Comments on: The RPG industry is like a water pipe

By: Gaikokumaniakku

Gaikokumaniakku — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:36:11 +0000

I don’t think Whitman claims D&D successfully won all of its players for life, I think Whitman is holding that up as an ideal. I think a small number of highly visible TTRPG evangelists have latched onto TTRPGs for life: Seth Skorkowsky and Professor Dungeon Master might be examples. Those evangelists will not stop even if TSR or WotC or Hasbro goes bankrupt: even if the rules were not available in print, they would vanity-publish them, or pirate them, or something. With that type of evangelist, the company TSR has not won, but the community of TTRPG players has won.

I would go a step further: TTRPGs are best understood as part of a system of cultural practices that can be handed down from generation to generation. Many TTRPG players are childless. Some TTRPG players continue stable long-term campaigns and ALSO have children. Those players are rare (relative to childless gamers), but they are likely to pass on the cultural practices of gaming to their offspring.

A key weakness of TTRPG culture is that many people get into it for some finite span of years and then get out of it forever — often with nasty, resentful stories of how the people they played with were horrible. If those alienated ex-gamers become a large group, then TTRPG culture suffers.

If time permitted, I would blather at length about the sociology of TTRPGs, but I ought to listen more and talk less.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:21:44 +0000

I’m honestly surprised UFC can sustain the pace that’s apparently working for them — but running events a bit too often probably saturates demand and keeps out competitors.

By: T. Beholder

T. Beholder — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 10:17:57 +0000

And eventually, you run out of new players.

Why?

It worked for a while.
Until it didn’t.
Three years later—1997—TSR collapsed.

Well, that, and crappy editors, and crappy management (thus lack of playtesting or in some cases even review by someone numerate).

I was the Gen Con coordinator.

Oooh. Why wouldn’t he tell us about Gen Con, then? Including its $CURRENT_YEAR state, and so on.

Spanked us. Hard. Because Wizards figured out what TSR never did: You don’t win by flooding the market for 7 years.
You win by keeping players for LIFE.

So that’s what d20, D&D4 and whatever they call that unholy mess they have right now did?

By: Mike in Boston

Mike in Boston — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:03:21 +0000

Why do we hear so much about companies like UFC and TSR that, let’s be honest, the world could do without?

Maybe it’s because they were created by entrepreneurs with a real creative spark and clear vision.

What discourages entrepreneurs like that from creating companies that would actually improve people’s material welfare, instead of distracting them from their sorry circumstances with creative new forms for entertainment?

It’s overregulation. The kind of creative genius who’d create something entirely new like UFC or D&D or your favorite website isn’t going to slog through dealing with FDA regulations, building codes, ADA compliance, and all that nonsense.

Entrepreneurship won’t really change people’s lives in America until regulation is swept away.

By: Phileas Frogg

Phileas Frogg — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:04:53 +0000

Pacing and quality matter for sustainability. It’s why the UFC doesn’t push it’s events too far in terms of numbers per year. 46 events in 2014 was the company’s all time high, and since then it’s settled into a sustainable 41-42 events/year, with about 1 marquee event/month.

The lesson is clear: Don’t oversaturate your own market, or you’ll get diminishing returns.