Report To The Stakeholders

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

It might be that the benefit to SJGames from GURPS moving to a model of crowdfunding for occasional large hardcopy books (with or without ongoing PDF support similar to what we have now) would be less than the loss to SJGames from stores getting annoyed and dropping Munchkin.

I don't think many (any?) stores would drop Munchkin because of what we did with GURPS. In any case, we aren't going to discuss future crowdfunding plans (if any) at this time, and possibly never publicly; we have to get our internal decisions made first.

Phil Reed is out of town this week, so please don't take his silence as anything other than he's off somewhere relaxing and ignoring us for a few days. Trust me, we need his vacation almost as much as he does. :-)

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

And yet Phil Reed keeps saying game stores matter. To SJ Games maybe (for Munchkin etc. ) but the above suggest that to GURPS they're now a hindrance rather than a help.

It might have been said already, but do note that it's quite possible for the company line to be "support bricks-and-mortar games shops" by selling board, card, and dice games through said shops, while its policy toward RPGs amounts to "sell RPGs mainly or exclusively in PDF." Moving GURPS to PDF is in no way withdrawing support from physical shops when all of the other games we're selling through such shops have surged in volume year after year. The net SJ Games presence in shops is up, despite moving GURPS to a mainly PDF existence. And further note that the latter shift really says nothing about shops helping or hindering GURPS . . . only that we find it easier to support a complex generic game with shorter, speedier-to-publish, and more easily updated PDFs.

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

EDIT: maybe the problem is Discworld is too British as a novel series. How popular are the novels in the US, I have no feel for it.

There may be some truth to that. To be entirely honest, nobody I know in my immediate or extended circles of RPG fandom here in Canada is a fan of the series. While the novels might sell briskly here, my purely anecdotal evidence is that the customers are largely non-gamers – and not only that, but the kinds of non-gamers who wouldn't set foot in a games shop to check out something to do with Discworld. The most rabid Discworld fans I know are in the convention-going SF&F community, who in these parts have a strong hate on for hobby games, regarding such games as at best a dilution of the pure blood of fiction and at worst as a cancer depriving proper fandom of lifeblood. It's a victim of the Nerd Wars.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Kromm

To be entirely honest, nobody I know in my immediate or extended circles of RPG fandom here in Canada is a fan of the series.

...Whereas, at a games convention over the weekend, I proved (to my own lack of surprise) that if you say to a British games fan or RPG publisher "the company can't get enough pre-orders for a Discworld game", you should photograph the resulting expressions to go in the dictionary next to the word "gobsmacked". And, as usual, my Discworld game session was fully booked, with a reserve - which I can't guarantee for other GURPS games.

Not all British Discworld fans go into games shops, of course, but at least one games shop I knew solved that last time round by sticking a large GURPS Discworld poster in the window. Anyway, that was the only RPG book of mine that got into a lot of regular bookstores. And Harrods.

Come to think of it, the nearest thing to a hobby games shop in a lot of places these days would be a branch of Forbidden Planet, a literary/media SF chain, who usually have a reasonable shelf of games, including the odd RPG.

[Kromm]

The gaming vs. cinema vs. novels vs. comics vs. . . . debate splits differently in each market. There is no One True Way. Being very much a back-office kind of person who goes nowhere near budgets, printing, licenses, advertising, and other business elements that face the outside world, I am really in no place to make informed comments on distribution. However, my understanding is that for U.S. games companies, there's "U.S. distribution" and "everything else," and as the former accounts for the lion's share of sales, there's an inherent bias toward how that debate shakes out in U.S. fandom and, when it comes to licensed RPGs, toward U.S. media properties.

[robertsconley]

With a foot in the world of SJ Games and GURPS and a foot in the world of Classic D&D and the Old School Renaissance, I feel the folks around here can figure a way to move GURPS forward.

If a group of hobbyists can resurrect an all but dead set of games and return to life with new products being published and most importantly played. Then there is hope for GURPS given the nature of SJ Games and it's fan community.

That with Print on the Demand, PDFs, the internet, tablets, virtual tabletops, there is a combination that will allow GURPS to thrive, grow and keep people happy. Based on my experience with other fan communities for other RPGs, GURPS has more than enough interest to do this.

But... the reason for the OSR success is that people went ahead and did things. Lots of things, some good, some bad, some so so. The important thing is that they tried. And not that different products were tried but different ways of publishing products were tried, kickstarters, Print on Demand, web site sales, boxed sets, traditional publishing, etc , etc. Some worked, some didn't and some were spectacular failures, there were a few big successes, for most like myself, it was profitable.

Certainly not Munchkin profitable or Pathfinder profitable but enough that it was worth the effort and pretty paid for my hobby for the past couple of years with a few dinners and extras for my family.

I think one of the big questions facing the community and SJ Games. How can GURPS keep going when every hour of labor for SJ Games is better spent on Munchkin and board games. Especially considering that SJ Games is able to provides for the livelihood for a lot of people. Which is great for a game company.

The only reason the OSR grew to any size is because today's tech allows use to profitably use our hobby time to turn a small profit. But there only a handful of OSR publishers I know of that actually make their livelihood from publishing. However are are dozens of publishers successfully employing their hobby time into tangible quality products (as well mediocre ones and poor ones).

I don't have specific answers but if the goal is to have more GURPS products the means are there. The enthusiasm is there. But in the end it up to Steve Jackson and SJ Games to determine what they are comfortable with.

I think if the present publishing channel is supported, we will have great quality products that are excellently designed but GURPS will be relegated as a niche of a niche within the industry and the hobby. That will be supplanted by other games within its own niche.

[pestigor]

While I strongly favor a print on demand option for Gurps as it seems the best compromise for people who want physical books and people who like PDFs, I think (and this is just a guess) that SJ games might have print commitments to printers to get the prices they get on their other products. Their printers might see a shift to POD as a negative and might push back with higher printing prices for Munchkin...Though I don't know any of this for sure, I can't see why not go to a POD situation for Gurps otherwise? But like Sean Punch said, I'm not a business office guy.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by pestigor

While I strongly favor a print on demand option for Gurps as it seems the best compromise for people who want physical books and people who like PDFs, I think (and this is just a guess) that SJ games might have print commitments to printers to get the prices they get on their other products. Their printers might see a shift to POD as a negative and might push back with higher printing prices for Munchkin...

I don't have specific inside knowledge, but from what I've heard in the business generally, few publishers have persistent long-term connections with single printers like that. And if any printer did try throwing such a foolish snit over a publisher using POD technology, well, there's competition in that business; the publisher could go elsewhere, with a rude gesture on the way out.

Originally Posted by pestigor

Though I don't know any of this for sure, I can't see why not go to a POD situation for Gurps otherwise?

Setting up in-house POD facilities would not be a trivial or cheap exercise. As I recall, SJGames apparently had a room left open for exactly that for a while, before they finally admitted it wasn't going to happen and put the idea on ice.

Building a relationship with an external POD specialist requires commitments on both sides, and could potentially tie SJGames to a single supplier in a field with still-evolving technology. Plus, POD printing is still not as good as traditional printing, to the trained and fussy eye, and SJGames has a perfectionist streak that may sometimes get out of hand.

[pestigor]

Unfortunately, with regards to Gurps they might have to compromise something to keep it viable. I'd be willing to live with less to ensure the game stays viable but I might be in the minority in that respect.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by pestigor

Unfortunately, with regards to Gurps they might have to compromise something to keep it viable. I'd be willing to live with less to ensure the game stays viable but I might be in the minority in that respect.

Thi part of the thread bothers me. GURPS is still viable and a lot of high quality material is published rather regurly.
Hard copy is less then it used to be, but we have a wide variety of PDFs and I feel the line has expanded.

[pestigor]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Thi part of the thread bothers me. GURPS is still viable and a lot of high quality material is published rather regurly.
Hard copy is less then it used to be, but we have a wide variety of PDFs and I feel the line has expanded.

While I might have been engaging in hyperbole when I said "viable" the tone in the report regarding Gurps didn't leave me with a good feeling for the future. I hope they can figure something out, I mean I believe SJ Games is still committed to Gurps, but it didn't even make the top 40...I'm putting a game together to run open to the public at the local shop (we still have these here in the states with varying degrees of success) and fighting my social anxiety at the same time. I mean what I said though, if a solution involves making do with less I'll still buy the product as long as the writing quality is what is not skimped on.