Buying the rights to GURPS?!?

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

My fields of study are history and elementary ed, not business... but...

I know a bit about business so let me see if I can explain why tax valuation or anything else is really seriously not going to be relevant here.

In business and financial jargon, liquidity refers to how easy an asset is to convert into cash. In practice it tends to be tightly correlated to how often similar assets are bought and sold, and how similar those "similar assets" are. Things like barrels of oil, or stock in a big publicly traded company like Apple are very liquid, because barrels of oil and shares of Apple stock change hands all the time and they're totally interchangeable. If you have some you want to sell, you can probably get a price pretty similar to what other people have gotten recently. And if you need to know the value for tax or other accounting purposes, you can use whatever price the thing has sold for most recently, as reported by the NYSE or whoever. This is called "marking to market" in accounting jargon.

Real estate is a classic example of a less liquid asset. If you want to sell your house, typically that takes time and energy. That's because every piece of real estate is a bit different, so if you're selling a house or an office building or whatnot, people are going to want to inspect the property, weigh alternatives, and so on, they're not just going to roll up and say, "yup, this is the square footage I wanted, and the price is reasonable, I'll buy it!" and then hand you cash on the spot. This makes the "value" of a piece of real estate a somewhat fuzzier concept—a desperate seller can result in a much lower price, while a desperate buyer can result in a much higher price. Still, for tax or accounting purposes you can look at what similar properties have sold for recently and get a number that's at least somewhat connected to what the actual sale price would be in event of a sale.

But there are less liquid assets than real estate, such as stock in many privately held companies. For example, what's Twitter worth now that Elon Musk has taken it private? Some of the investors who helped fund Musk's takeover have guesses they use for accounting purposes, but those valuations are just guesses. Even if they use those guesses for tax filings or legally-mandated financial disclosures, they are unlikely to face any consequences for using questionable numbers, as long as the paper trail behind those numbers involves vaguely-plausible accountanty things and not chat lots that say "lol we are so going to prison for tax fraud". I work in tech startups, and for similar reasons it is normal for nominal valuations of tech companies to have minimal connection to reality.

So if SJG had to put a value on GURPS for tax filing purposes, maybe that involves looking at revenue from the GURPS back catalog and making a pessimistic guess about how that revenue will drop over time and plugging it into a formula which takes into account the fact that interest rates are high right now any sensible buyer of GURPS is going to expect a pretty high rate of return on their money, and the formula probably spits out a conclusion that GURPS isn't worth very much. But SJ is probably more hopeful about GURPS' future than that, and realistically the only likely buyer for GURPS spun off from SJGames as a whole is someone who is also optimistic about the future of the game, or else likes the game so much they are willing to pay a premium for the privilege of owning it.

[Alden Loveshade]

I'm ready and willing to sell the the rights to GURPS 23rd Edition!

Of course to get it you'll have to wait until it comes out. And until I buy the company.

But if you want to reserve your spot for this incredible offer, I've lowered the price from $40 million to just $23 million and 23 dollars and 23 cents! And if you order now, I'll give you a copy of GURPS 4th Edition Basic Set absolutely free! So send me your money!

NOTE: In case there's any doubt, I am not at all serious.