Report To The Stakeholders

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Magic_Octopus

Really, GURPS support is fantastic if not getting physical books doesn't bother you.

SJG explicitly grants permission for you to print the PDFs so you can have a physical copy. Talk to your local printshop. (If there's a university in your town, they probably have a shop, too.) Or, several posters have had good experiences with Lulu.com.

See past threads for details, as well as photos of the results. A case-wrap full-color hardcover will match your other 4e books quite well.

[mehrkat]

I strongly recommend Hulu as a way to print your PDFs. I've had really good luck with printing 5 or 6 PDF (the 20 to 40 page versions) for $25 including shipping and they are good quality black and white. Quality is maybe a little shy of the soft covers from 3rd ed GURPS.

Covers are pretty easy to make just open up the PDF and use the windows snipping tool to create a picture of the first page to make the cover.

[PK]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

GURPS and Munchkin are both important parts of SJ Games' history; starting a Sharks/Jets fight about which one is more important (GURPS has been around longer; Munchkin has sold more) serves no one's interest.

I feel like this deserves echoing. Speaking as someone who (A) first became aware of SJ Games due to GURPS, (B) has a job solely involving GURPS, and (C) plays GURPS at least once a fortnight, I love Munchkin and am thankful that it has drawn so much attention to SJ Games in the minds of today's gaming community! When I tell someone that GURPS is an SJ Games product and they say, "Oh, the Munchkin people?", I nod enthusiastically because I'm happy that they already know who we are. It's a good thing.

Characters is almost out of print; Campaigns has a few months yet. Reprints of both are very nearly through the pipeline.

Also echoing this. SJ Games tries to order reprints of the Basic Set in a manner timely enough that new books are being printed just as we run out of the old ones. As we lack precogs on staff, there's usually a modest gap on one side or the other (e.g., the reprints come in a few weeks before or after stock runs out). Note that even in the latter case, if there is a brief gap in our stock, there will still be plenty available via distributor and store inventories.

tl;dr, "At this very moment, one of the Basic Set books is out of print!" is only cause for alarm if that statement has been true for several months.

Perhaps it's time to find a new signature, then. There's plenty of room in the hobby for Munchkin fans and GURPS fans to coexist without trying to start fights about which one is more deserving of our time and money.

Amen.

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Whether Steve would agree, I haven't the faintest idea. He no longer involves himself in the GURPS editorial process, though.

Anyway, it's always been made clear that SJGames exists to be a robust, profitable company, not as a monument to Steve's design legacy. Though that leaves the question of how one explains the Ogre reprint, or whether GURPS would still be published at all without some sentimentality; companies with a huge fat cash cow and a bunch of less profitable sidelines normally end up focussing entirely on milking the cash cow, killing off the tiresome distractions, in the gaming business as elsewhere.

I know that Philreed and others have already pointed out that SJG is not purely based on the bottom line, but let me quote Steve himself from the Gaming Balistic Interview:

Steve: Okay. Implicit in that question is the idea that keeping the same line going for decades and decades is necessarily right. It’s not necessarily right. You could make a good argument now, and you could have made a better argument five years ago, that GURPS ought to be turned off, because the market for table roleplaying had really shrunk by faster, easier to learn table games.

But I’m loathe to quit doing something that people like. And because we are not at all a public-traded company, I can get away with saying “Fine. This particular marginally profitable thing may not have played out yet, so we’re going to continue, and we are going to continue to try and develop it.” I can get away with that and someone who lived or died on quarterly returns cannot.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by PK

we lack precogs on staff

Something else for Phil to list as a failure on the next stakeholder report.

[Andrew Hackard]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

[Ogre] poisoned the company's view of Kickstarter at precisely the time when that was becoming a crucial tool for virtually every other company in the RPG business.

I disagree. We learned a lot about Kickstarters from the Ogre DE campaign, and one of the most important things we learned was "We need to learn more before we try again." This year, the Car Wars Arenas campaign applied a lot of the lessons from Ogre and was far less stressful and far easier to bring to fruition. Further campaigns (and we are discussing them) will continue to build on those lessons and the ones we take in from other future Kickstarters.

Kickstarter is a tool, nothing more. If it's the right tool for a job, we'll use it. If not, we won't force it. Other companies have different needs and I wouldn't infer any wariness about Kickstarter because we haven't run more of them.

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

Sorry, but when someone says to me "Oh, the Munchkin people" (it's happened a handful of times) I am embarrased and I suspect this shows on my face. It may be a failing of mine, but I just can't get past the stage of cringing at Munchkin and how infantile the entire thing is.

I'm sorry to hear you say that. I'm very proud of the work we've done in Munchkin the past several years. I know it's not to everyone's taste, but to let Munchkin taint your enthusiasm for GURPS and SJ Games seems a little . . . counterproductive? oversensitive? Not the right words, but maybe you get the gist of my thoughts.

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

Personally I'd far rather SJ Games were like it was 10 years ago when we got new GURPS products far more often, and they were better printed as well. I know you can't wind the clock back. But it seems to me that Ever More Munchkin(TM) occupies so much of the comany's time that even if more GURPS could be produced profitably there just isn't the bandwidth or will in the company to do it.

You're seeing correlation, not causality. GURPS sales started slowing at the same time Munchkin sales started picking up, but in many ways that was part of a growing interest in card and board games and a shrinking interest in RPGs rather than a deliberate shift in focus on our part.

Your statement is also belied by a quick look at our staff list. We have TWO staff members devoted solely to Munchkin; we have FOUR dedicated to GURPS and Pyramid. It's simply not true that we aren't supporting GURPS. The problem is that writing, editing, laying out, and illustrating GURPS books is time-consuming and hard by comparison. A typical 168-card Munchkin game has maybe 1,000 words across those cards. A 168-page GURPS book would be 100 or so times that number. Speaking as someone who has both edited GURPS and written Munchkin, I can tell you that from a perspective of just pure effort, editing GURPS was way harder. The same is true of our layout; each Munchkin card is a unit, while a change to a page of a GURPS chapter could ripple through a dozen pages or more before it's all done.

[Magesmiley]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

Your statement is also belied by a quick look at our staff list. We have TWO staff members devoted solely to Munchkin; we have FOUR dedicated to GURPS and Pyramid. It's simply not true that we aren't supporting GURPS. The problem is that writing, editing, laying out, and illustrating GURPS books is time-consuming and hard by comparison. A typical 168-card Munchkin game has maybe 1,000 words across those cards. A 168-page GURPS book would be 100 or so times that number. Speaking as someone who has both edited GURPS and written Munchkin, I can tell you that from a perspective of just pure effort, editing GURPS was way harder. The same is true of our layout; each Munchkin card is a unit, while a change to a page of a GURPS chapter could ripple through a dozen pages or more before it's all done.

That's an intriguing bit of information on the editing and layout process that I'd not realized/considered before - the amount of work for rules on cards vs. those in a rulebook. Gives me some food for thought.

Thanks for pointing that out.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

Kickstarter is a tool, nothing more. If it's the right tool for a job, we'll use it. If not, we won't force it. Other companies have different needs and I wouldn't infer any wariness about Kickstarter because we haven't run more of them.

Okay. I'll just continue browsing admiringly through my Kickstarter'd copies of Mage 20th anniversay edition and The Dracula Dossier, and wondering what might have been, in a different timeline.

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Okay. I'll just continue browsing admiringly through my Kickstarter'd copies of Mage 20th anniversay edition and The Dracula Dossier, and wondering what might have been, in a different timeline.

I won't offer it as advice because I don't know the internal situation at SJ Games. I'll Only mention it generally because I've supported or followed Dracula Dossier, Feng Shui 2 and Delta Green Kickstarters.

In my hypothetical games company how to get Kickstarter (or a preorder pledging system) to work for you seems to be key to producing good quality physical books.

[pestigor]

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

Sorry, but when someone says to me "Oh, the Munchkin people" (it's happened a handful of times) I am embarrased and I suspect this shows on my face. It may be a failing of mine, but I just can't get past the stage of cringing at Munchkin and how infantile the entire thing is.

To quote P.K. here, Amen!