RPG General News - The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR is dead

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This is part #3 of The CRPG Renaissance by the The Digital Antiquarian:

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The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR is Dead...

"How do you make a small fortune in tabletop gaming?" runs an old joke.

The punchline, of course, is that you come to that market with a large one.

The tabletop truly is a brutally challenging place to try to earn money, one which you have to be either wildly deluded or unbelievably passionate to even contemplate entering. Nevertheless, people have been making a go of it there for quite some decades by now. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that love rather than mental illness is the motivating force. For, whatever else you can say about these folks, nobody is more passionate about their hobby than old-school tabletoppers.

If you do dare to dream of making real money on the tabletop, there are two ways you might envision doing so. One is to strike gold with a once-in-a-blue-moon mass-market perennial of the sort that eventually winds up in every other family's closet: a Monopoly, a Scrabble, a Clue, a Trivial Pursuit. Under this model, you sell that one game to tens if not hundreds of millions of people, the majority of whom might not buy another board game for five or ten years after buying yours.

The other pathway to profit - or at least to long-term survival - is to score a hit in the hobbyist market. Here your sales ceiling is much lower. But, because you're selling to people who see tabletop gaming as a lifestyle rather than a gambit to divert the kids on a rainy afternoon, you can potentially keep selling them additions to the same basic game for years and years, turning it into not so much a single product as a whole ecosystem of same. It's a tougher row to hoe in that it requires an ongoing effort on your part to come up with a steady stream of new content that appeals to your customers, but it's marginally more achievable than winning the lottery that is the mass market.

That said, any given game need not be exclusively of the one sort or the other. Crossover hits are possible and even increasingly common. In recent decades, several hobbyist games - among them titles such as Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride - have proved to possess the necessary blend of relatability, simplicity, and fun to be sold in supermarkets and greeting-card shops in addition to the scruffy hobbyist boutiques.

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