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Old 11-23-2015, 08:43 PM   #611
Pragmatic
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Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

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Originally Posted by Owen Smith View Post
Sorry, but when someone says to me "Oh, the Munchkin people" (it's happened a handful of times) I am embarrased and I suspect this shows on my face. It may be a failing of mine, but I just can't get past the stage of cringing at Munchkin and how infantile the entire thing is.

Personally I'd far rather SJ Games were like it was 10 years ago when we got new GURPS products far more often, and they were better printed as well. I know you can't wind the clock back. But it seems to me that Ever More Munchkin(TM) occupies so much of the comany's time that even if more GURPS could be produced profitably there just isn't the bandwidth or will in the company to do it.
Below is my opinion, based on my observations, and full of my own biases...

I chose the name "Pragmatic" because I felt that tribalism within gaming was hurting the hobby.

Munchkin? I've played it. Not my thing. I like GURPS (though I'm more of a collector than a player).

But I know that, if Steve Jackson Games ONLY did GURPS, they'd probably produce fewer and less varied product line.

The gaming hobby isn't what it was 10 years ago. Even The Other Gaming System is only producing two or three hardcovers per year, and they're farming out most of their adventure modules to third-party partners.

So when I look at the Munchkin products, a tear comes to my eyes. Bless those guys who buy all the Munchkin expansions and lines. Their dollars are building up a large enough pool of cash that SJ Games can make GURPS products in a wide variety of settings (relatively speaking).
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Old 11-23-2015, 09:09 PM   #612
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Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

If supporting Munchkin helps Gurps, I'd be behind that movement, but from what I read in the report it seems that Munchkin's success isn't translating into Gurps proliferation. I realize the type of role playing Gurps used to represent is out of vouge. I also think that Gurps could be great again if people could find out how simple it can be. My signature represents my disdain for competitive non-role playing games. To my view Munchkin represents what I hated most about role playing, therefore I feel it's presence, the way only someone with autism spectrum disorder (Aspergers) can. I really don't like it but it's keeping the lights on apparently so it's doing some good.

It's really the feeling I get when I read the report and knew there was nothing (other than buying the books and PDFs, which I do) that I could do. Sorry to offend P.K. that was uncalled for by me to quip at you. Just give us die hard early 80's Gurps fans a goal and I figure we will work hard to meet it.
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Old 11-23-2015, 09:43 PM   #613
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A major issue with RPGs is that the price the market is willing to bear hasn't kept up with publication costs. If we must rely on the same-sized customer base that GURPS had in its early days – say, in the mid-1980s through mid-1990s – then we would have to charge ~$38.00 for the 128-page softbacks that used to cost $16.95. Nobody would pay that, so the obvious alternatives are attracting more customers willing to pay less (difficult in a market that's being bled away by other games media), lowering costs (PDFs do this nicely, but the hobby is conservative and too many gamers are wed to printed books), or just not publishing. Crowdfunding is yet another option, but one that's neither simple nor well-understood at this juncture; ultimately, it's unclear whether that wouldn't run into the "$38 for a softback" barrier, just from a different direction.
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Old 11-24-2015, 01:20 AM   #614
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Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

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Originally Posted by Pragmatic View Post
So when I look at the Munchkin products, a tear comes to my eyes. Bless those guys who buy all the Munchkin expansions and lines. Their dollars are building up a large enough pool of cash that SJ Games can make GURPS products in a wide variety of settings (relatively speaking).
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. Just for an example, if the company hit trouble and felt a need to contract, what do you think would be pruned first?

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A major issue with RPGs is that the price the market is willing to bear hasn't kept up with publication costs.
Crowdfunding appears to provide a partial way around that long-running problem, by offering serious fans the opportunity to pay more in exchange for a few bells and whistles and a warm glow.

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PDFs do this nicely, but the hobby is conservative and too many gamers are wed to printed books
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.

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Crowdfunding is yet another option, but one that's neither simple nor well-understood at this juncture; ultimately, it's unclear whether that wouldn't run into the "$38 for a softback" barrier, just from a different direction.
This reminds me of the people who say that Munchkin is a bubble that's sure to burst eventually... Given the number of apparently successful RPG crowdfunding campaigns that have run and are running, one has to wonder when it will qualify as adequately understood, on these terms. (Sadly, it'll never be entirely simple. Kickstarter campaigns are notorious as short-term but intensive time sinks that need careful management.)
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Old 11-24-2015, 02:22 AM   #615
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Okay. I'll just continue browsing admiringly through my Kickstarter'd copies of Mage 20th anniversay edition and The Dracula Dossier, and wondering what might have been, in a different timeline.
There's the timeline where Powered by GURPS really took off thanks to SJ Games getting the right license at the right time and the stars aligning (something like GoT or Harry Potter). Ofcourse in that timeline we all sit around complaining that SJ Games book have all become supplements for that setting.

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Old 11-24-2015, 02:33 AM   #616
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There's the timeline where Powered by GURPS really took off thanks to SJ Games getting the right license at the right time and the stars aligning (something like GoT or Harry Potter. Ofcourse in that timeline we all sit around complaining that SJ Games book have all become supplements for that setting.
Because WW and Pelgrane are soooo dependent on their big-name licenses to make their glossy colour hardback books sell...
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Old 11-24-2015, 03:37 AM   #617
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Because WW and Pelgrane are soooo dependent on their big-name licenses to make their glossy colour hardback books sell...
Corporate finances and practice is a far deeper matter than we can address in forum posts. A few things to keep in mind include:

* Retailers are far more sensitive to Kickstarter today than they once were. I've chatted with enough retailers to know that many of them dramatically decrease their orders of games that appear on Kickstarter. Kickstarter affects the long-term health of those games in distribution . . . which leads to more Kickstarter projects . . . which harms the game's distribution sales. Yes, it's a cycle.

* Overhead costs vary between companies depending on size, number of active product lines, and as many other variables as there are days in the year. 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. And we know that amount of investment into a project has little to do with market demand for the project, meaning that it's easy to dig a hole that cannot be escaped.
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Old 11-24-2015, 03:43 AM   #618
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A major issue with RPGs is that the price the market is willing to bear hasn't kept up with publication costs.
Sean's (as usual) dead on here. Some of the RPG publishers I chat with have cut their margins to keep MSRP down, a practice which has made them less profitable and made an already tough situation even more challenging.

I stated a decade ago -- and believe even more today -- that the RPG market has shifted to an era when you need to be in the top two or three spots OR run a smaller and decentralized company that sidesteps some of the overhead costs of running a business.

If we compare numbers of different categories in the hobby game market -- http://icv2.com/articles/markets/vie...bs-880-million -- we'll see that despite growth in the RPG segment (which is primarily attributed to the success of D&D, a success that hasn't carried over to many RPGs) we are talking about the smallest slice of the hobby market pie.
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Old 11-24-2015, 04:45 AM   #619
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Default Re: Report To The Stakeholders

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* Retailers are far more sensitive to Kickstarter today than they once were. I've chatted with enough retailers to know that many of them dramatically decrease their orders of games that appear on Kickstarter. Kickstarter affects the long-term health of those games in distribution . . . which leads to more Kickstarter projects . . . which harms the game's distribution sales. Yes, it's a cycle.
I'm afraid that I've all but given up on the shopfront retailer component of the RPG system these days. There's a handful of mostly really good survivors in my part of the world, one of which I use (primarily in practice as a mail order source), but I really think that any model for the survival of the business has to write "shops" off as a major concern.

But then, UK retailers have very rarely provided games tables, so there's less inclination over here to treat them as crucial to the hobby.
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Old 11-24-2015, 06:22 AM   #620
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I'm afraid that I've all but given up on the shopfront retailer component of the RPG system these days.
We support local game stores and will continue to support them. Local hobby game stores are vital to the hobby; local stores are where new games are given a chance to succeed and where many players learn new games.

Without the local game stores the entire industry would suffer.
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