As was noted above. He caved to the outrage mob and threw someone under the buss. Then got it done to him and now he has alot less people to support him. Theres a bit of karma there.

I suspect had the plague not hit gaming so hard with conventions and game shops closed that he'd have made it through. Not as strong as before. But probably not imminent to crash and burn.

Meanwhile, I'm doing great! The Old School Companion and Star Adventurer are both doing great, and my new adventure "Tamlane" is doing really well too!

Raggi ought to have teamed up with me instead of Zak. Oh well.

Digital is the way forward pdfs first.

Swanky hardback books are expensive to produce and then to post them out costs even more.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1139678Raggi ought to have teamed up with me instead of Zak. Oh well.

Zak has talent.

Quote from: The Exploited.;1139683Digital is the way forward pdfs first.

Swanky hardback books are expensive to produce and then to post them out costs even more.

I've bought quite a few rulebooks lately.
None of them are made of paper.

You can't ctrl+f paper, that's mostly the reason, really. PDFs are simply more time-efficient.

The only physical products I still buy (gaming-related, I mean) are those that have some higher value for me, either looking incredibly good on a shelf, some sentimental value, etc.
And I feel that's what most people are doing nowadays, which is why an overreliance on selling physical variants of rulebooks always baffles me a bit.

In this specific case, everything points to bad business decisions.
I don't think you should ever go into debt if you don't have an airtight plan to make some immediate cash from the debt.
KS is a good alternative, but only if you are in an advanced state with your project anyway and have all the costs down - anything before that is just highly naive.

I mean, I've been saving up money for almost 5 years now and will start putting that to use by the end of next year.
Not gonna go into debt just because I really want to do X, and even KS will only be an option much later on when I got something presentable and working already, not just an idea in my head.
Things will either work out, or they won't, but I find it unacceptable to end up in a worse position in case they don't.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1139678Raggi ought to have teamed up with me instead of Zak. Oh well.

You're not edgy enough. I bet there's not a single vagina monster on the cover of ANY of your books!

Quote from: TheSHEEEP;1139689I've bought quite a few rulebooks lately.
None of them are made of paper.

You can't ctrl+f paper, that's mostly the reason, really. PDFs are simply more time-efficient.

If I can't get a hard copy of it then I don't even bother giving it a try. I need a physical book in hand to read the rules and retain them.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1139678Meanwhile, I'm doing great! The Old School Companion and Star Adventurer are both doing great, and my new adventure "Tamlane" is doing really well too!

Raggi ought to have teamed up with me instead of Zak. Oh well.

I have actually seen this before, Not that part where he teamed up with Zak and ended up in an SJW trainwreck when sexual politics interfered with the growth of his gaming company, but the part where he goes into debt to finance business growth. This last part is pretty much a no-no in any business, and has been historically especially lethal for small to mid-sized gaming companies. In fact I have seen large gaming companies collapse because of debt financing practices, companies like Iron Crown Enterprises in the 90's (financed by the Tolkien Estate then licenses and financial support yanked after Tolkien Enterprises went after new suitors like say for example Peter Jackson, with his franchisees ),  

GDW (Game Designers Workshop) that opted to close before going too deeply in debt in order to continue their business operations. This was the original publisher of the Traveller RPG by the way.

Chaosium, the original publisher of Runequest and Call of Cthulu,  who folded in the early 90's after faltering sales with their original product lines. I was happy with Runequest as long as Avalon Hill was publishing the game under license from Chaoisum, but they yanked the license, and then went off investing in trying to gain a foothold in the Collectible Card Game market back in 96. When their Doom card game failed to materialize and their Mythos card game failed in the marketplace (competing against Magic ...of course), The founders of Chaosium split up and went their separate ways for a time, effectively neutralizing the company for more than a decade.

Then of course, there is TSR, where the Blume Brothers and Lorraine Williams financed the expansion, and then overspent on credit until 1996... Despite total sales of $40 million, TSR ended 1996 with few cash reserves. When Random House returned an unexpectedly high percentage of unsold stock, including the year's inventory of unsold novels and sets of Dragon Dice, and charged a fee of several million dollars, TSR found itself in a cash crunch. With no cash, TSR was unable to pay their printing and shipping bills, and the logistics company that handled TSR's pre-press, printing, warehousing, and shipping refused to do any more work. Since the logistics company had the production plates for key products such as core D&D books, there was no means of printing or shipping core products to generate income or secure short-term financing. Despite high sales, the company was deep in debt and not profitable in large part due to returns. Thirty staff members were laid off in December 1996, and other staff left over disagreements about how the crisis was handled, including James M. Ward. In large part due to the need to refund Random House, TSR entered 1997 over $30 million in debt and was shortly thereafter acquired by WOTC in what amounted to a fire sale.

Judges Guild. When they lost the original D&D license they had in 1978 they were no longer authorized to produce new material for D&D, or even AD&D. The new license offered was much more expensive, and covered much less than the original License Judges Guild had received from TSR. Bob had already gone into debt with his printer, and found himself in trouble after losing the TSR license. I think the original Judges Guild went bankrupt in 1984-85 and it's confiscated inventory was sold by the printers in a fire sale. It would be fourteen years before Bob restarted Judges Guild again in 1999. The printer I think also destroyed the original photolithic masters and plates for the Wilderlands Campaign maps, as well as the First Fantasy Campaign Blackmoor Map master. Unless Bob Jr. has them.

Gamescience. Lou Zocchi didn't go into debt. He did keep his inventory in a warehouse in Baton Rouge though, and that warehouse had the roof come off during a hurricane, which wiped out a lot of Lou's paid for inventory. This really hurt Gamescience for many years, but Lou is a tough old cookie, and he rebuilt Gamescience by licensing out rights to manufacture his precision high-impact dice. He has not reach back to the high point he was at in the late 80's early nineties though. he had published many tabletop games as well as Tekumel for awhile.

I'd be remiss here if I didn't also mention Kevin Siembieda and Palladium books. His ability to comeback from the brink of bankruptcy is nothing short of legendary. His money problems weren't due to debt financing so much as employees running off with the bank bag. He managed to recover by crowdfunding some new publications (Which he delivered on, by the way), and then produced extra copies which he then sold. have to say though that he crowdfunded Siembieda's Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter, and it is one of the largest failures in table-top Kickstarter history. The project failed to deliver on its goals and raised over $1.4 Million Dollars. Despite not making its goal and unable to deliver Wave 2 of the Kickstarter, Palladium did not refund money given to the project. So... not entirely broke, but did manage to finally alienate his customer base.

I think the LotFP fire sale is a good idea, however I don't believe that will help James with the tidal wave of debt that will shortly engulf him. I'll be very interested to see if he remains in game publishing, and eventually recovers. He should be making plans for that now, because his fickle SJW sycophants will not be there for him.

Don't worry about being edgy. Keep making good gaming books, privately funding the publishing, then enjoy the profits by continuing to sell copies until you sell out your print runs.

Quote from: TheSHEEEP;1139689I've bought quite a few rulebooks lately.
None of them are made of paper.

You can't ctrl+f paper, that's mostly the reason, really. PDFs are simply more time-efficient.

Not gonna go into debt just because I really want to do X, and even KS will only be an option much later on when I got something presentable and working already, not just an idea in my head.
Things will either work out, or they won't, but I find it unacceptable to end up in a worse position in case they don't.

I've a huge RPG dead tree collection. But since I've moved house they are all stuffed in boxes. In all honesty, I don't buy physical books any more. I just love the speed and fact I can carry my whole rpg collection around.

Like yourself, if I ever did release something... I'd never go into debt over it. It's an amateurs mistake.

I bought almost all of his earlier stuff, but then he seems to heavily focus on vagina monsters and some sort of psycho-sexual terror, which doesn't fit with my table at all. Which is a shame because the production values on his products have been amazing, especially his printing of Carcosa. To be sure most (all?) of what LOTFP published had at least some elements that were somewhat edgy, but those were parts of a greater whole. I hope he's able to recover from his current troubles, and I hope he's able to find a more sustainable way of doing business than depending on sales to outpace the debt repayments.

Quote from: lordmalachdrim;1139693If I can't get a hard copy of it then I don't even bother giving it a try. I need a physical book in hand to read the rules and retain them.

You are hampering you own efficiency that way, I can guarantee you, the information presented in either form is the same. But obviously everyone is free to do whatever. For me, it is also a matter of space, I prefer to have very few things, because that means I value those that I do have physically a lot more and care for them better.
A large shelf with a million books that were read once and never touched again to me is just a big waste of space (outside of libraries).

My GF prefers to read paper books, because they "smell better".
Can't really argue with that, they really do. It's just something that is irrelevant to me as it doesn't pertain to the information presented.

The point is more that fewer and fewer people rely on the paper and it is therefore not a sound business decision to focus on that route.

What I don't understand is that Raggi recently mentioned that to this day the sale of LotFP Zak PDF offerings is what pays his rent and are his best sellers. This is despite all the drama.
James seems like a smart guy, I'm not sure why he doesn't just resign Zak and go the kickstarter route (where he can also sell his older titles with new books). I'm sure he is worried about getting banned from DTRPG due to SJW mob pressure, but these people are not buying his products. And Kickstarter will break the supply chains the mob seems to have an influence over.

Last week livestream video of James Raggi and Jeff Rients talking about LotFP and cultural politics, also in response to Kiel Chenier disavowing (Chenier's statement) his previous work with Raggi:

3h 42m video of Raggi and Rients

BTW, you have it the wrong way around. Raggi has never thrown anyone under the bus, HE was the one thrown under the bus at various times by various people (including Zak) for various "offenses" (in Zak's case, it was because Raggi dared to post a photo of himself alongside Jordan Peterson, never mind the context was not even political but Raggi fangirling over Peterson due to his book on self help, of all things).

The only thing you might hold against him is that he cut his ties with Zak when the shit hit the fan, but it's painfully obvious he did that not because he believed in it but because he was essentially forced by outside pressure, with the biggest factor probably being DriveThru preemptive banning on the digital sales of every new Zak work.

Quote from: Simlasa;1139688Zak has talent.

He's so overrated it's not even funny.

Self promotion is a talent.