General Use RPG Products Hedge Your Bets (And Overall Sell Better)

About a week or so ago I was tooling around in a FB group, and I saw a post from someone I'd worked with in the industry lamenting a challenge that RPG creators and companies alike are facing. A large number of his company's products were for Pathfinder Classic, Pathfinder 2nd Edition, and Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. However, if you look at the top 20 sales spots on Drive Thru RPG for all three of those games, you find something that might surprise you if you're a player instead of a creator.

Only about 4-5 of the sales slots for those editions were products that are expressly made for those editions. 25 percent, at best. The other 75 percent (including most of the top slots)? Those were general purpose RPG products that you could use for nearly any game. Sometimes they're genre-specific, but they're never game-specific.

The numbers have changed since then, but the general setup remains pretty steady; generic stuff outsells system and setting specific stuff, even in its own category. This didn't come as a surprise to me then, and it doesn't surprise me now. But I figured that if you're a player and you're wondering why so many creators and companies are putting game-specific content on the back burner that I'd try to answer that question as best I can.

Since it's stuff like this that's always a bestseller.

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Evergreen Content, and The Broader Market

There's a concept that I first learned when I was a baby ghostwriter called "evergreen content," and it essentially boils down to the idea that whatever you're creating needs to always be a viable and useful piece of text. A movie review of a recently released film might be timely, engaging, and entertaining, but chances are good it's going to fall by the wayside relatively quickly to be replaced by something new. A guide for using a particular software suite might be popular as long as that piece of software remains unchanged, but your advice might be nonviable as soon as the next update hits. And so on, and so forth.

Evergreen content is stuff that's geared to always be viable, and of-interest. Examples from my own archive include articles like Why Do Superheroes Wear Their Underwear on The Outside? (which goes into the history of costume design and inspirations), How to Kick in a Door (pretty self-explanatory), and even articles like 10 Questions to Put on Your Character Creation Document.

And this is where we sidestep back into RPGs.

And why so many products are aiming for evergreen.

I was completely unsurprised when I saw that a majority of top-selling products in game-specific categories were game/edition neutral, because I've been seeing those same results in my own sales charts basically as long as I've been earning royalties on the splats that I create.

Because the sorts of products that tend to get the best, most regular sales are the ones that aren't tied to any specific game's mechanics or setting, but which still provide Game Masters or players with something of value. For example, some of my most regular sellers and biggest break outs over the past year and change have included:

- 100 Tips and Tricks For Being a Better Game Master: Possibly my fastest-selling supplement ever, this piece went Silver over the weekend when it was first released. While sales tapered off after a month or so, it still moves copies every pay period.

- 10 Fantasy Villages: While it got a big boost from being the Deal of The Day last Fall, this collection of 10 villages that can be plopped right down into any setting, complete with maps, rumors, NPCs, and more (but which is absent any mechanics) remains one of my better sellers.

- 100 Merchants to Encounter: One of the first things I wrote to hit Gold status, it's just what it says on the tin; 100 merchants, some weird and wild, some utterly normal, that GMs can keep in their back pocket for when the players need to go spend their loot, or locate particular kinds of items.

A majority of the supplements I've written over the past few years fall into this category, specifically because they tend to sell more copies than game-specific ones. Not only that, but they have staying power as different games rise in popularity, errata are released, or new editions come out. Many of them also have the benefit that whether someone is running a module or book-based campaign, or putting together something completely homebrew, these supplements can slip right into both scenarios. They are, in a lot of ways, universal tools as long as they fit the genre/style a given Game Master is aiming for.

What About Being a Big Fish in a Small Pond?

When you're creating content for RPGs, you want to make sure that you have as big a potential audience for your game as you can. It is, for example, why basically everything I write for Pathfinder Classic almost has to have a 5th Edition DND version as well... because I sort of need viability in both markets to even hope for a return on investment.

But isn't there something to be said for specificity? When a product fills a specific niche, doesn't that make it more valuable? Well... no, not really. And it's often a lot more difficult to predict what is going to work, and what isn't in that arena.

Like this supplement, for example.

I've written a lot of products for specific games over the years, too. Whether it was modules/adventures like The Curse of Sapphire Lake for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Evil Incorporated: 10 Pentex Subsidiaries for the World of Darkness, or even 150 Sights To See (And Rumors To Hear) in Absalom for Pathfinder, by and large the products that are tied to one specific setting or one specific edition of mechanics don't sell as well. Even if they do all right, they rarely make the same kind of numbers that the more generic supplements do.

And there are reasons for that.

Firstly, a limited audience means you've got a smaller pool of potential buyers. Even if you "limit" yourself to DND 5E (arguably the largest chunk of the RPG market), it does push out folks running Pathfinder, Powered by The Apocalypse, Savage Worlds, and all the other games with a smaller market share. And if you're making a game specifically for one of those smaller markets, then you have a drastically smaller pond!

In addition to working within a smaller niche, you now have to ask how much competition you have. Like I said, 5E is the biggest slice of the market, and there's a huge amount of content for it coming out every day. The same is true to a lesser extent in Pathfinder, Starfinder, and some of the spheres of the World of Darkness like Vampire and Mage. So if you're fighting over attention with other creators, and there are fewer eyes and ears who might be interested in what you're selling, you've entered a much tougher market.

At the end of the day, I'd be more than happy to write adventure modules, full campaigns, class archetypes/subclasses, or even setting expansion stuff like my recent releases for my Sundara: Dawn of a New Age setting for DND and Pathfinder... but those things almost never sell as well as another generic list. Worse, they can cost a lot more in terms of time, effort, art, editing, promotion, etc. So a lot of the time you end up working a lot harder to produce something that isn't going to sell as well.

If you want to see creators produce more game or setting specific content then it's up to you, as an RPG player or Game Master, to do your part to help us boost that signal. Because it's hard to make sales on that stuff, and the less of a return on investment it generates, the less likely our publishers are to green light it, and the less likely we are as creators to write more of it.

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