Perception is reality in branding. If you like the new edge system, good on ya. I am... sincerely confused at that, because it is hard to justify what it actually helps (It increases the time it takes to resolve combat and increases the amount of information tracked but reduces how important this information actually is), but I enjoy systems that are like... actually objectively totally broken rather than just designed in a questionable way, which means no one should take my opinion seriously for anything.
However, 6e as a brand is in a horrific spot, in the objective sense. Regardless of what you think of the quality of a game, it can end up here. 4e D&D was kinda low key great but ended up here, for example, despite now most people agreeing it was actually pretty good (and it influencing a LOT of games).
So, divorcing your mind from if SR6 is actually good or not (that, in a weird way, doesn't super matter. Exalted was bad and yet was crazy popular until it got into grimness porn) there is an unfortunate reality that... the market just doesn't feel anything about it anymore. When your community essentially rises up and has a rage spiral, it doesn't really matter if you think its justified or not because after their anger can't be sustained anymore if you don't make structural changes to bring them back to 'like' they aren't going to think about you at ALL. Losing relevance as a brand is terrifying, which is what SR6 managed to do.
Its communities don't exist outside of this site. This is... really bad because it is an extreme minority of the SR community in terms of web traffic, again this site is such an inconsequential slice of the greater SR community that despite being the official site for a long time it literally didn't come up in the top 4 results if you googled shadowrun, and its traffic stats routinely put it at 1/10th to 1/3rd of what other SR sites have as traffic both in pageviews and unique viewcount. Also, this website's bounce rate of 60%, meaning around half the unique visits SR gets a month are by accident.
SR Tabletop's website averages 25,000 total (non-unique) visits a month, which would be much higher than its uniques. For perspective, the SR subreddit gets around 80,000-60,000 unique visits a month, and its average viewed pages per visit are 10 times higher, which means its bounce rate is around 5%. So I hope I didn't blow anyone's mind because I know a lot of people on this site seem to think reddit represents a vocal minority rather than the current primary location SR fans talk about the game. Even pretending that the facebook group and this website have a 100% overlap with SR's fans, and that lets say half these uniques are people logging on through IPs reddit doesn't recognize as connected (Which would, by the by, be a freakishly high number and is entirely unrealistic), we can safely assume there are 40,000 active SR fans.
SR6's latest release is a 'silver best seller' despite being on a 50% discount for most of its 2 weeks of being out. That sounds neat, but as I overviewed before, if your below platinum you didn't break a thousand sales. Silver, for perspective, means that this book in its 'blockbuster debut period' sold less than 250 copies electronically. We have good reason to suspect the majority of SR's sales are electronic, including history and the fact that we are in the middle of a major viral outbreak and pickup sales from Barnes and Noble or FLGS are likely down, the book isn't available on Amazon yet, and the book isn't even a featured product or for sale in the Catalst store, so right now RPG drivethru is sorta the only location to obtain this book right now.
Cyberpunk Red's DEMO got over 5,000. SR 6th world itself sold (or 'sold' considering what went down with that release probably counts in the system, but we can't be sure), 1000-2000 copies, though that could in theory be bolstered by physical and CGL site sales. I doubt the CGL site sales though because its web analytics are so amazingly bad that most of the analytic tools I use to do research on website traffic kinda low key for a living right now don't even know it exists. And the store requires you to manually type through to get to even browse the shop, and it doesn't show up on google searches for shadowrun on the first 3 pages of results (Which is multiple levels of OOF because it both means your unlikely to discover it and it means so few people go to it google thinks it can't be what you are looking for), AND it doesn't show up on google shop.
So, to be really clear, 6e is kinda... screwed as a product right now no matter how you slice it. If you believe the uniques on this site are artificially high, well that means the percentage of people who actively play SR who bought the new book is.... lower than .5% (meaning for every 200 SR fans, 1 person bought this book). If you think its artifically high, it means this place is even more of a minority. If you think that books obtained via a discount coupon would result in them not counting towards sales, that means that however many lost sales via this coupon fiasco caused increases the ratio of players who despite owning the core system did not go on to purchase the next product (as at the VERY LEAST 80% of the people who obtained the 6e core rules from RPG drivethru did not decide to obtain the next book through RPG drivethru).
RPG drivethru takes 30-40% of sales. Maybe CGL made a special deal to keep more, but I doubt it. This means firing squad, which has been around 20 dollars most of its existence, made, at most, 2,800 dollars. 6e's core rules made about 27,900 dollars. The German edition also sold for around that much, but we can't say anything on how much CGL took away from that because all localized licensing and distribution deals are unique and we have no idea what the nature of that relationship is.
Soooo.... that is... really bad, and indicates a dramatic marketing change is needed, and considering the most vocal complaints about the game were about disliking core elements of the system, that being fixed is likely what marketing needs to focus on. You know, like 5e D&D kinda high key did. The time to actually fix things was way way earlier, and it would be hard to reverse ship without dramatic structural changes, but the idea that people early on were just an angry minority has kinda been demonstrably proven false in the worst way. The product has no attention on RPG drivethru with a devistatingly low amount of conversation. On reddit its announcement basically was non-news to the point I almost asked if we were going to actually keep it stickied for the normal amount of time considering how little anyone cared.
And, I can't stress enough, it
does not matter if SR6 was so good it restored IRL essence, balanced your real life and PC gen budget for you, made people like The Rocker PC concept again, and made your favorite NPC from the videogames canon. The fundamental reality of the sales situation is so dire that... it doesn't matter. I don't like D&D 5e very much but it makes gangbusters cash with tons of lucrative 3rd party deals based on mega popular IPs and so many books that are just flying off the shelves that they basically decided to leave RPG drivethru because they were doing so well they could just ignore a middle man, my feelings on 5e as a product are totally irrelevant when talking about its success as a product. No matter how much I don't like 5e D&D its a success. No matter how much you like 6e SR its... kinda objectively a really titanic failure and continuing to put one's head in the sand and pretend all criticism is bad faith and things are going great is the literal worst scenario you can do in a crisis communication scenario.
Like, for real, I get its an LLC and part of the appeal is that you don't have to get super corporate, but CGL needs to hire some marketing experts, do some actual research on its consumer base, and right this ship. As an LLC CGL has advantages in fixing these problems. They also had a few good ideas (reaching out to influencers, for example, to try to mimic D&D's success with podcasts) but handled it clumisly. Either this is a 'face issue' where your Rules Designing street samurai just failed to manage the crowd, or it isn't and legit mistakes were made, but now you need a face to get you out of your social snafu! Get yourself a face, first step, so many problems were clearly caused by a lack of effective community communication and good will (Ex: Howling Shadows).
Or don't the intersection of communications crisises and Shadowrun make it really easy for me to generate research materials and papers. Saves me a lot of stress in my studies!
Yes, that was exactly what was said. CONFORM!
It wasn't, but it doesn't matter what you say. It matters what people hear. Either what was said was careless enough to be construed as that, that was an overt implication of what was said, or good will is at such a low that people just want to hear that. None of those 3 things are good. No matter where you stand on 6e, I think it is fair to say CGL is facing a really big crisis right now, and at least from my perspective, doesn't have the expertise to handle those problems due to Cata being one of those companies that sorta grew out of a more 'fluffy' project, which is an enheartening success story but at some point you gotta bring in at least one suit.
That said, I may just be biasing hard to marketing and PR here because I literally research and study that for a living. Your lawyer thinks you need a lawyer, your plumber thinks you better hire a plumber, that sorta thing.
Dezzmont is right, 5e's bones were good and needed updating, streamlining and repairing in certain spots (*cough* rigging, *cough* matrix, *cough* magicrun) but instead we got the majority of of srun 5e's problems just transposed onto 6e's horrific relative advantage mechanic and even less information on how to run the game.
Also, who is this Dezzmont? I am clearly Dezmont, totally different person and not at all the same or just Dezzmont accidently making a typo in his own screename on the official forums like a goof, very good myessss?
But also it isn't invalid, like I said, to just abandon 5e and restructure the system entirely so you can do new things. Even 5e D&D is fundementally very different than 3.5 despite being based on its bones. I want to be clear I am assigning the problem not to 'change bad' but 'change attempting to fix something perceived as a problem without understanding or addressing the underlying problems likely makes bad thing worse.'
