Dungeon Fantasy: Powered by Nobody Cares

I picked up a Dungeon Fantasy boxed set at a low price. It was steeply discounted, and I was curious about GURPS. The game was, predictably, a commercial failure. Steve Jackson Games said as at their Stakeholders Meeting that the game was:

...so very late, costing more to produce than is healthy, and requiring so much of our upper management team's time and sleep. As it is, the game will likely be sold out at our primary warehouse before the end of the first quarter and will not be reprinted. The current market doesn't leave room for a game like this to succeed, and it's a great thing that we cut our planned print run by 30% or we would be stuck with copies for years to come.

Why was this failure so predictable? Simple, look at the box:

What does that box say to a customer in the store? It says, "Hi, I'm a generic knock-off of D&D!" And in this case, there's truth in advertising. Steve Jackson is one of those nerds who thinks the mathematical beauty of a system matters to people, when the fact that D&D was king through the 80s, complete with its messy saving throws, bonkers high-level spells, and weird combat resolution, should have told him otherwise. The real question should be, "Who's looking for a different way to play D&D?" The answer is, "Nobody."

 The reality is very few customers do much research. If you're looking for people who have researched your system and know what "Powered by GURPS" means," you're looking at a very, very tiny niche. If you want real success, you want to get the people who walk into the store, see your attractive product, pick it up, and buy it. People just don't do that with obvious knock-offs. They either already have the real thing, are there to buy the real thing, or already don't like the real thing. My guess is most DF purchases were by curious gamers with money to burn who read the rules once before permanently shelving the game (like me) or GURPS fans who are hoping against hopes that they can use a D&D clone to lure unsuspecting marks into a point-buy spergout.

Honestly, I think a box set isn't a bad idea. Only D&D has the brand heft to require the massive buy-in associated with the 3-volume format. If I'm going to try something other than D&D, I'd like one purchase to have the whole game covered so that I can run it and get people involved without having to have them buy anything (people will balk at even a $5 PDF, really). The problem is the box set is literally just generic D&D. Who cares? I'd be much more interested in something different. Sci-fi, post-nuclear wasteland, zombie apocalypse, steampunk...just not, you know, getting the Fighting Man, the Magic-User, the Cleric, and the Thief together to go into a cave, kill the goblins who live there, and grabbing their gold. I already have a shelf full of books for playing that game, and my players have a lot of fun at my table. D&D is good enough that I have zero desire to learn a complex new system to play the same game. It's why I haven't picked up 13th Age, despite the game being universally praised. It's just D&D with different numbers.

Content is king, not rules. Learning rules is a necessary chore people do in order to get to the content, not the main thing they want to do. Without compelling content, it doens't matter what your rules are, which is what SJ Games got backward and always has. DF has completely boring, derivative, generic content, so it gives you no good reason to learn the 3d6 system. And that's why it failed.