Report To The Stakeholders

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by namada

My big takeaway is: Support Munchkin, Support The Fantasy Trip, Support DFRPG, no support for GURPS.

This seems to come up every other year or so, so it's worth repeating: if it's not on the priorities list, it means it's not a priority, not that they aren't doing it at all. Not being on the list of priorities says to me that there's not something like another big box set on the horizon, but nevertheless there is a lot more GURPS in the pipeline. It's just the kinds of stuff we're seeing these days (more short PDFs of new material and classic volumes in PoD).

[mstlaurent]

Originally Posted by namada

My big takeaway is: Support Munchkin, Support The Fantasy Trip, Support DFRPG, no support for GURPS. That's a shame for me, because GURPS (not DFRPG, not anymore anyway) is the only thing SJG makes that I actually do support.

I haven't run any RPG except GURPS since I abandoned D&D, Traveller, and every other RPG over 30 years ago. (At least until Fantasy Trip reemerged.) But the way I look at it is this: Munchkin, DFRPG, and all of the other stuff that SJG sells more of than GURPS and that takes up more of their time than GURPS: well, that is keeping the company afloat so they can keep working on GURPS in the time that they do have to support GURPS. (And it keeps a roof over Steve and Phil and everyone else's heads, which I'm happy to see as well.) So even though I don't play Munchkin, I'm very happy to see it do well and I don't begrudge it the time it takes up.

As for the Stakeholder report, I read it religiously every year, even if I don't comment. I've been an avid consumer of SJG products since the company was founded. So I'm very much a stakeholder, and I'm always interested in the health of the company, even if I don't have anything to say on it.

[sparky00]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

I see fewer comments here than in previous years. Does that mean . . .

- you're not interested?

- all your questions have been answered?

- the Martians are eating your forum posts?

- or what?

Pesky Martians! Always eating posts.

It was great to see several Ogre products in the top 40 list, including one in the top 10! Glad to see Battlefields doing so well. It really is a great set.

I was stunned to see an Ogre playmat on the list. A playmat!!! They are really nice,& I knew they were popular, but no idea they were that popular.

Ogre is, and probably always will be, my favorite SJG line. Thanks for giving it such awesome support over all these years.

[SolemnGolem]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

I see fewer comments here than in previous years. Does that mean . . .

I got on board with SJG via GURPS, when I jumped ship from the D&D3E/4E edition change in 2008. The main competitors to GURPS were TriStat dX (which has since gone out of print and the makers have gone out of business), Basic RolePlay, and HERO System. Because I was hoping to get a generic system that did sorcery and low-powered horror campaigns, GURPS was the best choice.

I also got into Munchkin around 2009 and I bought Revolution!, which was my first modern (i.e. non-Scrabble, non-Monopoly-era) board game. I have a huge collection of Munchkin expansions, but it's been years since I've played, and I am much more likely to bring out Revolution! to introduce new players to. Something about the no-dice, no-draws, no-luck design of the game appeals to me, whereas I feel like Munchkin is very much like Cards Against Humanity - a humor satire game for drinking and snacks, especially where the winner or loser isn't terribly important and it's more the process of finding one that's fun.

I buy perhaps 90% of all new GURPS releases, unless they're clearly in a genre I'll never touch. (Then again, when I learned of GeneSys' purge of most of its writing staff, and its conversion to freelance support, I bought a hardcopy of their game book, more as a pouring-of-liquor-upon-the-ground gesture.)

I bought both expansions to Revolution! even though I rarely play using them.

I've bought SJG games that I have tentative personal interest in, such as FRAG Gold and OGRE, and they're sitting (in suspiciously pristine condition) on my shelf.

From a purely legalistic viewpoint, I'm delighted that Steve was able to get back the copyrights to The Fantasy Trip, and also to reintroduce Triplanetary to the market. From a GURPS fan viewpoint, if there's a way to harmonize or synergize these releases with GURPS tabletop, that would make them more appealing to me. (GURPS Zombies had a nifty little game mechanic that made use of the standalone pocket dice game, Zombie Dice.) As somebody who GMs a lot of undead hordes and lich necromancers, too, I'm also incidentally interested in SJG's Necromancer pocket game, though I don't know how much synergy that has with GURPS.

Sad to see Pyramid go (crikey, it's been more than a year) but it's good to see that GURPS is still coming along.

One idea, which I'm sure is not original, is the question of issuing brief (maybe 16 or 32 pager) supplement books to present "toolkits" for settings, so that a GM who wants to get Lite and maybe Char/Camp to run a setting of their choice, can also snag the setting summary and run with it after maybe an hour of reading. Granted, we do have far more in-depth splatbooks (GURPS Zombies alone could support maybe a dozen quite distinct settings), but I see this issue as one of the main obstacles to a new group adopting GURPS as their standard system.

One final thought is that video games are also going indie-fundable and Kickstarter-friendly... Could SJGames fund or do a chapter-by-chapter Infinite Worlds game, where a crosstime conveyor gave a player a variety of settings and rulesets in small, self-contained levels on an isometric hex grid?

[pestigor]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

I see fewer comments here than in previous years. Does that mean . . .

- you're not interested?

- all your questions have been answered?

- the Martians are eating your forum posts?

- or what?

Judging by the "#viewing" each section of the forums, I'd say there are a lot of Gurps people on these forums and since there wasn't any Gurps news (In the current market no news is good news) I think the traffic is similarly lite.

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

I see fewer comments here than in previous years. Does that mean . . .

- you're not interested?

- all your questions have been answered?

- the Martians are eating your forum posts?

- or what?

I’m always interested in the industry information, and the GURPS information. That’s it though, nothing else I’d have much to comment on.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by namada

My big takeaway is: Support Munchkin, Support The Fantasy Trip, Support DFRPG, no support for GURPS. That's a shame for me, because GURPS (not DFRPG, not anymore anyway) is the only thing SJG makes that I actually do support.

My big takeaway is: There are Martians?

[rickr]

Hi there,

After reading the report, my big questions are:

Your gross income last year was $4.4 million, and approximately 25% of that came through crowdfunding. How far do you see that shift going? Would your business be better off with 50% of your income coming from crowdfunding?

You said that Fnordcon was a success, but does that mean it made a profit? Can you afford to keep it going?

Last year, AEG said on their site that they have decided to make fewer new games, and to make them better than they have before. This year, you write that you prefer to produce fewer games and stay small in today's market. Do you feel an increased pressure to improve the quality of your releases this year? How are you going to respond to that pressure?

Has Asmodee made an offer for Munchkin yet? ;)

Thank you!

[SolemnGolem]

Originally Posted by Anders

My big takeaway is: There are Martians?

I think the FNORD tag was broken when Steve made his post...!

[mehrkat]

I also should be added to the lost of readers that doesn't comment very often but I've read and looked forward to reading it every year.