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johndallman · 01-31-2021, 03:37 AM

I don't think there'll be a new edition any time soon, for several reasons:

Sales. Currently, GURPS supports one full-time employee, the Line Editor (Sean Punch, "Kromm") plus sharing production and management staff with other products. Compiling and publishing a new edition would be several person-years years of work, during which pretty well all other GURPS publication would stop, and people would drift away. And then there would be the problem of updating 200+ fourth edition supplements.

Market conditions. TTRPGs are not selling nearly as well as they did in the 1990s. Kickstarter allows SJG to find the people who will buy a product, fairly efficiently but there aren't huge numbers of them for GURPS.

Lack of need. Fourth Edition is holding up rather well, and worthwhile supplements are continuing to be produced. The early 2020 printing of the Basic Set added some useful rules that have appeared in supplements.

Some years ago, Kromm expressed a personal opinion that the thing that could stimulate a new edition would be a new form of electronic publishing that was more capable than PDF. So far, that has not happened. I have done some thinking about what would be required, and while there's nothing impossible about it, the amount of software development that would be required can't be funded out of TTRPG sales. A new publication format would have to be created for some other purpose.

SJ Game are also not keen on "edition churn", creating a new edition of a game simply to stimulate fans to buy it all over again. That's laudable.

There is significant fan support for GURPS. The commonest activity is blogging, and the GURPSday feed at Gaming Ballistic is a good place to find out what's happening. My own contribution is co-editing a fanzine, The Path Of Cunning (link in signature) with RogerBW.

There are also third-party publishers: Gaming Ballistic publishes licensed supplements for the GURPS-based Dungeon Fantasy RPG, and the Prime Directive RPG from Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc. does classic Star Trek under GURPS.

01-31-2021, 03:37 AM	#2
johndallman Night Watchman Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: Cambridge, UK	Re: will there be a 5th edition for gurps? I don't think there'll be a new edition any time soon, for several reasons: Sales. Currently, *GURPS* supports one full-time employee, the Line Editor (Sean Punch, "Kromm") plus sharing production and management staff with other products. Compiling and publishing a new edition would be several person-years years of work, during which pretty well all other GURPS publication would stop, and people would drift away. And then there would be the problem of updating 200+ fourth edition supplements. Market conditions. TTRPGs are not selling nearly as well as they did in the 1990s. Kickstarter allows SJG to find the people who will buy a product, fairly efficiently but there aren't huge numbers of them for GURPS. Lack of need. Fourth Edition is holding up rather well, and worthwhile supplements are continuing to be produced. The early 2020 printing of the Basic Set added some useful rules that have appeared in supplements. Some years ago, Kromm expressed a personal opinion that the thing that could stimulate a new edition would be a new form of electronic publishing that was more capable than PDF. So far, that has not happened. I have done some thinking about what would be required, and while there's nothing impossible about it, the amount of software development that would be required can't be funded out of TTRPG sales. A new publication format would have to be created for some other purpose. SJ Game are also not keen on "edition churn", creating a new edition of a game simply to stimulate fans to buy it all over again. That's laudable. There is significant fan support for GURPS. The commonest activity is blogging, and the GURPSday feed at Gaming Ballistic is a good place to find out what's happening. My own contribution is co-editing a fanzine, The Path Of Cunning (link in signature) with RogerBW. There are also third-party publishers: Gaming Ballistic publishes licensed supplements for the GURPS-based Dungeon Fantasy RPG, and the Prime Directive RPG from Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc. does classic Star Trek under GURPS. __________________ The Path of Cunning. Indexes: DFRPG Characters, Advantage of the Week, Disadvantage of the Week, Skill of the Week, Techniques. Last edited by johndallman; 01-31-2021 at 04:33 AM. Reason: Added fan and third-party paragraphs.