[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Money means a lot. If, say, 5000 people buy the same supplement as you do rather than 500, that means SJ Games gets ten times as much money. That means more funding for more and better art and maps. That means hiring on more (and, plausibly, better paid) editorial staff and grooming someone to be another Kromm, so the actual Kromm gets to spend a little more time on tango and mixing drinks and less time on work. That means more authors writing more books (since it's a more attractive financial proposition) so you get MOAR GURPS!!!1!! And if 50,000 people buy it? Even more so. It's an indirect effect, certainly, but it's real.

That is really what it comes down to.

There might have been a time when RPGs were a "hobby industry" that people who were mostly not professional writers did as an adjunct to their days jobs (a bit like the situation many freelance writers are in today). When nobody much had a full-time job in RPGs. When the products looked a little like the typewritten leaflets of political radicals at the university.

But these days, the industry is closer to the mainstream:

On the production side, it's "just another business" in a lot of ways. People work on RPGs as a full-time job and expect to get paid enough to live on. They might still love games, but their first priority is the same as that of anybody else who works, which isn't undue greed but simply a desire to eat, pay bills, and perhaps have a little left to live life with.

On the customer side, gamers now expect the products to look polished. There are big players who can afford seriously glossy production values, support in the form of things like miniatures and computer applications, and involvement in video games and even movies. They set a very high standard. On some level, every gamer wants their favorite game to compete with that.

There's a bit of a disconnect between the two: A lot of longtime gamers seem to buy into the second but not the first. That is, they want everything to be polished, they don't want to wait for the products they desire, and they are constantly disappointed when various licenses or new technologies don't materialize . . . but they don't see that getting what they want requires paying a lot of full-time salaries, which means either accepting regular and sometimes significant price increases, or buying higher volumes at more modest prices.

I think in some ways this is a result of those who have the most money being the elders of the gaming hobby, whose vision of how stuff works froze in time back in the 1970s, 80s, or perhaps 90s.

Anyway, one thing that GURPS specifically needs is for fans from its early days (say, the 1980s and early 90s) to realize that – although GURPS isn't the same game with the same economic circumstances and same new fans it had in 1986, 1996, or 2006 – it's still a good game that deserves their support. Perhaps it doesn't have a new licensed setting several times a year, or hardbacks, or a plethora of design mini-games. We're very open about the fact that its current direction – focused genre support in small installments – isn't that. But it's still high-quality work that merits support. I'd say the quality has gone up, as I'm a much better editor and writer than I was in 1995, and most of our longtime freelancers are more capable as well.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

At the risk of expressing a view clouded by self-interest as a sometime member of that team, I quite agree. Not the kind of thing SJ Games can organize, of course, but still...

What we can do is control the editorial quality of our games. We have high editorial standards (ask any freelancer how exacting we can be . . . oh, wait . . .), so the writing is stronger than average. The indexes are reliable. The layouts might not be groundbreaking, but they're professional and readable.

What we can't do is magically turn back time to the 1980s and 90s when we had a whole office full of editors mostly dedicated to GURPS. Card, dice, and other games make too much money for the company to channel its resources into RPGs instead. Basically, there's just me, plus whatever fraction of Steven Marsh and Nikki Vrtis GURPS is allowed to borrow from other projects. That means certain huge initiatives – notably lengthy printed books and complicated design systems – are now impractical.

Only fans can turn back time, and they can't do so by regretting we don't live in the past – only by spending lots of money on the product line, so it can compete with the other products and justify more staff.

And to be clear: Nobody is getting rich off this; this isn't the privileged begging for more privilege. My last pay raise was six years ago almost to this day, in which time we've seen about 10% inflation . . . and that's on a rate of pay that I accepted when the U.S. dollar was worth 5% more than it is today here in Canada. Also, I don't have paid time off; when I take breaks, they're unpaid, making my real rate of pay even lower. I still do this work because I believe in it, not because it pays me well!

Originally Posted by Anders

Yeah, if you want Vehicles 4th edition you should buy everything GURPS and donate large brown paper bags of money to SJG so that they can hire another editor.

Essentially this. If more money appeared tomorrow, then despite what I said above about my own income, I'd prefer to see the money spent on more staff.