Runemancer said:
Gaming cons are filled with card, board and mini games. What happened? I feel like I am part of a species about to go extinct.
By all accounts, the RPG industry has had a very rough year. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but many companies are reporting very weak sales. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence out there that the industry is doing it tough at the moment.
A few months back, Gareth-Michael Skarka from Adamant Entertainment posted a
controversial blog post where he argued that the tabletop RPG industry is shrinking rapidly and will be pretty much dead within five years.
Although this view has been extremely controversial, many industry folks do agree that overall sales trends are looking ugly right now. Some of folks point to shrinking distribution channels, an aging customer base with mid-life responsibilities, and lack of an easy entry point for newcomers to the hobby as significant issues.
For example, Bruce Baugh noted:
The more I think about this, the more correct it seems to me. There was a mid-1970s through ’80s wave, and a second one in the ’90s that was never as big as the first one and did best in some different parts of the geeky meta-community, and then things have been tapering off ever since.
Recently,
analysis of search terms from Google Trends and Google Insights has showed some evidence that interest in traditional RPGs has been declining for at least 3-4 years, but that in the last year or two the rate of decline has been accelerating.
Check out the following graphs that demonstrate the decline in the volume of RPG-specific search terms:
Roleplaying Games
D&D
Dungeons and Dragons
D&D 4e
GURPS
Runequest
Shadowrun
Warhammer Fantasy
vampire requiem
Although some brands seem to be doing better than others, there does seem to be a pattern of decline and many companies are either trying out new approaches (such as print-on-demand) or diversifying beyond the RPG industry. I suspect that Mongoose has chosen to move into non-RPG business ventures at the moment because of graphs like this:
Mongoose Publishing
Runequest
Mongoose Traveller
Conan RPG
Elric Melnibone
Spycraft
It simply doesn't make good business sense to invest most of their resources in those product lines that aren't giving a good return on investment. Even discontinued miniatures product lines such as battlefield evolution seem to be holding a steady level of consumer interest better than most of the active RPG product lines - with the possible exception of Traveller:
Battlefield Evolution
The one company that seems to be bucking the trend at the moment is Paizo, which seems to be seeing a rising level of consumer interest. Although Paizo has only been a major player for a couple of years and there is not enough solid data yet to be certain, the trends in search terms are certainly interesting. Paizo is coming off a low starting point, but there does seem to be growing interest in their products:
Pathfinder RPG
Paizo
Paizo Pathfinder
Pathfinder Character Sheet
In this context, it may make good business sense for Mongoose to throw some resources into supporting the Pathfinder RPG. It's possible that moves to update some of their successful 3.5 products to Pathfiner may be a move to test the waters a bit. I dunno.
