Report To The Stakeholders

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

Personally, I know what I want from SJG.

Nice artwork there!
GURPS Asparagus eh?

[Ts_]

http://www.sjgames.com/general/stakeholders/
That seems to be the new one.

[stefanj]

Nice to read that things are going well.

[PK]

Great to see the report was so positive.

I'd like to preemptively address the fact that GURPS wasn't specifically called out as a priority. For those who may take this as some sort of omen or portent, please note that GURPS wasn't listed as a priority last year, either . . . no big deal. As the man himself said:

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

The fact is, GURPS gets the full-time efforts of two Top Men, and a lot of attention from several other staffers. It makes money, a lot of fans care about it and vote with their dollars, it is fun and satisfying for us, it will continue. Perhaps I should have said just that. But (in large part because Kromm and PK have it under control), it's not something that we need to be telling you, and each other, is a (sound cue: portentious music) Top Priority.

So there ya go. If there's ever anything we're doing wrong with GURPS, I'd expect "fix GURPS" to jump right onto the priority list that year . . . but frankly, I'm glad that hasn't happened. :)

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

Great to see the report was so positive.

One thing I'd like to do preemptively is address the fact that GURPS wasn't specifically called out as a priority. For those who may take this as some sort of omen or portent, please note that GURPS wasn't listed as a priority last year, either . . . no big deal. As the man himself said:


So there ya go. If there's ever anything we're doing wrong with GURPS, I'd expect "fix GURPS" to jump right onto the priority list that year . . . but frankly, I'm glad that hasn't happened. :)

As someone who sort of jumped the gun on this, its nice to see floating about.

(Thanks for cross-posting Rev.; you'd da man >_> 'cause RPK is so gangsta)

Ghostdancer

[PK]

Ghostdancer asked me to crosspost this point I made on Twitter. If it feels like I'm beating a dead horse, blame him. :)

His question there was, "If GURPS has two full-time staffers, and Munchkin has two full-time staffers, why is the former not a priority while the latter is?"

The answer:

* With so much of GURPS moving to digital release, issues like keeping it in stock and getting it distributed are nonexistent. Decisions made for the line affect hundreds of units sold, and a major mistake in managing GURPS could potentially hurt e23's bottom line.

* On the other hand, just keeping Munchkin in stock is a full time job! Decisions made for that line affect tens of thousands of units sold, and because so much cash flow is involved, a major mistake in managing Munchkin could cause serious harm to the entire company.

Thus, Munchkin has to be a priority, while GURPS doesn't. The two differ by orders of magnitude, both in units sold and importance to the company's total earnings.

[Christopher R. Rice]

<------ Whipping Boi

It was something that just popped out at me and I apparently didnt have the proper context. Maybe it was obvious to others but not me. Still Pyramid seems to have done well and that's just so awesome.

Ghostdancer

[Kuroshima]

I'm glad that SJG is doing so well. I feared that Pyramid wasn't being profitable, because last time I ran the numbers, they didn't seem that good.

Assume that of the 25k words per issue, 20k are by freelancers, paid at $0.04/word. That's $800 per issue. Let's say that the credit card company's cut per sale, layout, art, editing, and the $5k remaining words by the staff cost $800 more, for a total of $1,600 per issue.

27 issues have been published, so that's a total of $43,200.

Sales data (from here)

• 4895 individual issues have been sold, at $7.99, for a total of $39,111.05
• 158 3-month subscriptions have been sold, at $20, for a total of $3,160
• 67 6-month subscriptions have been sold, at $20, for a total of $2,680
• 374 12-month subscriptions have been sold, at $20, for a total of $26,180

This makes a total of $71,131.05, so yeah, assuming that my assumptions are right, it's a tidy profit

[Ts_]

If I had any understanding of numbers, I could try to figure out how much GURPS contributed to SJGames sales last year ...I assume sales is mostly the same as gross. (Okay, understanding of business terms would also help.) About $500k is not accounted for by Munchkin and dice games. GURPS is probably not all of that, considering that there's also other things on e23 and w23. So maybe $350k from GURPS?

Looking at data from e23 for 2010, namely that the top 100 sales listed under GURPS4E (which includes Pyramids) had 16k sales plus the unseen trail of probably another 100 items in the low tens ... So, maybe 20k sold items for GURPS on e23, with an average price somewhere around $10. That's ... wait for it ... $200k. The overhead of e23 should be low compared to printing. Maybe half of that for 1.x techies and servers. So about $100k from e23 sales can pay for the actual creation of the content.

"Printed RPG Sales" are listed under "Failure". If they make up the other $150k, that by itself is a bit troubling because they probably have higher production costs than keeping e23 running. Besides, Amazon lists some physical books cheaper than the PDF on e23, so the margin from each book must be pretty bad in comparison. I have no clue, but I guess Amazon wants a 40% share on such exotic items, so that's maybe $12 for a softcover and $15 for a hardcover that SJGames sees from Amazon. ... So, that's 12k printed books sold. (With sales concentrated on a lot less items than on e23.) Could be.

Anyway, we already assumed $150k sales in printed books. What's the printing cost of these books, the equivalent to keeping e23 running? Don't know ... Pretty hardcovers probably aren't cheap. I could imagine that 2/3 of that is printing cost, like $10 for a hardcover and probably around $5 for a softcover, plus overhead like storage etc. Maybe you end up with $5 per book left for the content? So maybe $60k?

(While that doesn't look worse per item than PDFs, this assumes you sell all the books you printed and you need to print many to keep the printing cost down ... )

So, $160k in total for the creation of all GURPS content and Pyramids: 2 full time staff, royalties, art and layout, plus the usual things like taxes and offices etc ... Hmm, I somewhat believe that to be a bit too pessimistic. On the other hand, I can totally picture some of the writers having to save on food for their kittens when you don't buy enough books. Please think of the kittens!

Disclaimer: This is all rubbish. I never even took a single economy class or anything like that. I don't even know what a GURPS $ is worth right now and right here ...

Ts

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

His question there was, "If GURPS has two full-time staffers, and Munchkin has two full-time staffers, why is the former not a priority while the latter is?"

Another useful view of this can be had by totaling the number of words, especially rules and stats, in the two lines. Go ahead – I'll wait!

.

..

...

There, you see? You need two full-time editors just to handle the word count for GURPS!

What's missing in the equation is how much art direction and production time the two lines get. Munchkin gets lots more . . . lots and lots and lots more, despite the entire line having far fewer square feet of readable surface area than a couple of GURPS books. And art and production assets are shared at SJ Games, not dedicated full-time to specific product lines, explaining the perceived discrepancy.

Short version: GURPS has two full-time staff and small bits of two to four other people. Munchkin has two full-time staff and the lion's share of all the other bits of everyone. On a per-line basis, full-time staffing doesn't tell you anything but how many words of text are involved.