[lordabdul]

Thanks for the annual report again, those are always super interesting.

Originally Posted by mstlaurent

I always sigh a little when I look at their top products lists, since the Steve Jackson games I play are pretty much, "Everything except Munchkin." But, hey, if Munchkin keeps the lights on so that all of the other games can get published....

Same here, although I don't even play much else than GURPS (and not even Dungeon Fantasy, although I did buy several products in that line to help out). I get something else every now and then to support the company (a couple Munchkins, Zombie Dice, some Ogre) but I'm afraid of what's going to happen when Munchkin's popularity eventually goes away. Hopefully SJG will be able to strike gold a second time before then.

There are a couple of things that stand out to me as a mainly RPG-oriented customer:

GURPS On Demand. We put quite a bit of time into this program in 2018, with over a dozen GURPS titles released as print-on-demand books during the year. The number of each that needs to sell is higher than we would like, especially since some of the books have yet to recover the costs to prepare them for POD sale. We'll review the program and then decide what happens next.

Here I wholeheartedly agree with Kromm:

Originally Posted by Kromm

I don't empathize with fans of hardcopy; living in a smallish apartment as I do, and with massive hard drives being cheaper than square footage and small enough to take up negligible space, I prefer media and packaging that don't have me stumbling over books, magazines, boxes, cassettes, discs, etc. I do sympathize, though;

These days, my consumption of RPG PDFs is easily outpacing my consumption of dead-tree RPG books by a factor of 10. I get proper books only for things that I will actually need during play, and/or that are actually gorgeous. A lot of GURPS material is super awesome for helping the GM prepare an adventure, but it's generally not something you need to refer back to during play, so PDF-only is enough for me. Plus, as a GM, I tend to hoard that stuff up like an angry dragon -- "a sourcebook on uplifted dinosaurs in a steampunk era? sure, that might be useful some day!". PDFs make hoarding super easy, especially in a place where square-footage is crazy expensive (I live on the other side of the country from Kromm... you probably know which city I'm talking about :) ).

Sometimes, for those things that are indeed helpful at the table, I might upgrade to the printed version years later (if it's still in print or available as POD) if I do end up running that game, and that not only relates to GURPS On Demand but also to the other thing that caught my eye:

In July, we announced that we were shifting our focus and taking the steps necessary to distance our operations from the industry's accelerating treadmill model for new releases.

If 2017 was the year for new games, 2018 was the bigger, louder sequel. Thousands of new titles were released in 2018, with some coming and going so fast that even professionals missed the release. Many of those games got pushed to the clearance racks faster than ever before; during the winter holiday sales, some games released as recently as September were already on deep discount.

I don't know how much those remarks relate to RPGs vs. board games, but it's interesting since it does affect how much stock companies are willing to print and, therefore, how much is still available a couple years later.

Other than that, small detail: the page title (that shows up in your browser's tab) says "Report to Stakeholders for 2017" instead of "for 2018".

Also, I'm confused, the forum is showing me pages 130 to 133 even though page 129 seems to be the last one (and the one this post shows up on).