You know what? I don’t call horseshit often, but here we go. I love AP & value it, there’s sometimes some bump, but Jesus fuck AP is so enmeshed in the market that its impact on sales is dwarfed by what @itsquinns.bsky.social (beholden to no one but his taste) can pull off pound for pound.
also, i have certainly seen games played and thought - not for me! if i didn’t like the flow of it, especially with people i know have a similar play style to me, thats something that sticks. i think people forget that lots of us play game structures for more reasons than the ones they can think of.
A positive review is meant to tell you to buy the product/support the artist. A good AP is meant to entertain and get you watching the next episode. There's obvious benefits to that since sponsored AP is so common but it's just not the same goals
This is also a bit insulting to the shows that are doing this kind of work. I've seen the impact TAZ had on Monster of the Week and how so many people are excited about Glass Cannon playing Shadowdark.
It's less 1:1 , I think. And AP has the ability to keep a game in people's minds for weeks, months, etc. A review is a lot more of a spike.
I also think it's audience. My AP is never going to sell out MSG but we get a lot of people who contact us to thank us for showing them how to play this game they already bought that their DnD group won't try. It's also ongoing fallout from WotC torching the fan base over the past few years.
I think some of these takes also come from within an Indie Bubble. D&D torched it's extremely online fanbase but it's still got piles of brand recognition for massive audiences. There's mutual brand benefits to continuing to use it.
I don’t think it’s about insult, it’s about noting that APs are worth MORE than simply their power (or not) to move product — and trying to emphasize (at least I am) that sometimes folks choose what to play on an AP for other reasons. And thank God for that.
Art shouldn't exist just to sell, even criticism should be more about making the art better, not just move units. I'd rather a show use a game that tells their best story than one that will just make a number go up
It's an interesting argument that echoes the "oh I can't run D&D because I'll never be Matt Mercer" that also strikes at the economic inequalities in entertainment.
Sometimes it feels like APs and TTRPGs are two completely different worlds. The large APs seem to disincentive themselves from having structures and systems too prescriptive for their needs. Which is why even when new games are introduced (like in D20 with their non-DND seasons) -
the game they're playing quickly gets disambiguated to the point where it can be disregarded. Unless of course the elements of the game can be introduced for storytelling tension (think box of doom or handing out tokens). Does that sound like it makes sense?
I’d say that what you describe isn’t unique to (or consistently true of) large APs, or even AP as a form, but true of certain styles of play — & it’s fair that more people ENJOY watching/listening to some styles over others. What’s notable is that “light” systems ALSO have mixed/low success in AP.
Yeah it is quite variable. I guess it's better to treat APs as a medium and not a genre.
Quinn’s quest is fantastic because he actually plays the games. That’s a LOT of work and buy-in for each video, and not always possible for every reviewer. But that’s different from a full multi-year campaign with a decade-old audience, a campaign your entire business and livelihood depends on.
And a company that is nowhere near as interested fundamentally in system!
I mean CR of all people should already have some numbers on Daggerheart so if the financial incentive was strong enough it's hard to imagine them not going with it for the main campaign. It's not unreasonable to imagine they looked at those numbers and they weren't that strong.
and to be clear, if it wasn't dnd it would have 100% been their own system. there was no way they were going to pick someone else's for the main campaign.
I don’t think that tracks given that they hadn’t even released Daggerheart when they were deciding on the structure of C4.
oh? fair enough, I don't have a clear picture of the timeline
I would love to be wrong — for a publisher to tell me an AP that sold out a print run or multiple print runs. They have an impact, don’t get me wrong, but an enthusiastic review with care & the weight of decades of credibility just goes further. Let’s not confuse exposure with profit. Again.
let’s not confuse exposure with profit!!! i should always keep reading before replying because you say it much more eloquently and succinctly.
i think the quiet year is an example of this happening, no?
With FatT?
TAZ if I'm not mistaken
That tracks (I know MotW got a bump) — I just think it’s not the no-brainer that folks assume it is, because if that was true a lot of AP & TTRPG history would be different.
How many APs have an audience comparable in size to CR's, and how many of those have ever played a full longform campaign in a system that wasn't D&D?
It’s worth noting that CR wasn’t the Geek & Sundry AP expected to do well, or that had the most $ poured into it. No one knows quite why (though there’s some factors) CR had/has the appeal it does, or how that intersects with system. What we CAN say is that CR doesn’t inherently sell systems.
Factors included: Multiple weeks on twitch front page when it launched Twitch being new Felicia Day’s brand new channel at the height of “New Media” Timing with the launch of dnd 5e Recognizable VO actors and their ardent fans Maaaaybe Stranger Things The people CR was lightning in a bottle
But yeah I think you raise a really interesting point (ran out of space)
As you know (this is one of those “comments directed more generally”) it’s all of those are factors (aside from Twitch being “new” — that’s sort of complicated to claim, though definitely a major shift in its focus) but CR wasn’t the assumed bet on the AP runaway success of the 2015 G&S projects.
100%. AP wasn’t something anyone understood or took seriously back then. No one, not even twitch (at the time) understood what they had.
That was Monster of the Week I think.
As I recall we did not sell out of Monster of the Week because @deadlyfredly.bsky.social keeps diligent spreadsheets on sell-thru rates and orders timely reprints for us but its run on TAZ certainly turned that game into a top three title for us at the Hat.
Right. I’m not denying there can be an impact — I remember Fred mentioning the impact of TAZ in that way — just as always, I think about scale and fit (TAZ didn’t have the Midas touch for every system it tried)
💯 we've had different systems featured on several big name APs and there's never a guaranteed bump to sales. I suspect it happened with the Quiet Year because inventory at the time was (smartly) limited. FWIW Fred posted about TAZ and MOTW here bsky.app/profile/dead...
My read on AP impacts has been that TAZ helps define a threshold of audience level that *can* boost sales in a eyes-wide kind of way. Transformed the standing of MOTW thanks to Amnesty. Blades in the Dark also soared thanks to Quinns in the pre-QQ days, IIRC. They're our top two games now.
But even a well-done one-shot with a high profile doesn't always do a game-changing shift. Parlor Room doing TSL was great, and we might have seen a modest bump, but it hasn't heralded the kind of night-and-day transformation those other two titles got. (PR is a kind-of edge case in all this tho.)
My personal anecdata is: I can watch QQ or read a review and have a VERY good idea whether I want to buy a game within 15 minutes or less. If I'm watching or listening to an AP, it probably takes me at least three full episodes to even understand a new system, if not more. Different investment.
Honey Heist, too
Can you sell out a free PDF?
It's not free, it's PWYW, and AFAIK it's made thousands of dollars as a result of that stream. There's a reason "beat the bear" is such a meme
And let’s be clear: sales bumps can happen. They are not guaranteed. If anyone knew the secret sauce for AP success then the recipe would change. As it is, those that managed to win the lottery are old enough to have seen folks who assumed that made them basically gods — & the gory results.
CR's Monsterhearts FAT's Fall of Magic TAZ's Quiet Year And the granddaddy of them all Will Wheaton's Fiasco & Dragon Age playthroughs Quinns Quest is an undeniable force, but I think it is dwarfed by CR's ability to move D&D sales and now their own products by some factor of 10.
My point is that CR (and everything short of Tabletop which is its own outlier) don’t have the *consistent* ability to move product in the way that folks assume would be the case. DID CR do numbers on Monsterheart? And … Candela would like a word.
To contradict myself, I think the numbers are also skewed by the fact that wizards is much better positioned to take advantage of an AP bump than just about any other RPG publisher who will just sell out immediately than be out for months missing much of the demand window.
And you can’t isolate CR in terms of the just bonkers juggernaut of D&D AP already built by AcqInc during playtesting for 5e plus an entire increasingly interconnected ecosystem. And I’m the first person to say that WOTC’s biggest failure of perception is the importance of AP!
I'll have to check with my business partner about whether or not it sold out any print-runs, but my recollection is that Wil Wheaton playing Dread had a massive, and probably lasting, impact on our sales. Could be an outlier, though.
Right — the Wheaton/Tabletop effect is something I’d put closer to Smith in terms of the continuum of types of delivery — and yeah, at its height they sold out fucking *everything*
Wheaton/Tabletop boosted Fiasco from a "scene favorite" to a "must-acquire for a rando basement hobby store in small-town Iowa," because that was the reach I had perceived
Worth noting that this did not translate into swimming pools full of gold coins for us. The bump was pretty modest.
I think that's worth noting. I know zero creators who've gotten "wealthy" via the selling of any TTRPG.
I always thought that Gygax was wealthy for a hot minute (he kind of vaporized a lot of that wealth quite quickly too?).
When I was in Gary's circles (~2000-2001), he was not in the best of financial shape, but he did tell us he at least never had to pay for beer at Gen Con
Oh, later years were definitely not good - but they "heyday" ones?
OK I'll give ya 1981-1985 or so ;-)
I get the sense (from seeing it in stores) that Fiasco is now an "evergreen" game. Did the Wheaton thing perhaps help with that? So, did modest bump result in a post-bump higher "baseline"? (bathtubs full of.... copper pieces?)
Yeah, long tail is a thing.
That seems to be part of why I think the original post is still in a bubble. Selling out is a lot harder the farther up you scale
Only one data point but I wouldn't have bought Dread without that episode and if I hadn't bought Dread I probably wouldn't have written The Wretched (which then sold out a print run thanks to SU&SD, completing the circle I guess 😅)
Ha! The circle of life is cruel, but beautiful to behold.