What do you want for the 35-year anniversary?

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Tomsdad

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?

This speaks to a key disconnect here: That between "established fans" and "potential new fans."*

If you go to forums where nearly all of the participants are established fans and you ask, "What do you want for the 35th anniversary?", you're going to get answers that lean toward revised and new rules. The audience consists of individuals who've already bought much, most, or all of what they want to buy from the existing library. What they seek are updates to things that are in their eyes outdated, fixes to rules that are in their opinion broken, and new content that is in their view missing.

All of which is how it should be!

However (and it's a big "however"), while it's nice to imagine special anniversary products as a kind of "Thank you!" to established fans, that's only a practical approach if established fans are numerous and spending a ton of money, and the focus is on retaining them and keeping them happy. When the number of fans and their spending have tailed off alarmingly – so much so that the company has had to regroup around completely different products – that changes the goal of special anniversary products. Now they serve to reignite the fire, to draw new fans.*

So while the answers here are absolutely valid for those giving them, they tend to fall far from what the company actually needs to be doing. For the most part, potential new fans* don't care about updates or fixes to existing rules (they don't know those rules, or why they'd need updating or fixing!), nor do they care about yet more content (they're new, so there's already a huge library of that!). They do care about the game having a fanbase they can play with, creators who can answer their questions, and a company that cares enough about the game to make it look like a going concern.

Thus, that's what those of us who work here have to focus on. As it happens, I think that getting GURPS onto VTTs would be a step in the direction I'm talking about: People to game with! A game that's using this decade's technology! And yes, we do talk with people who are doing that kind of thing.

Whereas something like GURPS Vehicles . . . oof. A ton of work to make happy the subset of established fans who already know the system well enough to feel comfortable with a design system that would've been at home in the 1980s or 1990s. I'm not putting it down or saying anything bad about it (I edited the previous edition, and I am a gamer from the late 1970s), but it wouldn't be the kind of "anniversary present" that GURPS needs right now.

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* To be clear, when I say "new fans," I do not mean the relatively small group of longtime gamers who've looked at GURPS sometime in the past 35 years and said, "Yeah . . . no." I'm talking about grabbing a bigger cut of the far larger number of gamers who start their RPG journey every year, and who don't even know what a "GURPS" is.