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Old 11-25-2015, 12:28 PM   #661
DouglasCole
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Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

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Originally Posted by philreed View Post
GURPS Fourth Edition was still basically new in 2005. Events over the past decade should make it clear which way the market has shifted. Look at:

* D&D has advanced two editions since 2005, and WotC is keeping support minimal today.

* The Pathfinder RPG didn't even exist a decade ago. Paizo made a smart move when they saw an opportunity, and they've now got a much larger company than they did in 2005.

* Games like Ticket to Ride, Catan, and Munchkin have all seen dramatic spikes in sales and reach since 2005, with all three of them breaking into a much larger market.

* Asmodee, through a combination of funding and brilliant business choices, has taken advantage of the surge in hobby gaming to merge with Fantasy Flight Games, purchase Days of Wonder, acquire L5R and Spot It, and become a powerful force in the industry.

Things in the hobby game market are wildly different today than they were a decade ago. With RPGs at $25 million in 2014 and minis/boardgames at $125 million during the same period (http://icv2.com/articles/markets/vie...bs-880-million) is it a surprise that publishers have taken steps to survive in the current environment?
If role playing games are actually one sixth of the entire market, I believe that I find myself pleasantly surprised! That's a higher fraction that I would have thought.
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Old 11-25-2015, 12:52 PM   #662
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Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

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If role playing games are actually one sixth of the entire market, I believe that I find myself pleasantly surprised! That's a higher fraction that I would have thought.
You're overlooking other games. ICV2 reports 2015 at $880 million total hobby sales. RPGs were $25 million of that.
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Old 11-25-2015, 01:45 PM   #663
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Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

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You're overlooking other games. ICV2 reports 2015 at $880 million total hobby sales. RPGs were $25 million of that.
Actually, I was still surprised that role playing games represented 16% of the group of role playing plus other tabletop games. I figured it would be more lopsided against rpgs.

Still, the overall point that you bring up is important to look at. Role playing games represent something on the order of two and a half or 3% of every dollar spent for this kind of entertainment. And not only is that a small fraction of total dollars, is a very low margin small fraction of total dollars. The opportunity costs of investing staff time in that couple percent for an even lower profit are, relatively speaking, quite high.
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Old 11-25-2015, 02:18 PM   #664
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The opportunity costs of investing staff time in that couple percent for an even lower profit are, relatively speaking, quite high.
Exactly. I think it's easy for someone not involved in the day-to-day business of the game industry to miss just how challenging RPGs truly are to produce profitably.

For an even bigger eye-opening piece of data consider the Hasbro annual report for 2014. -- http://investor.hasbro.com/financials.cfm -- Games are listed as over $1 billion in revenue. That's over the ICV2 hobby number of $880 million. AND the ICV2 number includes Magic and D&D.

So when we expand games out to include mass market then RPGs become an even smaller slice of the overall pie.
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Old 11-25-2015, 05:25 PM   #665
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Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

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the fact that some of the intended content was farmed out to PDFs.
As one of the authors, I have to ask: what content was that? We wrote the outlines for the main book and the Companions at the same time, each with its own mission (basically, adventuring equipment in the main book, historical background, construction systems, and quotidian gear in the others), and while some things moved around the series as a whole as we realized that material initially written for one book was better suited to the mission of another, I don't remember substantial revisions moving stuff out of the main book. Indeed, IIRC, the main book grew by something like 16 pages during the initial writing.
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Old 11-25-2015, 05:45 PM   #666
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As one of the authors, I have to ask: what content was that?
Maybe it's a matter of perception since the Low Tech book is fewer pages (160) than the two books before it (240 and 272*).


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Old 11-25-2015, 06:10 PM   #667
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That's not the version of events that was discussed on the forums previously. When it came up before, the statement was "well it's too big to be profitable as an entire hardback, so we're splitting it up". It may be this was done right at the start and there was never a serious plan for Low Tech to be one big book, but that fact never came out in previous discussions on the forums.

The fact remains I would have willingly paid twice as much (or more) for the entire Low Tech with supplements in a single big hardback. Whereas I haven't even bought the PDFs.
Incorrect.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.p...82&postcount=5
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Old 11-25-2015, 07:15 PM   #668
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The fact remains I would have willingly paid twice as much (or more) for the entire Low Tech with supplements in a single big hardback. Whereas I haven't even bought the PDFs.
And if price is no (or relatively little of an) object, then print-on-demand service bureaus will be happy to take your money and your digital file(s) to produce exactly such a format. Going from electronic to print is easy; it's the other way around which can be tedious and error-ridden.

To those who complained about the page-oriented display of PDF files, that's totally understandable. BUT maintaining the "fixed" nature of a physical book is vital for at least one simple reason: page references. As was pointed out, there are no reasonable solutions (and, as a vanishingly limited use-case, nor are there likely to be) for reliable links between documents of varying publication date. And then there are licensed properties, for example, which sometimes exist ONLY as print versions, and would be particularly challenged if they couldn't rely on fixed references in the main rules.

PDF is, like it or not, the best possible compromise for the modern era. Perhaps someday all GURPS texts will happily for any legitimate buyer assimilate themselves into one squirming, interlinked whole, like an intelligent version of the old numbered-section wargames rules. But if it ever even comes, that day is a long way out yet.

For now, the answer lies in having a display machine and software powerful enough to magnify and slide pages quickly, and/or the willingness to use print-service bureaus in order to obtain your own hard-copy texts. I quite liked Kromm's examples about personal investment in hobbies; why shouldn't RPGs be similar?
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Old 11-25-2015, 11:15 PM   #669
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For now, the answer lies in having a display machine and software powerful enough to magnify and slide pages quickly
Works for me. I have a 22" main monitor in landscape mode and a 19" secondary in portrait (which is perfect for PDF viewing!). They're gaming-quality hardware backed by a gaming-quality graphics card, so the image is bright, flicker-free, and not prone to annoying aliasing or artifacting. I have 48-year-old eyes with really terrible vision even with eyeglasses (sorry to briefly digress into the forbidden topic!), yet I can work on PDFs all day without difficulty. I don't especially buy "low ease-of-use" arguments here.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Proteus View Post

I quite liked Kromm's examples about personal investment in hobbies; why shouldn't RPGs be similar?
Given that my wife works a part-time job at a tango studio and I, too, work some nights there as a barman – both so that we can afford to have hobbies – my standards are "If it costs less than the earnings of a part-time job, and you don't have to sacrifice personal time to be able to do it, then your hobby is affordable." Granted, given that I work as an editor and occasional writer – work that's famously low-paying – my standards are probably warped.

Anyway, I'm not saying "I'm right and others are wrong." I'm just putting my experiences on the table to illustrate the (possibly unusual and unrepresentative) standards that I bear in mind when I advise my superiors on decisions for the GURPS line.
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Old 11-26-2015, 12:38 AM   #670
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Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

What about selling Print on Demand titles through DriveThruRPG. They are obviously something of a competitor to Warehouse23, but they do offer a service which is in demand for many RPG enthusiasts. Not only would it mean GURPS titles will never be out of print, but it may also increase the exposure of GURPS, as DriveThruRPG gets a lot of gamer traffic. Or even Lulu, but that is not gamer-centric. A little while ago I spent 100's on printing all my 3rd Ed GURPS classic PDF's and it really pained me to think I was giving all this money to Lulu when it could have gone to SJG.
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