Place your bets: brand vs. fan

by Sam Driver.

I am actively following an evolving business competition in the role-playing game sector, and I see it portending changes taking place in many other sectors. At stake in this particular case is a nearly 40-year-old roleplaying game brand — Dungeons & Dragons – that has been owned and operated by more than a handful of businesses over the years. Since the late 1970s, D&D as it’s often called has been on the scene as a geeky brand of imagination entertainment.  It started as one man’s dream and has now entered the popular consciousness, appearing in movies, print, and online, with a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) based on it. (See our June 3rd blog article “MMORPG guild leaders: Gurus in the midst.”) Geekiness aside, the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game is a lucrative brand with a passionate following of players, many spin-off products, and a long, nostalgia-filled history. 

Lately a drama has been unfolding:

• The newest release of the product is not backward-compatible. As Version 3.5 of the D&D rule set aged, sales naturally diminished. It is easy to see that in order to refresh sales of the brand, the product needed to be reinvented.  Fans will buy it.  They are fans, after all.  Let’s update the game for the new millennium and create a whole new product line to sell. Voila! The makers of the game, Wizards of the Coast, created a 4.0 version of the D&D rule set. How to market it? Tell the community that the bugs in v3.5 are overwhelming and unfix-able.  (Cue sinister marketing music.) There’s one big problem. Version 4.0 of the game is not backward compatible. As a result, the revised game system invalidates all previous versions of the game. Players have to learn a completely new set of rules, which means going out and buy a whole new set of rule books. Ka-ching!
• Enter on the scene the open source community, with a viable alternative. Paizo Publishing has entered the market with an alternative rule set to D&D, and we have a recapitulation of Greek myth proportions on our hands. Paizo created a new product called Pathfinder to extend and repair the V3.5 D&D rule set. As it turns out, not only are the problems with V3.5 perfectly fixable, but the open source community, under strong leadership, produced a phenomenal rule set in under a year, and this rule set continues to evolve under the dedicated effort of more than 15,000 contributors. 

This a classic battle of the expert few versus the minds of many, and as I watch it unfold I am finding it hard to see how the expert few can win here. On one side of the battlefield we have a fairly small band of professional game developers and marketeers working full time on the D&D product – (hopefully) well-paid, with the strength of a long-standing brand behind them. As is common in the gaming industry, the people who make the game are at odds with those who play it — the fans, who all believe they know how the game could be made better, if only the game developers would listen to them. Rising up from amongst these passionate fans, we have a small group of leaders who are managing thousands of crusading activists who are donating their time to a fierce fight, working to change the game to the way they want it to work. 

What made it possible for Paizo to rally 15,000 contributors and pull together a solid product in less than a year? The community building capabilities of the Web – social networks, blogs, wikis, and the like. I am foreseeing open source projects like Paizo’s Pathfinder rising up all over the place. My June 3rd post about the Fold.it project highlights a great early example in the field of biochemistry. The community building capabilities of the Web allow groups of passionate, smart individuals to find each other and become, in their numbers, very powerful. Kudos to those like Paizo who figure out how to leverage the wisdom of passionate crowds. Keep your eyes on this trend.

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