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State of the Pen and Paper Industry
Syberghost writes "Kenneth Hite's annual 'State of the Industry' report has been released in his online column Out of the Box for gamer news site http://www.gamingreport.com. Among other interesting bits; Margaret Weis Productions is the sixth-largest RPG maker, on the sales of their sole RPG product line, the Serenity RPG. Sales overall were down, again; the RPG industry as a whole isn't doing well." Sad but not surprising.
It's not just the price or the time needed to play. It's also the fact that it's really hard to convince most gamers that they need to continue buying supplements. I'll admit that I have a lot of 3e/3.5e books, and I'll also admit that 3.5 was basically a cash-grab by WotC. Having said that, however, the truth is that most of the more recent supplements aren't things that I feel the need to buy. It's either stuff that I'd come up with on my own already, or it's material that is kind of cool, but not interesting enough to warrant purchasing. Hell, I don't even use half of the material in half of the supplements that I have now. Why would I need to buy more?
Also, there is the fact that the industry moves in cicles. If you recall, there was a significant drop-off in the market during the late 80's and 90's, which would correspond to the time between the initial frenzy over 2nd edition and the release of 3rd. I think that the same thing is happening here, and that when 4th edition comes out, we'll see a big boom in the market again (at least for a few years).
Another factor this time is the sheer glut of 3rd edition materials that were released. Everyone and their brother jumped all over the open-source nature of the d20 system, so there's even more dross to sort through and more competition in the market than ever before.