches on the term "Dungeons & Dragons" - which Skarka responded to in a follow-up post. The significance of the Google search trend was fairly debunked by noting downward trends of "chess" and "Microsoft" and other terms. As noted earlier, the ICv2 numbers are also suspect. So while a downward trend in the industry is likely, the scale of it isn't clear.
I don't think doubtful about predicting any long-term future trend based on this. The RPG market has had plenty of ups and downs, and it has always been small after a brief fad around 1980 or so. There was a rise in the early 2000s with d20, but that bubble burst and there was a decline that followed. I suspect that the industry will continue to decline, though not drastically, until there is a new big splash.
In the meantime, convention attendance seems to be strong and not declining. Gamers continue, and lots of people are still publishing RPGs. Recruitment is limited, but it always was. On a good note, I have been seeing more kids events at the conventions I am going to. These are generally the children of gamers. Given that the peak of RPGs was around 1980, there could be a second wave as kids of those people come of age. As an anecdotal data point, my sister has not played any RPGs since high school - but her two sons are quite enthusiastic about D&D and the PS238 RPG.
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- jhkimrpg (
jhkimrpg) wrote,
August 14 2011, 11:36:50 UTC 1 year ago
Screened comment
August 14 2011, 17:34:42 UTC 1 year ago
You should probably ask someone at Evil Hat before you go off publicly speculating who is and isn't an owner. You're rather off there. And Fred Hicks is a pretty easily accessible guy for asking such questions.
- Ryan
August 14 2011, 18:20:45 UTC 1 year ago
August 14 2011, 18:28:45 UTC 1 year ago
August 14 2011, 18:25:09 UTC 1 year ago
Well, Dresden Files was not in the running for the Indie RPG Awards, as it was not submitted.
However, I don't buy that something being popular makes it non-indie by definition. If you say "licensed games can't be indie" - that would be consistent, though you'd have to scratch Burning Empires as well as a number of other games. However, I don't really buy that. If the creator of the property (i.e. Jim Butcher) is supporting, then licensing is a collaboration just like any other collaborations between creators.
You could make argument against Dresden Files being indie only if it isn't primarily written by the controlling people at Evil Hat (as far as I know - Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, Lydia Leong, Leonard Balsera, and Chad Underkoffler). It does have a list of nine authors, about half of whom are not in the company. If their work was freelance and a major part of the writing (say 50% or over), then that would be non-indie.
I don't know about how writing was divided up or contracted. You should talk to the authors for that information.
August 14 2011, 19:11:20 UTC 1 year ago
Not that we dwell on whether we're "indie." We keep our focus on making games and having fun as a group, like a band that gets together to make an album.
- Ryan
August 15 2011, 01:29:10 UTC 1 year ago
When it comes to licensed games, the creator of the original property obviously has ultimate creative control, and it's a trivial observation to state that this violates the indie creed as it existed before scenesters made licensed games.
I have had more influence over the story world of Mage: The Awakening than anybody who worked on the DFRPG had over its story world. (You may be surprised to hear this, given your past statements about what you believe freelancers do.) What's the dodge here? That another party had buck-stops-here ultimate authority? Again, Jim Butcher almost certainly has that over DFRPG. Now you're left with a bizarre rationale for the indie label where the deciding factor is not creative agency, but the fact that one game is produced within one businesses, and the other is a relationship between two businesses.
None of it makes sense any more, and it's past time that design theory and production were disconnected. That way you can exclude anybody you want to without the awkwardness of stretching the definition every time somebody you like makes a business decision.
August 15 2011, 04:01:33 UTC 1 year ago
However, as a general point, any collaboration where the collaborators retain rights to their work - whether it is licensing or not - means that one person can pull out and scuttle the project as originally envisioned. The project would be dead. I would claim that any definition of "indie" has to allow for collaboration between creators - and this includes if one person writes the background and one person writes the mechanics.
So, to take Mouse Guard as an example. Let's suppose David Petersen created the world of Mouse Guard, and Luke Crane created the mechanics (leaving aside the point about editors for now). If the two of them controlled the product, I'd say it was a collaboration that was indie. If one or the other did not have control and could not stop the project, then it was not indie. To your point about editors - if the editors (paid or not) did the majority of the work on Mouse Guard, then I would agree it is not indie. However, just having people help you does not make a project non-indie.
August 15 2011, 04:59:33 UTC 1 year ago
With regard to Mouse Guard, David Peterson didn't write the game. Luke Crane couldn't make a Mouse Guard RPG without his permission. It doesn't make any sense under the definition of indie that was being hawked back before licensed games, so now we're playing at defining percentages of work, which is of course ridiculous -- some percentage values of text are more important others.
At this point it's easy to apply this increasingly strained set of definitions to things that would obviously have been rejected by label inventors -- like White Wolf production in much of the 90s, and much of what Palladium Books releases now. This alone makes the definition incoherent.
So you have lost any meaning related to business model, business scale or creative control. What do you have left to hang a consistent definition on? The preferences of a scene. So formalize that and move on.
August 15 2011, 05:56:55 UTC 1 year ago
(1) A freelance game designer is given a set of specs from a company. He submits a manuscript, gets paid, and then the person controlling the company puts in a bunch of changes before releasing the book - copyright by the company.
(2) An artist agrees for his own created work to be be used in a game. The artist and game designer agree on a deal, and release a game they both like. Either one can pull out at any time and the project would be sunk.
I would say that #2 is creative collaboration, but you're trying to make out that it is the same thing as corporate control. The thing is, #1 isn't hypothetical. Tons of game books have been and are produced under this model. In #1, the creator has no control. In #2, the people who create the content remain in control of their own creative work. That's straight out the definition of creative control.
Really, I feel that the playing with the definitions is going on in reverse. In years past, no one made any issue about Burning Empires, The Princes' Kingdom, Thou Art But A Warrior, or lots of other collaborations where one person's product depended on another. It seems to me that what has changed isn't the fact of licensing, but the popularity of the license. Apparently, it is OK to use Iron Empires or Dogs in the Vineyard with permission, but if someone use something popular, then people will make a stink about it not being indie.
August 15 2011, 16:41:00 UTC 1 year ago
That is why, in all of my interactions with indie supporters, I can count the number of people who have asked questions about how games are produced outside that community on . . . no hands. That's right. Fuck all. You, for example, have never to my knowledge asked anyone about the creative or technical aspects of it. You're making a supposition based on a superficial investigation.
I can read all about how people *think* a company like White Wolf or Catalyst makes books though, especially on Story Games. It's wrong in basic respects, but that never stopped them from believing.
For example, most of my current freelancing does not involve anything like hard design specifications. It features a word count and general subject, and that has often been hashed out by us before it gets turned into an outline. I wrote the last outline of my latest project, actually. The "bunch of changes" you imagine generally don't happen unless there's some last minute disaster.
Really, the main difference between #1 and #2 seems to be that you're phrasing #2 more charitably, since every freelance work I've done could be described by #2. I guess a contractor could continue the book without my stuff and with someone else . . . just like the licensors of Mouse Guard and DFRPG.
What you have left is the work for hire distinction, which certain does matter -- but I don't think it matters to *you* since, well, the community has let other WFH art in.
Your definition of "straight up creative control," is so damaged, and relies so heavily on refusing to investigate the practices around you in the production of games, that it should be vehemently rejected.
And yes, this issue has come up before, starting with Ron Edwards' assertion that Hero Wars was an indie game even though Robin Laws designed it. The primary difference is that now there are a number of outfits that are effectively mainstream game companies in every way that matters, from business model to hiring to creative relationships, so this hypocrisy, which in the past just ensured that you alienated other small press outfits so that they stopped talking to you and provided an echo chamber, has now swelled to the point where the echo chamber has stopped working.
August 15 2011, 20:35:25 UTC 1 year ago
I have talked to plenty of people in the industry about their work, ever since I went to college with Ken Hite in the late 80s. Heck, I have my own industry credit as one of four contributing authors to HERO System 5th edition.
I am not claiming that all industry falls into my case #1, but I think this distinction - the work-for-hire distinction - is important and a line should fall somewhere between the extremes. Citing Ron Edwards or any other random person doesn't make me a hypocrite - it means that I disagree with him. Likewise, I dislike how many small press were alienated by the indie games community, and I've tried my best to include them and talk to them.
August 15 2011, 20:50:51 UTC 1 year ago
Maybe HERO, being all gearbox, mandated that you were a writing robot with no creative or technical design discretion who did as he was told. Your experience is not universal.
In any event, what about the specific arguments I've raised? There is no aspect of what you have accepted under the indie games category that is distinct -- you're appealing to vague know-it-when-I-see-it value judgments dressed up as concerns about creative control (which don't make sense in the case of licenses) and text volume (which doesn't make sense because of how RPG design works).
That, and neither of our feelings, is what is actually on the table.
August 16 2011, 09:25:29 UTC 1 year ago
Regarding the specific arguments you raised - I believe that principle of creative control criteria can apply to any partnership whether you label it with the word "licensing" or not. The principles still apply and make sense. The idea of creative control is to distinguish when the person who creates has final control over their creation. For example, Clinton Nixon's game The Princes' Kingdom acknowledges that it is based on Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard, and thanks Baker for agreeing to let him publish. Assuming for the moment that he needed this permission, it still reflects creative control. Baker created Dogs in the Vineyard, therefore if he controls its use, that is still creative control.
If permission to use something comes from someone other than the creator, however, then that no longer represents creative control.
The label of "license" is irrelevant, in my opinion. It is possible to make something based on someone else's work and still reflect creative control, but only if permission (if needed) comes from the creator of that, and not some third party. Thus, some things called licenses may reflect creative control, and some may not.
August 16 2011, 18:06:44 UTC 1 year ago
In any event, I know the idea is to block credit to games that come from some imagined board or corporate body, but that doesn't work any more; Evil Hat and Burning Wheel are both business entities distinct from their creators. At this point, you could turn around and claim that this doesn't matter because the creators still decide what gets created -- but of course, this was true for White Wolf at various points up to the very recent past (Bill Bridges designed Mage: The Awakening and was its developer, for instance) and is still true for Palladium Books. Read text and development blogs at BW, and there's a lot more "we" than "I," including specific statements about design that don't come from Luke Crane.
I think this is why it's convenient to retreat to some definition where to uncover the facts, we need to bury our nose in specific contracts and legal relationships down to the very paragraph (because you have now retreated to the point where no specific type of agreement can make or break indie cred) because of course, nobody's going to ever do this, and you can just make the folk assumption you always have, which is if a guy was in the community you'll accept him. This cannot help but be biased and implicitly offend insult people you snap-judged to not qualify,so this is a damaged categorization method for a failed definition.
At some point it's time that you admitted that successful chunks of the indie community consist of boring old business entities run by development teams. Sorry!
1 year ago
August 14 2011, 13:58:47 UTC 1 year ago
Games on Demand Numbers
If you're interested in a breakdown of what got played at Games on Demand, you can see your rough counts here:https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsh
Anonymous
August 14 2011, 14:55:33 UTC 1 year ago
August 15 2011, 01:42:58 UTC 1 year ago
Actually, no. My reference to those trends was in the context of a specific discussion about recruitment, and I was careful to approach this with multiple searches with specific segmentation.
I think that if any group is doing the heavy lifting with regards to getting gamers into seats at this point, it would be the OSR, primarily through re-recruitment through the very large group of casual and lapsed hobbyists. It's a pity you chose to conflate all editions of D&D except for Pathfinder, because that actively hinders insight into the single largest general segment of players. The destruction of a unitary Dungeons and Dragons is probably the single biggest development in the hobby.
August 15 2011, 03:21:42 UTC 1 year ago
As for the Google searches... Your original claim was "Your interest is dying" - i.e. that the decline of searches on "D&D" constituted proof of declining interest among gamers. I don't think it constitutes any such proof. It seems quite possible that the majority of searches then and now are from people with no interest in joining a game, but rather are simply curious about the topic the same way that I might be curious about Afghanistan or ancient Rome. If so, the search frequency measures how much D&D is in the news and general public consciousness. While D&D being in the news may help recruitment, they aren't the same thing.
August 15 2011, 05:24:51 UTC 1 year ago
The Google data is not just "searches." It utilizes specific segmentation to rule out noise based on prior keyword research. (I couldn't say, "I entered such and such but it didn't make any sense" a bunch in the article.) This is why I examined the projection of the term rpg in the roleplaying games category. The whole category and the term alone each generate unwanted noise from related RPG activities which I examined via trend tools that correlate spikes with specific news items, but when combined they correct for that. This is also why I examined multiple terms. As Trends actually lists news spikes, they aren't hidden factors -- you get side by side comparisons by default. But in any event, if only 10% of searches are folks wanting to get into playing, the question is whether or not that percentage changes or stays consistent with fluctuations in total search volume.
The skeptical but crude position is to say that there is no fluctuation, which means a decline is a decline is a decline. If you want to argue that the percentage of search volume devoted to real interest is going up, you need to show your work beyond Gen Con attendance or referring to a comparison that, as I said, isn't a refutation at all.
It is also worth noting that my post was back in 10/10 -- and the confirmed data for "RPG" (which used a projection) has been a continued downward trend, though it is flattening out. So all in all, it looks like we're reaching a halt in the decline, but not a reversal.
Gen Con numbers are something I have doubts about in terms of determining interest because it's focused on existing hobbyists and it has experienced growth during periods of decline. If you use data that has not correlated with hobby health in the past . . . it's hard to have faith in it. (Contrast with search volume, which generally *does* correlate.) Anecdotally, I can also tell you that lots and lots of gamers have little to no interest in game conventions. The vast majority of gamers I have met outside conventions don't go to them ever.
August 15 2011, 06:04:49 UTC 1 year ago
I'm not claiming proof of rising real interest. I'm claiming that there's no proof either way. If only 10% of the people searching are genuinely interested in playing D&D, then I can't tell anything about whether this subset is rising or falling from the total.
A rise of searches on "Afghanistan" could indicate a rise in people who want to move there, but it doesn't necessarily. What it shows is people curious about the topic. Likewise, a decline on searches for "D&D" could indicate a decline in people who want to play, but again, it doesn't necessarily. What it shows is less people curious about the topic.
August 15 2011, 16:47:45 UTC 1 year ago
And as I specifically stated, this stuff accounts for news items. That excuse doesn't work. Also, as D&D is not Afghanistan, we can restrict ourselves to certain contexts about it.
August 15 2011, 20:08:00 UTC 1 year ago
I think RPGs do benefit from being in popular consciousness - I just watched the movie Astropia and thoroughly enjoyed it, and also enjoyed the trailer for the upcoming Knights of Badassdom. However, recruitment through popular media (i.e. someone hears about it and buys a game) has always been secondary to word-of-mouth (i.e. joining existing groups) - with a possible exception in the early 1980's.
As to what there is proof of... I think it is reasonable to postulate a downward trend. Really, I think there is general agreement that there has been an overall downturn since the d20 bubble burst years ago. However, I don't think it is reasonable to call people deluded fools and/or asshole if they don't accept ICv2 or Google Trends as absolute proof that RPGs will imminently go into a zombie state comparable to Victorian parlor games like Minister’s Cat or wattle and daub construction.
August 15 2011, 20:58:14 UTC 1 year ago
Yes but not in this case, and no. The reason Search is an important part of modern marketing is because it possesses direct cause and effect metrics. I really wish people would stop chortling ans sneering at mentions of the things that so transparently drive their consumer habits, because if they actually studied them they would understand those habits and the world around them better.
So no, this is not about vague "buzz." This is about data points that have strong positive correlations with sales and community building in terms of objective metrics. We cannot see the other side (hits, memberships and sales) of it in the RPG field outside of a few examples, but since this is true everywhere else, you need to make some kind of argument that RPGs are crazy different.