How can it be that every game this company makes is so utterly shit?

How can it be that every game this company makes is so utterly shit?

>American game design

They seek an immediate profit and disregard their consumer-base beyond the most basic desires had by said consumer-base.

I masturbate to fat chicks.

Did your mother not let you have chicken tendies again? Is that why you're so upset?

They have two near-monopolies. They don't have to be any good as long as they continue to offer the biggest games in their respective genres,

whatever they re doing, it is working

In all seriousness, they worship the wrong gods.
That is your answer.

MtG is their only near-monopoly. D&D I'm not sure has even a majority share of its market. Maybe in USA.

WotC tried making good games. All the different card games they tried a while ago, D&D 4e was an attempt to have good mechanics.

But their customer base doesn't care. Awesome games like Hecatomb were forgotten in favour of just more MtG, and the toy company that owns them just wants them to maximise profits in the easiest, simplest way possible.

It's literally the most popular tabletop game in the world user, the only thing that rivals it is Pathfinder, and that's only because it's D&D.

GW was in a similar position in the tabletop wargame market a decade ago, there was a little bit of AT-43 and a fledgling warmahordes scene on the side but that was almost it outside of historicals.

Now there are over a dozen big players in the market and a swarm of small businesses as well.

And those only looking at direct competitors. In both circumstances GW needed to compete with all other forms of entertainment from movies to model trains to videogames to cycling.

>""""""""""""""""""""rivals"""""""""""""""""""" it
Only in the sense that it is the single largest non-5e ttrpg. 5e is more than 50% of the market by itself. PF doesn't even take a quarter of the remainder; and as others have pointed out, it's a shitty homebrew version of D&D. If you add in all the editions of official D&D+PF D&D makes up something like 80-90% of the ttrpg market.

Can't be that bad given that they lead the tabletop RPG market and the trading card game market.

At this point it's more like 2/3. Still dominant, but less so than it has been before.

I'm still amazed there's people butthurt about the edition wars. You really need to let that shit go.

What makes something commercially successful doesn't make it good

Who cares about edition wars? D&D always sucks, but at least with 4e you could tell they were trying. Then they gave up and made (3.)5e all over again.

>Who cares about edition wars?

Oh, I didn't realize you were a system-war troll. I often get you two confused because you both wear the same layers of caked shit.

>troll
Sure. Anyone who doesn't like D&D must be a troll, right?

Nah, just the idiots who hate it as much as you do and always want to start shit on a D&D board.

And this is why WotC's games suck. they don't need to put any effort in, their fanboys will relentlessly defend whatever they do as long as it's nice and familiar. Actually putting work into things or having new ideas does them more harm than good, so they're incentivized to just keep producing the same crap over and over.

>a D&D board
Keep telling yourself that.

It's a D&D board, just like it's an MTG board, and a 40k board, and a GURPS board. If your plan is to get upset about D&D, you're going to spend all your time here upset.

Wowee you trolls are PISSED.

That applies to something that is commercial successful in the moment - pogs, for example. But if you keep getting buyers and keep dominating the market over time - 24 years in Magic's case, 42 years in D&D's case (17 of them under WotC's aegis), then the only logical conclusion is that it MUST be considered "good" by the general populace, and that if you don't like it, it's your subjective, minority opinion.

I don't like Nirvana, for example - at all - but I recognize that - no, seriously, I hate Nirvana - I recognize that they're probably actually a good band given how continuously popular they are. Even though I can't understand why. Kurt Kobain has one of the worst singing voices I've ever heard in a commercially-successful band.

>2-4 decades is a long time

Americans

Dude, context. Non-board tabletop games are only about 200 years old at most, provided you include the earliest form of Kriegspiel (which wasn't popular among the Prussian officers until the 1870s when it got a massive rules overhaul), though it really only got its start with H.G. Welles' "Little Wars" in 1913.

So D&D has existed for just slightly less than half the functional lifetime of tabletop gaming; and Magic, about a fifth. And both of them were the progenitors of their respective branches - D&D invented the pen-and-paper RPG, and Magic invented the trading card game.

did you lose at your local Magic tourny again, OP?

>24 years in Magic's case
Wizards copyrighted several of the key mechanics of the game, making it virtually impossible for anyone to make a card game to compete with it on the American market.
European laws does not allow one to copyright game mechanics, so European games could still theoretically use them as long as they weren't sold in America.

>42 years in D&D's case
Again, D&D has only "dominated" the market in America. Europe had, and still has, a whole bunch of other RPGs, and D&D usually isn't the game stores claim sell the best.

I would agree that DnD and Magic's success was not an accident and I think Wizards has done a very good creating and maintaining their brands even if Magic is in decline right now
The thing is though that what the majority of the market wants often clashes with design decisions that would make for a better designed game (in that the game has more depth, is more streamlined, is more balanced, etc) and so the market isn't a good indicator of whether a game is good as we conventionally think of it, DnD's success is still impressive and earned, it's just for qualities that I don't consider important

Magic is popular because it is popular. IMO it has little do with the mechanics, and a lot to do with
>first mover advantage
>hitting the market just as the internet reached millions of Americans, allowing it to saturate the market very quickly
>a skinner box marketing strategy that gets people to sink thousands of dollars into pieces of cardboard
It got to a critical mass where people who are into nerd hobbies look around and say "well, I guess everybody is playing MtG, I will too". And collectible card games are so goddamn retarded that it's unlikely another will be able to even build the same kind of scene from scratch.

D&D has some of the same advantages, along with the fact that they explicitly market the game to beginners (with starter sets and the like). 99% of indie games are focused solely on attracting hobbyists.

I think they also benefit from being the lowest common denominator. You see the same thing in all entertainment--90% of the market is flooded by flashy, derivative garbage that'll be discarded almost as soon as its released.

>European laws does not allow one to copyright game mechanics
This is true in America as well. Game mechanics can't be considered uniquely proprietary in a legal sense, only the names for those mechanics. For instance, there are games that have mechanics where you 'tap' cards, which is one of those protected terms. In something like Game of Thrones it's 'kneeling' the card, but outside of the name it works identically.

Magic seems better designed than DnD, although quality varies by set, the main problem of have with magic now is how it's being handled as a product, not the core mechanics, I could be biased though as I have played less of a variety of card games than I have TTRPGs

Wizards copyrights on the mechanics expired before the Game of Thrones card game was released.

Last statistics i saw from a thread a little while ago put 5e at around 2/3rds of the market, at least in the US, and PF around 11 or 12. So combined nearly 3/4ths of the ttrpg market, just between DnD and its top clone

Even 50% would be huge, considering the rest is divided up amongst dozens of smaller companies.

I wonder what #3 is these days. Edge of the Empire? Is Onyx Path even remotely close to what White Wolf had in the 90's?

It's kind of mind boggling to read about even small companies like Steve Jackson Games and Chaosium having full time development teams.

>90% of the market is flooded by flashy, derivative garbage that'll be discarded almost as soon as its released.

Except, of course, that neither Magic nor D&D are discarded almost as soon as they're released. They've got staying power, son.

Although you're right about another facet of D&D's success, the fact that it's trying to reach a broad audience base rather than being specifially targeted at hobbyists. It's the same market strategy that allowed the Nintendo Wii to outsell the PS3 and XBox One despite barely being a better than the GameCube in a technological sense (though this also worked to advantage - the Wii's technology wasn't cutting-edge, which meant that it could be made cheaper (Nintendo actually made a profit on the Wii, whereas most consoles are sold at a loss and the profit is made on game sales) and broke less often)

In terms of RPGs, I think it's Savage Worlds. Roll20 lists it as Warhammer, but the problem there is that it groups ALL Warhammer properties under a single banner - so it includes 40K, Fantasy, Battlefleet Gothic, Rogue Trader, Dark Hersey, etc. as a single thing, most of which are not RPGs.

Copyrights can expire, at their earliest, in 70 years after being registered.
Patents expire 20 years after their filing date.
M:tG mechanics were filed with the U.S. Patent Office in 1995, and would have expired in 2015. The Game of Thrones LCG was first published in 2002.

I'm salty as fuck about the current state of Magic and I'm on a years long hiatus outside of Paper Pauper, but it's still the most flexible and by virtue of that also best game by a long shot. Some games might come close or overtake it in strickt 1v1, but they are either long dead or dying and are simply not as malleable.

Vague, Sweeping statement obviously targeting two of the three biggest hobbies on the board. Effective in that it immediately sparks discussion about D&D, MTG, and the difference between popularity and quality of a product. However, it lacks pointed discussion. I would almost accept a "When did you realize D&D was Garbage" thread out of sheer nostalgia over this one. On a separate note, a dedicated "Times you realized MTG was shit" baitthread could likely spark some interesting discussion, but only if enough effort was put into exploring various, citable reasons on why the game is bad.

Overall, however, the statement is absolutely false, as Guillotine exists. A nice fun card game about killing French Nobility that has a nice balance between having a Strategy and ease of play. Great for parties with Normies and Relatives.

6/10, OP is going for low-hanging fruit here, lacks focus.

>How can it be that every game this company makes is so utterly shit?
they're catering to gamist players, the biggest "niche" of the hobby

>5e is more than 50% of the market by itself.
does anyone have solid numbers for markets outside of the US? because i can guarantee you it's not anywhere near 50% in Germany.

>Again, D&D has only "dominated" the market in America. Europe had, and still has, a whole bunch of other RPGs, and D&D usually isn't the game stores claim sell the best.
Dude nobody gives a shit about your irrelevant shithole. America is the trend setter so unless these niche europoor games have a shot of dethroning wizards in the global market then it doesn't matter if they control 40% of the tabletop market in the Basque region of Spain compared to wizards. Seriously, get some perspective, Europe is irrelevant. Even SEA and S. America are more important these days.

>Irrelevant
>Larger market, higher GDP

lol

Gdp isn't the only thing that matters, so does trajectory. Europe is on a downward slide.

t. butthurt american

>Fourteen quarters of consistent growth
>Downward slide

lol

Honestly, the US and the EU are roughly equivalent at the moment. Neither is doing particularly well, and they all have their own problems. How it pans out in future,
especially in relation to the economic power of China, remains to be seen. But calling the EU irrelevant is really dumb

It's extremely irrelevant. When someone from the US or from outside the US wants to study cutting-edge science, they go to one of dozens of top American research Universities, (or maybe one of a half dozen french, Swiss, or German research Universities.) Where are all the top tech companies? The US. Europe is lagging where it counts: innovation.

>top tech companies
>about to lose net neutrality

lol

test

Okay, but does attracting a handful of good students to our universities mean much when it's not affordable to most of our own citizens? Yeah, America has some great universities, but they're out of reach for most people.

Why would you want to add data from irrelevant countries?

>Where are all the top tech companies?
HQ in US
Tax residency in Ireland, twice.
Staff outsource in India.

Different American user checking in.

>a whole bunch of other RPGs

But that's the thing, it has a whole bunch of other RPGs, but those RPGs aren't especially big outside of their home nation. The Dark Eye, for example, is huge in Germany, but how many Spanish or Italian players do you think it has? Do you think there are more Spanish players of The Dark Eye than there are of Dungeons & Dragons? Meanwhile, D&D has a notable presence in all those countries. Likewise Japan has its own set of RPGs, but they aren't played anywhere to any real extent except Japan. Meanwhile, people in Japan do play D&D.

D&D dominates the global market for two reasons:
1) The largest number of RPG players are in America (this is pulled from my ass, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are more tabletop RPG players in American than, say, Germany, Italy, Spain, and France combined, if for no other reason than America's overall population is greater than those four countries combined (about 316 million people in America verses about 294 million people in those four combined)), where D&D is overwhelmingly dominant;
2) No local RPG competes well outside of its home nation, whereas D&D does reasonably well in most markets.

It's better to be a jack-of-all-trades than a master of one, basically.

>about 294 million people in those four combined

Whoops, sorry, that's Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and Poland combined. Without Poland it's about 255.58 million people total.

What the fuck is a chicken tendie?

Dunno.
Could have something to do with Turducken.

They should follow their lead

I think the main reason Magic survives is this assumption by most players that things won't get worse. Even when it does get worse, people assume that will be the last time. It's like we're in an abusive relationship.

I think it's a "chicken finger".

It's chicken white meat that's been ground, shaped, breaded, baked, frozen, and can be baked or deep fried to be quickly served as a finger-food; usually comes with dipping sauce and served with fries.

It's a mass-produced chicken katsu.

Huh yeah same

There are board games that caters to "gamist" personalities, and they do a far better job of it than D&D.

...

All that tells me is what the userbase of d20 plays, which, honestly, might speak more towards how hard it is to find people who play those particular games. I have never used it, either way, and have never met someone who has. Neither have I ever met someone who has played any of those games, with the exception of WoD, as more than a one time thing.