Report To The Stakeholders

[philreed]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

So Phil Reed and others wanting to support games stores as the way to support the hobby is laudable, but it effectively writes off the entire of the UK except London (and maybe one or two other big cities I'm not aware of having decent shops).

We keep our online store operating -- www.warehouse23.com -- specifically for those who do not have a local game store. Where possible we want the local stores to handle the bulk of game sales, demonstrations, and education.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

The trouble is, that makes GURPS a charity case, surviving on the tolerance of a Munchkin-based company. That's not only faintly humiliating, it doesn't feel stable or safe.

Speaking as one of the few people who makes his or her entire living, not just part of it, from GURPS, with no other freelance work because my job is very full time (and then some):

I could be full of dread that I might become redundant, but though I certainly work hard to ensure that does not occur – like any employee of any company – I experience surprisingly little such dread. That is because it's clear, looking out from the inside, that SJ Games deems RPGs worth publishing. My primary source of head-shaking and concern stems from nothing SJ Games does, but rather from the voices that are on the one hand lamenting, "We need more GURPS! Why is there so little support?", while on the other hand declaring, "I buy only printed books." Support is PDFs right now, and while that might not be everyone's cuppa, it's buying PDFs – not protesting them – that will send SJ Games the message that GURPS is a going concern, perhaps motivating decisions to try new things.

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

It's not just grumpy conservatism; some people do honestly find printed books easier to use, you know. Look at all the discussion on these boards about printing services.

I do not deny that at all. However, this is still a business and dollars (pounds, euros, shekels, ducats . . .) are still the votes that count. Not buying PDFs is not equivalent to voting against but rather akin to spoiling your ballot. That's my only concern. I have no problem with people being as conservative or as grumpy – or as progressive and supportive – as they like. However, if they aren't buying what we're selling out of some sense that they're casting a protest vote, then they are very directly threatening my livelihood and I might find it difficult to feel anything but apprehension where those parties are concerned.

Originally Posted by philreed

* Overhead costs vary between companies [...] what is successful for one company would be considered a failure for another company.

* RPGs are a significant investment in energy that isn't always appreciated.

I echo two of Phil Reed's points for good reason:

GURPS is a very expensive RPG to produce because we spend a lot of time perfecting each supplement. Yes, of course there are errata, we publish the occasional dodgy rule, and not every last supplement is a winner – that's to be expected of a vast, 30-year-old product line with dozens of contributors. In general, though, we devote a great deal of time to reviewing, re-reviewing, and re-re-reviewing each item; checking rules consistency and voice and page references against an ever-growing library of supplements; making sure that everything has decent grammar and style; including an index that's actually useful; and ensuring that the layout is readable. You might dislike some of our typeface choices, or American English, or AP Style, or a hundred other things, but you cannot deny that we leave very little to accident. All of that costs far more than just making the cover and interior art pretty, and the pages glossy, would . . . yet in the current market, text quality and rules integrity sell fewer copies than gloss and prettiness.

To get back to Phil Reed's points, that is how our reality differs from those to whom we are often compared. It both explains where our overhead costs come from and illustrates how our efforts are not always appreciated. And if we decided to spend money on more readily appreciated elements like print (vs. PDF), hard covers (vs. soft), gloss (vs. matte), color (vs. B&W), and art (vs. text), we would end up spending less on the writing and editing of actual game content. Somehow, I think that would amount to attracting one audience at the expense of another, and I am not convinced that we would be any better off for it. Having all of the above would be wonderful, of course, but a lot like having and eating the same bit of cake.

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Because WW and Pelgrane are soooo dependent on their big-name licenses to make their glossy colour hardback books sell...

Not really the joke I was making.

I think pelgrane has Cthulhu under license (that's a huge slab of their work. The Fall of Delta Green certainly will be.

I suppose the timeline where GURPS became entirely devoted to Cthulhu books is out there too

(I was going to suggest the timeline where the GURPS versions of WW books took off, but I'm not that crazy)

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by philreed

Without the local game stores the entire industry would suffer.

That may well be true, but sometimes suffering may be unavoidable, and arguably that particular suffering started years ago in the UK.

Life is pain.

Originally Posted by Kromm

Support is PDFs right now, and while that might not be everyone's cuppa, it's buying PDFs – not protesting them – that will send SJ Games the message that GURPS is a going concern, perhaps motivating decisions to try new things.

That's fine for those of us whose essential desire is "GURPS"; even if we would prefer printed books, PDFs are a functional substitute, and refusing to buy them would indeed be a pointless sulk.

But insofar as there are, or may be, people whose essential desire is "GURPS printed books", their interests are simply not being met. There will come a point with some people at which the only way they can signal their preferences is by not buying stuff they don't want. Telling people to buy stuff they don't want, on the off-chance that it will eventually lead to the appearance of stuff they do want, isn't great marketing.

Or, to be a little more nuanced about it, faced with a choice of buying "GURPS (not printed books)" or "printed RPG books (not GURPS)", those people may decide that the latter is closer to the mark. It's a signal, just not one that does SJGames much good. Because there are printed RPG books on the market...

Originally Posted by lachimba

I think pelgrane has Cthulhu under license (that's a huge slab of their work. The Fall of Delta Green certainly will be.

Oh dear, please don't start a discussion of whether Cthulhu material is or has to be "licensed". That's a hideously messy topic which doesn't belong on this board. Suffice to say that any randomly-chosed Cthulhu-related RPG book may or may not generate license payments to a couple of different bodies, and even if I was a lawyer, I think I'd be scared to offer opinions on this.

But in any case, the Pelgrane product which I've been talking about, repeatedly, is The Dracula Dossier. And Bram Stoker is decidedly out of copyright. They also have a whole stack of totally original material in their catalogue; the Cthulhu stuff is actually in a minority there.

[Kromm]

These points show up why – however globalized the market gets – regional snapshots will still cause debates. Specifically, physical games shops are still quite a big deal in America, even if they're doomed in the U.K., while Pelgrane products are so vastly outnumbered in volume by other games products popular in America that they're relatively obscure here, despite their higher profile across the pond.

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

But insofar as there are, or may be, people whose essential desire is "GURPS printed books", their interests are simply not being met.

Well, as a wise man said:

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Life is pain.

In this case, I think that one of the sister trends of 21st-century globalization – digitalization – ensures that those who have the desire for physical books may just have to cope with the pain of such publications becoming increasingly uneconomical and troublesome. They may well be moving from the realm of little luxuries to just plain luxuries.

[Celti]

Originally Posted by Kromm

My primary source of head-shaking and concern stems from nothing SJ Games does, but rather from the voices that are on the one hand lamenting, "We need more GURPS! Why is there so little support?", while on the other hand declaring, "I buy only printed books."

Hear, hear! Being a Millennial gamer, I never grew up with that insistence that printed matter is the One True Way™, and in fact prefer PDFs — the searchability alone makes them orders of magnitude better than print, even with the phenomenal (and, I know, difficult) job of indexing SJ Games staff performs. I only wish there was something like a (perhaps subscription-supported, alongside of or part of Pyramid) GURPS equivalent of the d20 SRD.

That being said, whatever happened to the plans for Print on Demand services? Even if SJ Games (can't/doesn't want to) do print-on-demand in-house, a possibility is a contract with a company like Lulu or someone, where you buy the PDF on W23 and there's a link to send it straight to Lulu's website, where you customise and pay for printing — maybe even at a discount, if SJG uses their orbital mind-control lasers to secure a great deal.

[Celti]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

During character design I often have four or five 4E books spread out on the lounge floor while I'm checking different skills and advantages across multiple supplements and seeing how they interact. It's not unknown for my iPad to also be there with a PDF only product open. How do you do that kind of thing using only the PDFs? Or do I have to commit the entire lot to my memory to cross reference?

I have a virtual desktop (essentially, a fake monitor that I can switch to at any time) that all of my relevant PDFs are open on. The various PDFs are open in tabs in SumatraPDF (sometimes several dozen at once) and I have keyboard shortcuts that a) show me a searchable list of all open PDFs for easy switching, and b) let me easily switch between virtual desktops to bounce between that and my text editor. It's served me well for many years now.

If I desperately need to look at two PDFs simultaneously (in practice, I never do), I can set up a split-screen view of two PDFs, or a PDF and my editor.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

The technoloy hasn't caught up, books are still a better experience with a nicer user interface.

My old, tired shoulders would much rather carry around 50 or so PDFs on a tablet than five "real" books in a backpack. It's all about what you prioritize. The problem comes when people become so resistant to change that they can't see the world passing them by.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

How do you do that kind of thing using only the PDFs?

Like Celti, I routinely have several open at once and switch back and forth between them. Faster and easier than juggling physical books, I've found. Could the problem simply be that you're using the wrong PDF app?


(Well, no, almost certainly not, but perhaps figuring out what you need to have a bunch of things open simultaneously might help.)

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

The problem comes when people become so resistant to change that they can't see the world passing them by.

You're veering towards blaming customers for not doing things the way that suits the company, Andrew.

One also notes, as a point of curiosity, that card and board games are still sold - and widely bought - as physical products. Curiously, nobody seems hell-bent on rendering them digital, although it could hardly be that hard a task.