[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

This is kind of disappointing. When it was announced that Pyramid was being cancelled in part to free up editorial resources, I had hoped we'd get a somewhat more frequent schedule of non-Pyramid releases. But that isn't looking like it's the case.

Please give us time.

The people who made the decision about Pyramid (which was made at the level of company-wide profitability, and not by editors) aren't the people who make the decisions about what goes into the GURPS pipeline (who are editors). We GURPS decision-makers learned of the fate of Pyramid in the third quarter of 2018, which meant we had no time to queue up a bunch of GURPS products for release in the first quarter of 2019. The process of outlining, approving, contracting, writing, reviewing, playtesting, revising, editing, laying out, illustrating, reviewing again, and finally uploading takes three or four quarters, meaning the response to a decision in the third quarter of 2018 isn't something you'll see before the second or third quarter of 2019.

As soon as we got the news about Pyramid, we ramped up the intake of new projects. We have seven first drafts arriving between March and June 2019, five more in house and awaiting playtesting, and yet another somewhere between those two steps . . . plus the short item I just wrote . . . plus two manuscripts that are further along but need special treatment . . . plus Steampunk 3, which didn't get uploaded this week for reasons related to urgent matters pre-empting it, not because we sat on it to release it next week. I wrote Action 5 and got it released in less than one quarter to make sure we had something sooner, and the manuscript I just wrote will serve a similar purpose; staff-written product has the massive advantage of taking just one or two quarters, but I'm the only staff writer for GURPS, so I can only do so much, especially when I'm also responsible for managing 15 or 16 other projects.

It's important to remember that while SJ Games isn't a huge company, it does have different departments and product lines, and X happening in one of those (operations, Pyramid) doesn't necessarily imply a response Y in another (editorial, GURPS). But because it isn't a huge company, it has limited person-hours to spread between everything (as I said, I'm the only staff writer for GURPS and also the developer for the entire line). Of the 33 people listed here, just three have anything to with GURPS – and two of those three have other, non-GURPS obligations as well.