Scarcity in TTRPG Marketing

I hate scarcity. It drives people to make decisions based on short-term outcomes and is a major source of anxiety in the modern world. It is also often artificial — if the system was different, people would be more likely to have “enough” resources or even an “abundance” of them.

One resource that is often perceived as scarce is human attention. There are only 24 hours in a day and even fewer waking hours. However, I argue that no matter how small your niche is, there is more human attention out there than you would ever need.

The well of human attention

There might be only a hundred thousand people potentially interested in your work globally. This seems like a big number, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the staggering tens of millions of TTRPG players globally. If you sell a $50 product to one thousand people (a modest 1% conversion rate) every year, you get a $50k yearly income. It isn’t fantastic, but it’s also more than some of us probably expect from a TTRPG carrier.

Now, I know how that sounds. How on earth am I supposed to reach a hundred thousand people regularly and even get close to 1% conversion rate on my sales? Well, there is a way. It’s a dark, ugly path that violates users’ privacy by tracking them everywhere. It is (lightning strikes over a dark castle of capitalism) personalised advertising.

This is not the solution we are looking for. We can, however, derive one basic insight from personalised ads: if you show people something they are interested in, they are much more likely to buy it.

Traditional promotion

Traditional marketing wisdom for TTRPGs is to:

• Share your work in communities where you are an active member
• Build your own community of people who like your work and promote it there

These strategies work, but have a common downside: both by definition promote your work only to the people in these communities. There is nothing wrong with this approach if that is your intention. What if it isn’t, though?

Some people don’t even know these communities exist. Others are already at their capacity for the number of communities and won’t join yours. My theory is that potentially lots of people who might become potential customers don’t know about your product because of this friction in how we spread information.

Recommendations to the rescue

I think we might solve the perceived scarcity of human attention by providing recommendations to potential TTRPG customers.

Imagine a website. You can submit a link to your TTRPG to this website. You can choose a list of very specific, narrow tags for it. Not “D&D” or “horror”, more like “alternative 1800s” and “trans experience”. People can subscribe to receive an email with new entries in specific tags monthly.

The moderators check every entry to match the tags. Authors cannot submit a game twice unless there is a significant content update for it. Readers can search all submissions by tags, author and publisher. Lastly, there are no ads on the website or in the emails.

TTRPG authors can promote their work directly to specific audiences, reaching them no matter what community they are from. TTRPG enjoyers can easily find games in tags of their choosing — or explore games in new tags they didn’t hear about before.

Conclusion

I think such a website could be useful to the TTRPG community. As a software engineer, I know how to build it. However, I want to hear from others first. I might be approaching this whole thing from a completely wrong angle. Does this idea resonate with you? Does it seem completely bonkers and might have unforeseen consequences? Let me know what you think.