Is it just me, or has this forum stalled?

[Clovenhoof]

Nice essay, Majestic. Well said.
The "internet killed the MTV star" claim kind of reminds me of the Pastafarians' dogma that global warming is owed to the decline of pirates:

 

[Style]

Seems like activity has been up of late.

 

[Spongly]

Majestic7 wrote:

Piracy actually has zero effect on record sales

Well I don't know about this, but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Everybody can do a little personal test: How many CDs or DVDs did you buy last year, and how many illegally downloaded music or movie files did pass through your hands?

This isn't a real test is it though? Free downloads give you the opportunity to get a hold of a lot of music or whatever that you probably wouldn't buy.

If I was going to pay £15 for an album, it had better be a bloody good album - I wouldn't waste my money buying one which only has two or three good songs on it. You'd download more stuff when it's free than you'd ever buy, just like people gorge more at an all you can eat buffet than they would at an expensive restaurant.

Basically, without downloading, I wouldn't have bought any more or less CDs or DVDs, I'd just have a smaller collection of music and films.

 

[Hervé]

I was talking about ILLEGAL downloading, just read the post. :wink:

 

[p1fx]

as a person who has just come back into the hobby after a long absence im both concerned and pleased with developements in the industry. i stopped playing in about 1998/99 due to what appeared to be a either changing or dying industry. card games had suddenly become very popular and suddenly many of our fellow players were buying cards instead. there were still players but none for any game other than those certain ones printed by white wolf, and there play seemed to involve mostly duels between players to see who had best vampire etc. not that we lived in a big place then but rpgs were still quite popular in the area when i started playing, not so much by 1998.so faced with this lack of players etc i packed up cthulhu, ad+d,cyberpunk etc and mothballed the lot.

 

[p1fx]

not too long after doing this i heard that tsr were going bust. this i thought must have spelt the end of the industry, if a figurehead company went down what hope was there?
after hearing that they were being bought by a cursed ccg maker i walked away and didnt look for news for quite a few years. then i bought a load of new edition cthulu stuff in about 2003 after seeing them by chance, this made me want to play again but had then moved to scotland in a tiny town and had to forget about it.
then by chance last year on my way through glasgow to edinburgh i found a rpg shop!! and then a sort of rpg/ccg shop too, was supprised to see them and glad of it, for it had been quite sad to see the decline of the shops back home, there had been quite a few rpgs sellersin the lake district, at markets or in little shops and it felt like the end of an era to see them dissapear. so to see shops still going strong and in a country without a huge population was uplifting.

 

[p1fx]

it is good to see the variaty of games available still and that many old gems are either still around or have been reborn.
however the fragility of the market concerns me greatly with dwindling numbers not being helped by us allowing ourselves to get pigeon holed as a niche, if we go to underground how will anyone new ever find us to join in? the way in which some rpg companys like wotc seem to try to milk the fans they have is concerning too, the industry used to be about gaming not money.
instead of pandering to mmorpg players we should be converting them, i here plenty of people saying they give up trying to keep up with technology in order to play new games, rpgs need no memory or graphics card!
the increase in tv spin off rpgs like buffy did help bring some people into the hobby but these games seem to get dropped again quite quickly which perhaps dosnt give them the best impression. perhaps we could convert some of these fan fiction people as there lots of websites devoted to it.

 

[tneva82]

On the other, why play D&D when you could play WoW or any of the other online RPGs? They are a much, much more convenient way to play, from not needing to get the gang together to not even needing to have a GM.

For a one because there's not much of R in the online RPG's. More like grinding money and skill and hacking foes. Computer generates missions can't be as varied as human GM can do and game admins can't create invidual missions for everybody.

 

[tneva82]

they end up buying things that they download and really like.

None that I know who download music buys any cd's whatsoever. Why would they? They get same stuff for free so why pay for it afterwards...

For cover art? HAH!

However, the study I referred as well as other studies point out that in the case of music sales, one reason for lower sales is simply that retail stores order less copies of CDs to their storages from the companies.

And why would stores order less? Because they can't sell more of them...No point for stores to order 50 copies if they can only sell 10.

 

[Old Bear]

On the other, why play D&D when you could play WoW or any of the other online RPGs? They are a much, much more convenient way to play, from not needing to get the gang together to not even needing to have a GM.

For a one because there's not much of R in the online RPG's. More like grinding money and skill and hacking foes. Computer generates missions can't be as varied as human GM can do and game admins can't create invidual missions for everybody.

I hope the next gen of online RPGs involves more NPC activity forcing players to behave in a more realistic manner. If instead of weedy mobs plasyers were faced with something more formidable with perhaps things like permanent loss of equippment and stats for character death, etc. then we might get something with a bit more soul. The trouble is much of the money is coming in from the idiot kid players who spend their time grinding and ganking andd naming their characters in leet speak or with some attempted reference to genitalia.

 

[Clovenhoof]

I hope the next gen of online RPGs involves more NPC activity forcing players to behave in a more realistic manner.

Thing is, you can't force players to do anything. You can just try to attract a certain player type who will do so voluntarily. And here again it's difficult to do that with a medium supposed to attract thousands of players - after all, the game has to pay for itself and keep its staff fed.

So far, I had one really, really great online RPG experience - and that was a rather small, hobbyist NWN persistent server with a Middle Earth setting. We were maybe 30 active players and everyone knew their Tolkien lore. The GMs made a special event every week or so. It was really a great game and great experience.
But I have my doubts anything like this is even remotely possible with a MMORPG.

For MMOs, my experience is more like yours. :/

The trouble is much of the money is coming in from the idiot kid players who spend their time grinding and ganking andd naming their characters in leet speak or with some attempted reference to genitalia.

Quite well summed up.

 

[Philip_fry]

The trouble is much of the money is coming in from the idiot kid players who spend their time grinding and ganking andd naming their characters in leet speak or with some attempted reference to genitalia.

There´s achtually someone calling his charakter "Dolores"? :lol:

Sorry, coulnd´t resist. My first post in a long time and it´s rather rubbish. But at least it has been a "Seinfeld" reference, sort of at last.

But back to topic, yes I believe thinks have slowed down a bit here. But I guess that´s because our beloved RPG hasn´t really changed significantly in the last time (what I apreciate), so most of the questions are already in the clear and the new released stuff isn´t much to talk about neither. Let´s face it, most books published are reprints with minor new content. And besides the Bestiary I´m not considering buying anything of the upcoming release candidates. The Campaign sounds promising, but since in our group the GM changes every adventure I guess we´ll pass on that one.

So I guess there a reason why it´s been a little quieter here, but that´s not necessarily a bad thing.

Regards Marcel

 

[warzen]

they end up buying things that they download and really like.

None that I know who download music buys any cd's whatsoever. Why would they?

They won't: mp3 is more convenient than a CD.
It's not entirely true for pdf. Personnaly, I can't read a pdf book, I need the physical one. But I agree that pdf is fine to do text search.

W.

 

[Majestic7]

None that I know who download music buys any cd's whatsoever. Why would they? They get same stuff for free so why pay for it afterwards...

For cover art? HAH!

Sorry, I'm repeating myself now, but anecdotal evidence is not sufficient to prove anything the way or another. Besides, the point is as well that people are not buying less product X because they download the stuff from the net, but because they spend that same amount of money to buy products Y. Diminishing sales of music pretty much come to the amount of money that is nowadays spent at computer games and DVDs - both of which could be downloaded as well. I buy computer games that I could just download because I want to support the game companies. Pretty much always I still download DVD image of the game, since they are easier to use than corporeal discs - and cracked exes allow bypassing often quite annoying DRM. Some products, such as RPG stuff, offer simply better quality through purchase. I mean, an actual physical book is much easier to use and more portable than a PDF.

Yes, it sounds plausible to "common sense" that people would not buy things they can just download for free. However, "common sense" tends to be a flawed tool at creating view of the world. Looking on the sky makes easily one think that the sun orbits the Earth - after all you can see it making a round circle from one end of the horizon to the other. This is still not the case. In the same way, I see no reason to believe that downloading would cause drop in sales as there are no independent, neutral research results that would say so - while there are research papers that argue the opposite.

And why would stores order less? Because they can't sell more of them...No point for stores to order 50 copies if they can only sell 10.

It is just not sales, it is as well change in the structure of distribution. Shops are keeping less stuff on their shelves and preferring to order things only on demand. At the same time a lot of people are ordering stuff online from shops that can sell the same products at much lower price.

Besides, even if piracy would lower sales - which I will not accept without studies that prove that - there is little that can be done. New technology always changes the market. DRM and other reactionary attempts to control it are doomed to fail. The companies must either adapt to the new environment or they will die. Otherwise it is like trying to sell torches while there are lighbulbs for sale next door.

 

[Majestic7]

I hope the next gen of online RPGs involves more NPC activity forcing players to behave in a more realistic manner. If instead of weedy mobs plasyers were faced with something more formidable with perhaps things like permanent loss of equippment and stats for character death, etc. then we might get something with a bit more soul. The trouble is much of the money is coming in from the idiot kid players who spend their time grinding and ganking andd naming their characters in leet speak or with some attempted reference to genitalia.

There was interesting discussion on this subject in regards to Age of Conan a while ago. Unfortunately the thread was devoured by the Crawling Chaos when the forums went kaput for a while.

...so I can't be bothered to write all the posts I had there again, heh.