4th edition: The Sting of the Smalltime

As geeks, comic books and games are our Big Time. These industries are the recipients of our grail-like yearning.

But these industries are still so very small, with a correspondingly small amount of money compared to other entertainment channels.

Because these industries are so small, even though they might have the very best content talent, they don't have the best business talent. To wit: People who want to make hobby games for a living top out at Wizards of the Coast. People who want to make money for a living top out where the money is -- brokerage firms, marketing firms, insurance companies, banks.

This means that the hobby game business usually has inexperienced or experimental marketing and business talent. Even if you DO have state-of-the-art game design, you don't have the best people selling to you.

So you get a company that -- even if they have correctly identified what they need to do -- has severe difficulties delivering on it.

Enter 4th edition. Lots and lots of people have said lots of things about the new game, and if you care much, you've already read them, so I'll skip to my verdict: It's a fine game. It's a fun game. I don't love it, but I bear it no ill will.

However, the game itself is not what is interesting or lamentable about 4th edition. It's the business.

The great flaw with 4th edition D&D is that no one was particularly asking for it.

Third edition D&D was and is a serviceable game, which the market was still using and enjoying. The market was not ready for an upgrade (and unlike the Vista comparisons, many will never be ready for this particular upgrade). I predict the market will absorb 4e tolerably well. But they didn't ask for it.

Now compound this flaw with where we started. When you're primarily pushing a product on brand equity, you better have some damn good sales people out front, because the product will not sell on merit. You're selling its D&D-ness, not its betterness.*

Wizards doesn't appear to have damn good sales people, and as I said up top, they probably can't. Anybody who's really good gets called up to the majors.

So we have a boatload of ice chests in Anchorage. But the people who can sell fridges to Eskimos are already out in the field, working for GE. The ice chest manufacturers must hawk their own wares, with predictably mediocre results.



*This is not to say that they didn't try to sell it based on its betterness. The game design staff -- seemingly the vanguard of the marketing effort -- tried to convince the market of the game's betterness. But they've been unable to convince a portion of the market, and so the real force in sales comes from brand equity, i.e., "This is all the D&D there is! Buy it!" Eventually, you need to come to the sober realization that even if YOU think the game is better, mixed reception means it is not, in fact, empirically superior.