Wizards of the Coast Interview
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Q: What was it do you think that caused that core crash? Was it the internal thing at TSR where the company itself wasn't doing what it needed to do? Or was there a cultural thing where it's like suddenly people who grew up on D&D changed? Or you didn't have a new audience?
A: I've heard that before and I think for awhile people subscribed to that theory, but looking back on it now, especially with our recent success, I mean, there are actually more people playing D&D now than have ever been, even during the eighties. I think what happened was TSR stopped looking outward and started looking inward. What I mean by that is when D&D first came out, Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, the various people who where involved with D&D at the start where willing to try all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, you had things like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks where D&D meets science fiction. You had all kinds of really cool adventures and everything.
And then somewhere around the nineties somebody got it in their head that the only way to make money is to release new campaign settings. And these campaign settings all had a narrow focus. If you look at Planescape or al-Qadim those were the most extreme examples of campaign settings that were done. And they were very critically acclaimed and financially successful in certain ways, but you see a lot of other campaign settings that were very good but, like, Mystara, Birthright, Red Steel, these various things, how many times do you need to say, (European middle ages fantasy?) You know, and do essentially the same thing over and over again. They all had very cool mechanics and many of them had cool histories, but it was essentially the same darn thing over and over.
So we kept splitting our audience. And when you split your audience, instead of selling 15 products to 100,000 people each, you're selling 150 products to 10,000 people each, you know, that doesn't work. And, you know, the math is terrible on that. So when Wizards consolidated Dungeons & Dragons and said, (Look, we're going to pursue core D&D, were going to pursue Forgotten Realms, and for awhile that's pretty much it. And then we did D&D miniatures and now we do the new Eberron campaign. Very strong growth potential. We've managed to get it so that our core consumers are no longer confused about which thing they want to buy. They're no longer confused about which campaign setting has what, you know, which product goes where, what they should have. They know that every month a couple of products are going to come out and that's going to be what's available. I mean, I remember when Birthright launched we put out four Birthright products in a month, and not to mention Planescape, core D&D, Ravenloft, and a bunch of other things. So you might have like twelve different products and who's going to buy all of those? Now we put out two or maybe three D&D products a month, plus novels and miniatures. That's it. Wizards of the Coast recaptured that focus and now it's much easier for somebody to get into the game because they look at it and go, (Oh, that's what D&D is. I understand.)
And so for the first time in years we're seeing the audience grow. We're seeing younger players getting in. Older players, some of them transition out, some of them come back. But every month our numbers are showing that more people are starting to play D&D. The new basic game comes out this September - it's in the catalog. We're going to have another venue for people to get in because the basic game that is very similar to the old basic set where you could do character creation, and you could put your own adventures, and it's going to have really cool miniatures in it with a very low price point. But unlike the old basic game it's not a separate game. It's the same game as you get in the players handbook, it's just less of it. You know, you don't need 80 spells in there. You only need the five or six for each class and level that are going to provide an interesting choice and then you move on.
