What do you want for the 35-year anniversary?

[Tomsdad]

My answer a kick starter for a nice 35th anniversary edition of GURPS Character and Campaigns.

No need to do a complex expensive reedit from the current version, maybe add some nice (non page numbered) colour plates, a bling new cover/ maybe have stretch goals add some appendix's at the back with stuff in (again not integrated into the base text, so no extra editing). A nice new 35 year introduction, retrospective etc

No stretch goals that involve sourcing and combining new products in one or god help you more shipments i.e. just the books, even if stretch goals increase the page count the books with colour plates and appendices.

Fulfil out of the US and Europe. (but also offer a PDF only tier)

Hopefully the old fans will buy a nice 35th anniversary edition, but better yet maybe you get some new purchasers on board and then some new fans.

Then put it on drivthru for PDF, standard and deluxe paper stock versions.

Not exactly innovative but hopefully relatively easy, and self supporting with some benefits on the back end

Originally Posted by Kromm

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.

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!

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.

Problem is do we have any feel for how many established GURPS fans have GURPS supplements left to buy? i.e. is there a danger of scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of established fan base buying stuff?


(there's also a question of barrel size when it comes established fan base, I guess)

The small specific PDF supplement that caters to specific subjects is good in that it allows things that would never otherwise see the light of day to be published. But that specificity also makes them easy for fans to pass over if there's not a specific need. i.e. you risk atomising your published items appeal. Not an issue if you doing both wide in scope publication and also narrow in focus stuff, also I guess individual narrow in focus stuff can become part of serialised wide focus body of work when taken over all with other publications in the range (e.g. the individual spell supplements that each focus on a narrow subset of spell types, together amount to much larger Grimoire of new spells). To borrow a term from the video game industry "game as service".

Speaking for my self* I own every physically published 4e supplement weather relevent to me or not, and I buy the PDFs that interest me. I'm fine with PDFs especially the GURPS ones due to them being a manageable size and clear and easy to use.


*Although yes one fan's perspective in the fan base is worth just that, one

Originally Posted by Rolando

Ok I want a "We Will Get GURPS Vehicles When We Get It!" T-Shirt!

Also:
-Remastered art of the Yrt map. I know it is less generic but it may look cool enough, maybe as a T-shirt (?).
-The covers of the books are very good as T-shirts too, the mosaic style with multiple arts in black background.
-A coffee mug with a 1d6 "how to answer to a greeting before you get your coffee" table, with the GURPS Logo in the other side. Bonus if the answers get more polite as they go down, so it is also a measure of your politeness relative to how much coffee you take.
-Plushies of the Iconic characters from Infinite Worlds. C31R07 must look very cute.
-A T-Shirt character sheet that you can completely fill with permanent markers

GURPS T-Shirt: "4th Edition Vehicles, are we there yet" ;-)

Merchandising is fun, but overseas shipping can kill it for many. So again fulfilment out of several places is key. (although the more varied the product the more complex and expensive this becomes)