Report To The Stakeholders

[rknop]

How long has it been a "periodicals" market? I haven't kept up in the last year or two, but for years Paizo would list the Pathfinder Core Rule Book as their primary seller.

I can see it would be a periodicals market for supplements and such (indeed, back to Paizo, their "Adventure Path" line was designed to fill the void left when they lost Dragon). But I'm very surprised to hear that it is for things like core game sets.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by rknop

Wouldn't the indications be that the game has promise, and more would sell?

Not in the current market. Backlist sales aren’t as strong as they once were, and many titles sell on release and then quickly die off. If we had gone with our original planned run, we would still be sitting on thousands of games that trickle out slowly over years. Selling dozens each month when thousands are in the warehouse isn’t good for business.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

It means that products have a very short shelf life. Sales drop off quickly over time. Publishers, therefore, must plan to produce new products on a regular basis to keep up with the market and not pay much attention to old ones. This is similar to (not the same as) the magazine business, where no publisher in July would expect to see many people buying June's products, let alone January's.

Thanks for the assist here!

[philreed]

Originally Posted by rknop

How long has it been a "periodicals" market? I haven't kept up in the last year or two, but for years Paizo would list the Pathfinder Core Rule Book as their primary seller.

I can see it would be a periodicals market for supplements and such (indeed, back to Paizo, their "Adventure Path" line was designed to fill the void left when they lost Dragon). But I'm very surprised to hear that it is for things like core game sets.

It depends on title. Munchkin continues to sell — we have another printing of Munchkin Deluxe scheduled for release this summer — where other once evergreen titles have slowed to a point it’s not cost effective to keep them constantly in print.

[Steve Jackson]

Originally Posted by rknop

I can't help but suspect that DFRPG was predetermined to be a failure before it was released, and that no rate of sales could have saved it.

That's not fully correct, but it's not fully wrong. (What do I even mean by that? Allow me to continue . . .) At the time we sent it to print, we knew how late it was and how much it had already cost. But it certainly would have been an error to NOT send it to print! And we could always hope that sales would be such a fantastic blow-through that we'd need to send it back to print immediately. That did not happen. It has happened with some games, like Munchkin, so there is always hope. And we knew that it was a very fine set, so we DID hope. But we do not have people rioting in the streets demanding more copies of DF. The people who like it, like it fine, but there are not enough of you.

[rknop]

Do ebooks break that trend at all? The cost of keeping a PDF "in print" has to be quite tiny. (Not zero, because there is maintaining servers, but nowhere near as expensive as something that requires printing and warehouse space.) As such, I would guess that a trickle of backlist selling there makes it worth it, at least as compared to taking it off the market altogether.

Do PDFs manage to have more legs than print products, avoiding the periodicals market?

(Thinking about it, the periodicals market business reminds me of laments I've heard about book publishing in general, even 20 years ago, where new books get a few weeks of shelf life at (say) Borders (I did say 20 years ago...) and if they don't sell well enough then, they will never meet the cost of publication.)

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by rknop

I can see it would be a periodicals market for supplements and such (indeed, back to Paizo, their "Adventure Path" line was designed to fill the void left when they lost Dragon). But I'm very surprised to hear that it is for things like core game sets.

We're experiencing in card and board games a similar thing to what RPGs went through during the d20 boom. With crowdfunding sites on the front end (Kickstarter, notably, but also Indiegogo, Patreon, and even GoFundMe) and relatively cheap, fast printing solutions on the back end (GameCrafter, DriveThruCards, others I'm blanking on), there is a much lower barrier to entry for the first-time creator -- and the simpler the game, the lower the barrier is. Produce a game that's just cards, or cards and a small number of other components that you can source cheaply (stock d6 or plastic tokens, for example), and you can make a few hundred copies without risking much. If it takes off, then you approach publishers with sales figures in hand to see if anyone's interested. Meanwhile, you're writing your next quick-and-dirty* game.

* Not a value judgment. I have a shelf with a couple dozen games I got off DriveThruCards because they looked interesting and they were cheap. DTC is especially good because they print to order, so your inventory cost is limited to what you actually want to have on hand for conventions and reviewers and such.


The problem isn't that any one creator is publishing too much content; it's that there are so many games coming out, week after week, that anything remotely marginal gets a week or so of face-out shelving and then it's spine-out, buried among dozens of other spine-out games.

Originally Posted by philreed

It depends on title. Munchkin continues to sell — we have another printing of Munchkin Deluxe scheduled for release this summer — where other once evergreen titles have slowed to a point it’s not cost effective to keep them constantly in print.

It's also worth emphasizing something you said in the report almost in passing: for the past nine years, at least, we've set a goal to have all or almost all Munchkin in print at all times. (Not so much the mini-expansions, but basically everything else.) The sales in 2017 were down enough that we are revising that goal. We have a short list of titles that must stay in print, a longer list of titles that we should rotate in and out of the lineup, and an almost equally long list of titles that are going out of print as soon as we sell the last copy. Even two years ago, that was almost unthinkable, but now we have the Collectible Card Game eating a lot of time, energy, and space, and lower-performing Munchkin games just aren't as important to our bottom line.

[Refplace]

Looking forward to the Conspiracy game.
A for GURPS it was nice to see 4 items in the top 40.
The DFRPG being #6 tells me that all the advertising and social media push everyone did wasnt wasted. But would a new boxed set that doesnt have unexpected costs be worthwhile? Or is that concept dead...
GURPS Characters being there indicates new players, plus I feel like we have seen a lot of fresh faces on the forums.
I like the POD experiment seems to have worked out, and hope the Drivethrough experiment also works well and both help reach new people.
To me that is the key for GURPS growth, and I hope new product is geared towards attracting new people as much as pleasing existing customers.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Refplace

would a new boxed set that doesnt have unexpected costs be worthwhile? Or is that concept dead...

Dungeon fantasy is BY FAR the most popular genre of roleplaying games (for another datum, the original Munchkin game and its expansions far outsell all other Munchkin sublines). A new set would require basically the same amount of work, just in a different direction, and would be working against the grain of the market rather than with it.

[Ballistica]

If the Boardgame subreddit is anything to go by, the market these days is so chocked full of new games that people are more focused on collecting "the newest shiniest" game that they will probably play once, then getting anything thats been out for a while.

Sort of like video games, with Call of Duty is a good example, they sell on release riding on that hype factor, then see a massive drop off in sales from that. Then work is all focused on building the hype for the next Call of Duty release next year to make more money.