Select Page

I’ve been thinking about the two assumptions usually made about the business of hobby games in general and tabletop RPGs in particular:

1. A game that isn’t supported with expansions is dead.

2. Dead games can’t make any money.

One of the suppositions underlying those points is that the thing holding a game together is the commercial hub of the game store. But that’s clearly becoming less and less true as clumps of fans — fans of particular games and of games in general — congeal online.

The question for publishers is the extent to which these online communities can be directly tapped, economically, in a sustainable way.

Careful: The question isn’t whether publishers can sell games online. Because, you know, no shit. It’s whether an online community’s door can be open wide enough that new people will come in. What the FLGS is (allegedly) good at is putting the unknown, fresh, and new in front of known gamers, and pulling them into new games. The (alleged) shortcoming of games where the community is overwhelmingly online is that there’s no similar front door. New people don’t enter, and since you can’t stop people from leaving (marriage, kids, World of Warcraft), publishers wind up in a position where exactly one fan remains. Will the last Rolemaster player to leave please turn off the light?

The question I’m interested in answering is this: What are the (a) many and (b) best points of new player contact for a game whose community is overwhelmingly congregated online?

Spout your conjecture in the comments, naturally, but I’m most interested in actual examples — Actual Play, if you will — of online communities based around commercial products that are not related to gaming with which you are involved, and how you got involved in those communities, and how — if at all — the creators of those products wind up with your money in their pockets.