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 jmurph wrote:
But all of this is business analysis, not game design, and the two shouldn't be conflated.

Definitely. The point wasn’t to open a debate on the reasons for GW’s successes and failings, but to put game design in a better context than ‘sometimes crap sells’, like the McDonald’s analogy seemed to argue. Even if a game design isn’t great, there’s lots else going on that makes people buy and enjoy games.

Anyhow, because I can’t help myself, GW’s success came because their model of a monthly in-house magazine and branded stores was the best retail model in the pre-internet wargaming world. But once the internet came and companies could show their games and minis to anyone interested for close to nothing, then the high cost GW model became a very bad system.

I think of game design as a commercial venture as much as anything. I think it's important to consider whether a particular feature of any game is a benefit to the consumer.

Back to the "averaged die", I found, just for fun, this schema for a d20:

1 face showing "1"
2 faces showing "2"
3 faces showing "3"
4 faces showing "4"
4 faces showing "5"
3 faces showing "6"
2 faces showing "7"
1 face showing "8"

that, is, more graphically:

1
22
333
4444
4444
333
22
1

this would be the choice to go when you feel that the d6' outcomes universe of just 4 results is too limited for your game model, and you would benefit from improving them to as much as 8, at the price of having a dice type that may be unfamiliar to some players and harder to manufacture.

But this is just a mental excercise, as with the classical 2d6 you would have even more averaged outcomes with two very obvious kind of dice