11-24-2015, 09:28 PM | #641 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: MO, U.S.A.
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
In the U.S. the Friendly Local Gaming Store is fading away in a lot of areas. Springfield Mo (Population 160,000) is a College town and is the third largest city in the state. The local gaming store has ~half a dozen D&D books, the rest is Euro-games, card games, and some miniatures stuff. Although they do still have a large selection of dice.
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11-24-2015, 10:49 PM | #642 | |||
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: USA, Arizona, Mesa
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
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11-25-2015, 01:11 AM | #643 | |
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Sydney
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
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Even on a beach in GOA the owner told me five more years and his second hand book shop will be done due to low demand. Its Amazon, PDFs, e-books etc |
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11-25-2015, 02:07 AM | #644 | ||||
Join Date: Jul 2009
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
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Reading this thread has been very educational. Such open communication is just amazing. Thank you Phil, Andrew and Sean :) |
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11-25-2015, 02:26 AM | #645 |
Join Date: Jul 2009
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
Regarding print vs. PDFs: I much prefer print books for reading. PDFs are much better for reference and portability.
There is also a deeper meaning to me. I feel that physical items are more permanent and keep me more invested in the hobby. But that's just me being emotional. Also, digital devices make me anxious and distracted. Just sitting down and reading a book is more comfortable and I am able to focus better. But then again, at the age of 35 I am already a dinosaur. |
11-25-2015, 02:56 AM | #646 |
I do stuff and things.
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
This reflects today's hobby game market. Roleplaying is a tiny slice of the current industry, and most stores adapt to meet the demands of gamers. Magic is still a strong brand, boardgames continue to do great, and impulse-priced games are growing (again).
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11-25-2015, 03:04 AM | #647 | |
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Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
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11-25-2015, 03:11 AM | #648 | |
I do stuff and things.
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
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* 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?
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11-25-2015, 03:35 AM | #649 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: The ASS of the world, mainly Valencia, Spain (Europe)
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
There are many fronts open here. Obviously, Steve won't let GURPS die as long as it's not an unbearable loss making machine, but it needs to be economically viable, even if net profits per $ invested are lower than other SJG products. Phil is probably fighting the battle to keep it in place every day. FLGS are dying everywhere (here in Valencia, Spain, they still exist, but they're more often than not labors of love, as proved by the fact that the all eventually end up closing. The ones I grew with no longer exist, and the new ones are mainly comics/boardgames/MTG/Warhammer focused). I understand that SJG has a history of good retailer relationships that they don't wish to smear. It is certainly not a simple problem to solve.
Now, however, GURPS is mostly going digital. It's no longer on the store shelves anyway, because the physical product doesn't exist any more, for most of the word count. I have learnt to love digital formats (though I hate the PDF format, I understand why it's used*) because I can carry my entire library on my Nexus 7 everywhere. They're searchable, and * PDF are unfit for purely digital consumption/distribution, and their only use should be as a temporary format for print, and as a stop-gap format for books normally scheduled for print but that you also want to release in digital form. Good digital formats are reflowable (and so discard the concept of page as an immutable thing), cross-linkable (PDFs can include internal links, but linking to other PDF files is still a mess of not very well supported implementations) and platform independent (PDFs are, for the most part, unless you happen to use some adobe specific features). They should let you process the text in any way you want (to enable use cases not originally though about by the original creator, such as turning them into alternate formats for editing), and accessible (meaning that they're easy to handle for those with disabilities. My eyesight is fine, but I understand that it's not the case for everyone. PDFs can be made accessible, by making them tagged pdfs, but AFAIK, they have their own issues [larger file sizes, slower to open, require extra work if the original source document wasn't created with accessibility in mind...]). |
11-25-2015, 03:43 AM | #650 |
I do stuff and things.
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Report To The Stakeholders
Well said. Thanks!
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