Category: Transmedia

In yesterday’s post I gave the “Why” — my reasons for saying that tabletop game industry folks should be moving into the wider transmedia field. Today, I’m going to talk about “What” and “How”.

CWF+RTB=$$$

That formula is the creation of Mike Masnick from Techdirt, taken from a 15-minute presentation he did at the 2009 MidemNet conference in Cannes. It means: Connection With Fans plus Reason To Buy equals Business Model. It’s an argument for how creatives (specifically musicians, in his example) can generate a living in an age of pirating downloads, clueless corporations and shrinking economies.

Take a look at the original presentation (rather than having me summarize). It’s only 15 minutes, and well worth your time:

(He did an expanded, 30-minute version of the presentation at the Leadership Music Digital Summit, about 3 months later —it’s available on vimeo, if you’ve got a bit more time.)

Essentially, Masnick is talking about a fairly basic concept: Create a fanbase, and then monetize that fanbase. This is something that we in the tabletop game industry already know how to do — gamers become fans of our products, and they purchase, with the goal being fans who purchase every release for a particular line. An evergreen customer.

We’ve got the connect with fans bit down pretty well — we’re used to talking to them on various internet fora, via Twitter, at Conventions, etc. The next step in the process is giving those fans a reason to buy — which, for most of us in the field, is where our thinking is currently limited. We’re stuck into the “if we build it, they will come” school of thought. We produce games, and gamers will buy them. That’s basically how it’s worked for the past 30-odd years. Your game comes out, you communicate that to consumers via ads or demos or spreading word-of-mouth via the internet, and gamers who are interested will pick it up, start playing, and recruit others.

I would argue that we need to give them more of a reason to purchase than “because it’s there.” We need to understand what they want, and that means getting into their heads.

It’s All In The Mind

I started researching the psychology of fandom — what drives the very tribal behavior of fan groups, what activities encourage that behavior, etc. The best resource I found (through a video of another talk given at the same MidemNet as Masnick’s, above) was Online Fandom, a blog that covers that very subject, by Nancy K. Baym, a professor of Communication Studies. Watch video of her presentation here (unfortunately non-embeddable).

Funny story — I had watched the video of her presentation and had gone to Online Fandom, reading everything she had posted… and it wasn’t until prepping to attend SXSW this past March that I realized that she’s an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Kansas–Right here, where I live. Small, small world.

Baym’s work (and the work of others, which I found through her references) taught me a lot, but also confirmed what, as a fan myself, I already knew: Fans tend to assume a level of ownership of the object of their fandom — they view it as theirs.

If we can give them things which speak directly to that sense of fan ownership and tribal identity, that gives a very compelling Reason To Buy. Transmedia properties, which often include interactivity and participatory structures as part of their design, are tailor-made for that sort of approach. Even better, because of the multi-vector nature of transmedia, it allows creators to open up specific areas of participation to fan ownership, without losing overall authorial control. (For example, allowing for fan creation of adventure material for the RPG portion of a transmedia property doesn’t effect the authorial control over, say, the web series portion.)

Can You “Take a Page” from Webcomics?

The webcomics folks have been living in the CWF+RTB=$$$ for quite some time. They give their content away for free, and yet the most successful ones make a good living as well. They do this by using the free content to create fans, and then monetizing that fanbase, by giving them reasons to buy. Special print collections, fan-identity items like shirts and the like, and more. As Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary once said: the whole thing is like grizzly bear soup. First you’ve got to find, hunt and kill a grizzly bear (that’s the creating fans part), and after that, it’s just a soup recipe. Meaning — if you can create the fans, getting the money isn’t that hard.

If you haven’t watched Tayler’s presentation from the Utah Open Source Conference in 2008, I cannot recommend it enough. It was a game-changer for me (and I was lucky enough to be able to tell him so at GenCon last year). It’s about 30 minutes in length:

Another good source of advice and information is the website Webcomics.com — it’s a paid site ($30 per year — absolutely, unreservedly worth it) run by Brad Guigar (Evil, Inc.), with regular contributions from Scott Kurtz (PvP) and Robert Khoo (the Director of Business Development for Penny Arcade). They’re talking about webcomics — but a lot of the advice is equally applicable to anyone who is engaged in digital delivery of entertainment.

It’s the “Freemium” business model (as coined by Chris Anderson, and discussed in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price) — which, when we combine it with Masnick’s formula and Baym’s behavioral research, leads us to the main model for us to follow: Use free content as a gateway to create fans of our properties, and then offer them reasons to purchase based on the psychological drives of fandom.

To Be Continued (What, again?)

This one got bigger than I was expecting as well — although I guess I should’ve expected that: trying to sum up years of research and thought on this topic into a blog post is bound to get lengthy.

We’ve discussed “Why” and “How” — well, the big-picture “How”, at any rate. Tomorrow: Down to brass tacks. What do we do, and how do we do it?

Please add your comments or questions below.

I’ve been meaning to talk about this in depth for a while now, and now seems as good a time as any. It’s a fairly large topic, though, and I can’t figure out any elegant way to get into it, so I’ll just lay this out there:

Folks in the tabletop games industry should
be expanding into the wider Transmedia field.

There are a few reasons for this, which I’ll get to in depth below. For right now, though, let’s talk about the term. It’s horribly buzzwordy, but it’s pretty much become the accepted terminology: Transmedia is storytelling across multiple forms of media in order to have a wide array of entry points by which consumers can interact with a particular property.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been doing a ton of research. It is my firm belief that moving in this direction is a smart play for tabletop gaming companies, for many reasons.

Skillz Ta Pay Tha Billz

First of all, the core skill set for transmedia storytelling is one in which tabletop gaming companies are well-versed: World creation. We’ve spent the past 30-odd years developing a very specific competency: the design and implementation of fictional settings, for the interactive use of consumers. That’s tailor made to the new transmedia paradigm, but we currently waste it by only producing tabletop games, which are only a single potential facet of an overall transmedia property. It’s a bit like having the know-how to design and build aircraft, but using that knowledge to produce only landing gear.

We should continue to create worlds. We should contine to produce tabletop games — but only as one small part of a larger overall effort. Create fans, and give them multiple options for interacting with your properties.

Publishing: Massive Changes

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve all seen the stories about how traditional publishing is in the midst of completely paradigm-shifting changes. The rise of electronic publishing now gives everyone direct-to-consumer delivery options, and the old gatekeepers, 19th century corporations that have grown too large and ponderous to rapidly change to meet these new realities, are weakening by the day.

Several blogs you should be reading, to keep abreast of the constantly-shifting ground beneath our feet:

• J.A. Konrath — a midlist thriller author who has put his own out-of-print and rejected novels up on Kindle, and shares his numbers. He’s figured out that at current market penetration, he can make roughly $100,000 over five years with a single Kindle novel — so why would anyone consider going through a publisher for a smaller advance than that?.
• Digital Book World — as it says on the tin: A publishing community for the 21st century. Informative articles, excellent webinars and Twitter conferences.
• Techdirt — more widely focused than on just publishing, but well worth reading to keep up on news regarding the impact of the internet on all business models.

I’m sure that you probably know of a few as well — please post a comment with your suggestions!

The games industry got to electronic publishing ahead of the crowd. We’re not doing a spectacular job at leveraging that early adopter status, I’m afraid, but we did get here ahead of the mainstream. The direct-to-consumer model is familiar to us at this point — and the point that I’m getting to here is that pretty much every other form of entertainment media is heading in that direction as well. Traditional publishing is just the biggest and most visible example right now.

GameIndustryPocalypse

Anyone who has been working in this business for more than 10 years knows this simple and uncomfortable fact: The traditional, three-tier (publisher-distributor-retailer) tabletop games industry has shrunk drastically — perhaps past the point of true viability. Initial orders of new product are a fraction of what they were even 10 years ago. The number of dedicated games retailers has been dropping precipitously, and few of those remaining stores stock very widely or deeply. This situation is not going to reverse itself. The hobby has reached the size where there are areas without enough active gamers to support a brick-and-mortar store. This leads to fewer stores. Fewer stores leads to fewer new gamers… and the cycle spirals.

The aggregating ability of the internet mitigates this — which is good for direct-to-consumer sales, but not so good for retailers. Making the problem worse is the head-in-the-sand reaction of most industry folks, who plug away as if it’s still the last century, hoping for the eventual turnaround –the new “Pokemon” or “d20” that will lift all boats. But, in my opinion, things have reached the tipping point. It’s not coming back. A vibrant, active Trade Organization might be able to implement a cross-tier effort to restructure and roll with the changes, but we don’t have anything resembling that level of organization. Our disparate tiers are out for themselves, combative, untrusting, and apparently more than willing to go down with the ship while waiting for some nebulous recovery.

You’d have to be suicidal to stake your livelihood on the future health of this industry.

Clouds on the Horizon

Click over and read this blog entry from Charles Stross, about recent tech news and the coming future of the internet. Go ahead. The rest of us will wait here.

Cloud computing — the decentralization of data, streamed to whatever device you choose — is coming, along with faster and more pervasive wireless connectivity.

Whether or not you view the iPad as functionally flawed or the greatest thing since sliced bread, you must come to grips with the fact that it represents a sea change in the consumption of media. It’s not a monotasking eReader. It’s a multi-fuction device, designed for consumption. That’s the future.

…and I don’t know about you, but I think that we should be aiming our business at the future, rather than hoping for a return to an idealized past.

To Be Continued…

This entry has gotten a bit epic, size-wise.

I’ve given you the Why. Tomorrow, I’ll try to tackle the What and the How.

In the meantime– Comments: We Haz Them. Fire away.