The Future Is Bright: The coming boom in RPGs
I’m not possessed of any special abilities when it comes to prognostication, but I’m as capable of forming opinions as anyone else. Two stray thoughts occasionally click together for me to form a new idea, and when that happened recently, the implications spelt out an unexpectedly rosy future for RPGs and the recording and media companies – provided they don’t annoy too many people in the meantime with overprotective nonsense like SOPA, of course.
Genesis
The catalyst for this new enthusiasm for the future derived from one of the final episodes of a BBC TV series called “Turn Back Time: The High Street”. The TV series is not yet available on DVD, but there is a book available through Amazon (shown below) which is definitely now on my shopping list. (If you want to know more about the TV series, here’s a link to the BBC’s episode guide and one to for the series).
Getting back to the subject at hand, the series was summarizing the social changes of the 1960s in the course of the second-last episode and the rise of the social and economic force called “Teenagers”.
As an employment shortage grew, opportunities for teenagers to earn disposable income began to grow, and industries emerged to target those disposable incomes. Since it was easier for one teen to sell to another, and wages for employing them were lower, this created an ascending economic spiral for the emerging social class. During the 1980s and beyond, many of these employment opportunities dried up with erosion of the purchasing power of teenaged incomes, followed by the rise of minimum wages, and a series of recessions and economic shocks such as the oil crisis which produced a general shortage of employment.
For some reason, this economic history – which I had heard before – connected with another notion, that of an aging population, and because I was concentrating hard on preparing for the return of my superhero campaign, now set in the equivalent of about 2050 on a parallel world, for the first time, the two notions connected together.
Implications Of An Aging Population
As the population ages, the ratio of those under the age of retirement to the number of jobs available will drop, quite substantially. Employment will become easy to find once again, and as a result there will be a marked rise in opportunities for younger employees – not just for the poor-paying typical employment with which we are familiar in modern times, but even middle-class incomes.
I have seen estimates that claim the there will be as many as ten jobs available for every jobseeker. In order to attract staff, companies will have to offer more. There will also be increased educational requirements. Scholastic programmes have already started to change in anticipation of this need; I know that my cousins were studying calculus years before it was part of my schooling. Even when I was attending university, the first year chemistry course was virtually identical to the one that I had passed in High School a year earlier, so this is hardly a new trend.
Inevitably, better-paying jobs and greater competition for employees means that disposable incomes will rise, and so will the demands placed on those earning those incomes. There will he an increased need to discharge stress – these people will be working hard, and partying harder.
The New Teen Market
These factors will combine to make teenagers a major market segment once again, and what will sell best to them are independence, identity, and entertainment. Specifically, I would expect boom times in:
- Low- and mid-priced cars;
- teen-oriented car accessories;
- teen fashions;
- music;
- Teen-oriented movies and media in general – shows like Buffy, and Charmed; and finally,
- Games of all kinds, especially those that can reinvent themselves for a modern audiance and that are immersive in nature.
And the type of game that best fits that prescription? RPGs. You heard me: Role-playing games.
The Gaming Future
RPGs reinvent themselves all the time. They are fundamentally immersive. They are just far enough outside the mainstream that they will still appeal to teenagers looking for a mild dose of rebellion. They are priced from cheap-as-chips to inexpensive, but with almost unlimited capacity for expensive extras like miniatures and landscapes and 3D virtualizations and game-related software. They are ideal for a better-educated populace.
Whether or not this bright future includes tabletop RPGs, or will be the exclusive domain of computer-based games like World Of Warcraft, remains to be seen. My personal feeling is that there are unexploited potentials for synergies between the two.
Picture, for example, software that simulates a game world, a-la World Of Warcraft, in which an adventure-designer permits a GM to operate their home-brewed game world in a manner more akin to that of a table-top RPG.
Or software which, after the input of character abilities, permits each player to select their action for the next round and then integrates them all into an animated round of battle that can be viewed and replayed from multiple angles before pausing for the selection of the next round’s actions.
This sort of interactive roleplaying technology is well within the grasp of current software engineering, led by systems such as those developed to individualize the reactions of computer-generated characters in the Lord Of The Rings movies. I would predict the first such to arrive within the decade.
But even without such radical new developments, the future of the hobby seems assured. And that’s one heck of a silver lining for those of us who care about the hobby.
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January 19th, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Really interesting article, Mike! (And oddly short for you… ;} )
Ryan Dancey has a gloomy take on the tabletop industry here that is worth a read: http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/315800-4-hours-w-rsd-escapist-bonus-column.html
Reading deeper, it sounds like you and he are saying the same thing — role-playing is becoming more and more digital.
Your vision of a “DM-driven” software reminds me of Neverwinter Nights. It had a multiplayer mode where one player could be the GM, creating monsters and locking doors and causing NPCs to speak and so forth. I never tried it, and I’m not sure how popular it was. Has anyone had experience with this sort of game play?
January 20th, 2012 at 1:12 am
Glad you enjoyed it, Will, and sorry if there’s been a delay in your comment being posted – it fell foul of our spam filters for some reason.
I had read the column by Ryan Dancey before (in the wake of the announcement by WOTC that he refers to), and was struck by the massive holes in his line of thought. Essentially, he has defined the RPG market as being the distribution channels that were in existance in 1995 and nothing else; by then reporting that there are fewer businesses operating within those distribution channels, he concludes that the RPG market is contracting. But there have been four really fundamentally important developments in that time-frame, maybe five:
* The rise of Amazon;
* The rise of DriveThru RPG / RPGNow;
* The ability of publishers to sell directly to customers over the internet;
* The rise in PDF-Only publising of RPG materials as opposed to dead-tree printing and distribution; and,
* The development of e-Book readers, especially Kindle and the iPad (that’s the ‘maybe’ – I don’t think we’ve felt the full impact of this one yet).
Every sale through any one of these distribution channels is not accounted for in Dancey’s article. Nor is the fact that overheads are massively lower now as a result. Cut out the middleman, you can cut prices and still be even more profitable; cut expenses and you can do likewise – and both have been happening since 1995.
That’s why we can start from a similar foundation, foresee similar developments, and yet reach such diametrically-opposed conclusions.
(And yes – the article is unusually short – I was surprised at how short when I actually uploaded it. Writing it took about as long as usual, though. One draft was a good 3000 words longer, but they didn’t really add anything substantative – so they got chopped in editing.)
In answer to your comment concerning Neverwinter Nights, I was actually talking to Jonathon Jacobs of Nevermet Press about that very thing just last night. He wrote,
to which I replied that it would be interesting to look at when the time came. Further musing led to the thought,
Whatever the gap between the desire of a GM to be able to direct on-screen action instead of verbally describing it HAS to be smaller now than it was then. How long will it take to bridge the gap? No idea. But eventually, I’m confident that it will happen.
January 22nd, 2012 at 2:58 pm
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January 23rd, 2012 at 11:02 am
Part of Dancey’s point was that the old distribution model provided a necessary function for the RPG market. Not the function of getting the RPGs into the hands of the players, but rather of being able to give developers large infusions of cash. This allowed them to better finance the production of the next game in the line, primarily by covering the large lump sums of printing costs.
Of course, the rise of the e-market is also significantly under-cutting the need to cover large print runs. A PDF (or other ebook format) still has relatively high initial costs in terms of paying the artists, layout, and similar professionals. But it is nowhere near the cost of the paper, shipping, and distribution.
What this is doing is strongly empowering the micro-publisher, and creating a more difficult model for the large (relatively speaking) publisher. It is also starting to cause the distribution of material to trend strongly to online purchases, creating even more problems for the FLGS.
Of course, following your analysis, today’s teens are very familiar with online purchases. Tomorrow’s will be even moreso. If we also make a move to find a niche somewhere between MMORPG and virtual tabletop playing, the online experience will be necessary to the play.
I think that the tabletop hobby we enjoy today is more likely to follow the pattern of the ham radio operators, rather than the model railroad fans. It will be a weird niche hobby that uses outmoded technology (in our case, pen and paper), but will always be cheap and easy to get involved in.
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January 23rd, 2012 at 8:37 pm
I’d agree with that, Lugh. What the FLGS will have to do is evolve a new business model – something combining gaming and internet cafe, is my thought. They do a deal for a “favored retailer” status or some sort of affilliate programme that lets them discount prices relative to “the man on the street” prices and still make money, then set up a bunch of servers. People still turn up there to buy games, get exposed to marketing and hobby news, meet friends and play the games they’ve bought.
Right now, the FLGS I go to relies on the CCG market to survive. If that ever goes away – and it will happen eventually – they will need to adapt to survive.
Mike recently posted..The Future Is Bright: The coming boom in RPGs