Quote from: GeekEclectic;836191Margaret Weiss puts out some stuff that's really to my taste, but they can't negotiate a license properly for the life of them. Their licenses are set up in such a way that once the license ends, they aren't allowed to even sell digital copies of the products they already wrote and had approved anymore. This has affected Smallville and Marvel Heroic, and is likely to affect Leverage, Firefly, and more down the road.

Counterexample: Eden Studios. Their Buffy and Angel licenses ended years ago, but they are still allowed to sell digital copies of the products that made it through approvals. We'll probably never get Military Monster Squad or Tea & Crossbows, but we'll never have to worry that the core books or The Magic Box(really expensive sometimes if you find it in print) will ever be unavailable to interested fans.

That EDEN Studios deal sounds so utterly, utterly out of the way of the ordinary that I can't believe it. That is not the way merchandising licensing works, whether for movies, or comic book characters, or else.

As a licensee you (usually) obtain a limited license that allows you to sell (or rather produce) your derived stuff for x years (with or without a much shorter sell-off period after that). What media that license covers - print, PDF, e-book - is subject to the contract. Fantasy Flight Games apparently doesn't have the rights to e-books of the Star Wars RPG.
And electronic "books" are the same as physical books, with regards to the license.

And rightfully so - a licensor's interest is to eventually find a new licensee. But no one would be interested in obtaining a new license if the former licensee is still allowed to sell his stuff. (Having old merchandise stuck in the channel, either at distributor warehouses, store shelves, or in the secondary market, is bad enough.)

I wonder who is paying royalties to the licensor of Buffy and Angel for each copy that is sold via DTRPG... (or maybe EDEN still has a digital license and just doesn't believe in the viability of another print run?)

Also...

Quote from: GeekEclectic;836191they can't negotiate a license properly for the life of them.

In the field of big IP there is not much wiggle room for negotiations. Usually it's "take it or leave it - we don't really need the measly extra visibilty an RPG line gives us (since it caters to already existing fans of our franchise) and we also don't really need the extra workload of approving 100+ pages of content you invented/extrapolated from our franchise - per month".

Quote from: Iron_Rain;837077Some guy tried making a card game making fun of pro vs anti gamer gaters. It was seen as "problematic" by Evil Hat and so drivethrurpg pulled it.

So it wasn't even a product that was based on one of Evil Hat's games, such as FATE? (Like, a "Book of Erotic FATEs"?)

Wow. Just wow.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;837080That EDEN Studios deal sounds so utterly, utterly out of the way of the ordinary that I can't believe it. That is not the way merchandising licensing works, whether for movies, or comic book characters, or else.

As a licensee you (usually) obtain a limited license that allows you to sell (or rather produce) your derived stuff for x years (with or without a much shorter sell-off period after that).

Also...

In the field of big IP there is not much wiggle room for negotiations. Usually it's "take it or leave it - we don't really need the measly extra visibilty an RPG line gives us (since it caters to already existing fans of our franchise) and we also don't really need the extra workload of approving 100+ pages of content you invented/extrapolated from our franchise - per month".

1: Correct. It is very rare to get these and usually it only happens when the IP holder doesnt think that little detail through. I have no less than four IPs that I can do work on in perpetuam. Once because the IP holder quit, handing me the whole damn thing. Three because there was no cut off clause. I stopped work on those when things went off kilter and out of respect for the IP holders. But if I so desired I can reprint the RPG books. That is utterly and absolutely rare.

2: And when that time limit runs out. You are screwed if you have any unsold product. The whole Lord of the Rings fiasco with Iron Crown and/or Decipher?

3: Totally true. The IP holder is usually allowing it as a sort of paid advertising. Except that they get paid rather than the host. Others do it because it sounds fun, or you had a good sales pitch. My first bif IP deal was done soley on confidently pitching the concept of a type of game that had never been tried before.

4: One of the big problems with IP deals is that they are notoriously fickle. I have seen deals pulled at the proverbial eleventh hour when the product was near to completion or actually ready to ship. Ive seen deals cut off mid stride. And certainly deals that ended because the IP holder wanted more money than they were getting already.

Quote from: Snowman0147;836957Evil Hat beyond a doubt.  They threaten DriveThruRPG to take down a product they didn't like.  Which while I am at it DriveThruRPG is shit for caving in to that threat.

Evil Hat is the culprit, here.

DriveThru is just looking out for their bottom line.  They stand to lose more money from Dick Hat followers than they gain from selling a product that few people know about.  It's just business.  

James "Grim" Desborough published a GamerGate card game

I don't know much of his stuff, but I do enjoy the SLA Industries stuff he edited or co-authored.  He probably gained more from the press than he lost.

Quote from: Bloodwolf;837093Evil Hat is the culprit, here.

DriveThru is just looking out for their bottom line.  They stand to lose more money from Dick Hat followers than they gain from selling a product that few people know about.  It's just business.  

James "Grim" Desborough published a GamerGate card game

I don't know much of his stuff, but I do enjoy the SLA Industries stuff he edited or co-authored.  He probably gained more from the press than he lost.

I get that Grim courts outrage, but considering the stuff that DriveThru has on the shelves, like a tentacle rape game I think it is, going after a GG based mockery game is petty as fuck.

Fortunately, I don't care for their products anyway, so not giving EH money was a simple decision.

Quote from: Omega;8370854: One of the big problems with IP deals is that they are notoriously fickle. I have seen deals pulled at the proverbial eleventh hour when the product was near to completion or actually ready to ship. Ive seen deals cut off mid stride. And certainly deals that ended because the IP holder wanted more money than they were getting already.

  And Marvel seems to be quite bad about this--there are products for all three licensed RPGs that were ready to go but never saw the light of day (or, in MWP's case, only got a very limited release as PDFs).

In a really freakish inversion. Privateer Press signed a movie deal with Paramont or some other big company to make a movie out of Monsterpocalypse. Then near immediately ceased development of the game and went near dead silent on the subject. They produced it for a time after. But then even that stopped and a whole line ended in mid-stride.

Common theory is that the movie deal somehow included some clause that the company could not produce their own game. Which sounds absurd. But in the end the game is DOA.

Quote from: Old One Eye;836714Based entirely on your description, I suspect that non-gamers looking for one of those movie-atlas book thingies were more of a target audience than gamers looking for a ttrpg.

It's certainly possible.  As it turned out, my GURPS Scarlet Pimpernel sold -- the GURPS collection completists aside -- less well to gamers than to fans of the books or the movies, because I'd written the only (effective) concordance to the series that ever hit print, and the gamebook spread by word of mouth.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;837097I get that Grim courts outrage, but considering the stuff that DriveThru has on the shelves, like a tentacle rape game I think it is, going after a GG based mockery game is petty as fuck.

Fortunately, I don't care for their products anyway, so not giving EH money was a simple decision.

They specifically targeted him because its Desborough and he's top on the list of people they despise.  There are even other gamergate-related games, that no one has a problem with being there.  This was entirely about who wrote it, and who was demanding he be censored.

I think that the fundamental problem is that gamers are creators and not necessarily businessmen. Like painters or sculptors, they most likely have a passion for making things and may have zero talent for marketing and running a business. I think you could see this as early as TSR in the 1970's, where the company had a lot of cool ideas but didn't know a lot about mailorder and printing and other aspects of company development. (Not to pick on TSR, understand, but I'm using them as an example.) The ability to develop a cool idea into a RPG isn't the same skill set as knowing about finance, investment, hiring a qualified CEO, stock and inventory, and so on.

When you look at the quantity of game companies that have come and gone over the decades, it's a staggering list. While there are some that never hit it big at all, there are quite a few like TSR (D&D, Gamma World, Top Secret, Star Frontiers...) and Game Design Workshop (Traveller) and West End Games (Star Wars, TORG, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Paranoia...) that looked like juggernaut companies that couldn't possibly fail but then did. Sometimes one or two poor decisions caused massive collapse and company downfall.

The other thing is that I think game designer people tend to be less timeline oriented than many other folks. Some professions stick tightly to a schedule, but creation is harder to channel. A good game needs time to ferment in playtest, re-write, and so on, but a tight schedule tends to lead to a "get it out on time even if it's not ready" mentality.

I'm no expert. It just seems like a pattern.

Quote from: finarvyn;837929Sometimes one or two poor decisions caused massive collapse and company downfall.

How many of them were operating with enough funds to absorb the blow of a failure?
I see plenty of botched projects from major corporations... and I've got no faith they're all run by geniuses... but those losses generally get absorbed because other profits are so high. For a little company like Chaosium every project is more of a gamble.

Quote from: TristramEvans;836678Christopher Lee, OTOH, was a fucking badass. I'm still reeling from that death.

He released another one in his nineties.  Everyone else's DNA is made of AGTC, his was made of AWESOME, absolute badass.

Quote from: Ravenswing;836502Surprised to hear you say that about Banks.  I was an early and loud critic of the Serenity RPG (for a bunch of reasons), and on more than one forum Banks handled my oft-caustic criticisms with grace and class.

You were questioning his game mechanics not his religion.

Quote from: Simlasa;837931How many of them were operating with enough funds to absorb the blow of a failure?
I see plenty of botched projects from major corporations... and I've got no faith they're all run by geniuses... but those losses generally get absorbed because other profits are so high. For a little company like Chaosium every project is more of a gamble.

Sometimes the blow is too big to absorb. Iron Crown and/or Decipher I believe took some massive hits when they had to junk product ready to sell that they could not because their IP deals fell apart. It is one thing to have a product that is not selling well. At least you are recovering some of the money gradually. It is a totally different matter to have sunk resources into a product that you now cannot sell at all.

Other companies work on the pattern you describe of having a very fine margin from one project to the next. Any blow to sales or miscalculation can be hard to bounce back from.

And quite a few companies bled themselves out trying to cash in on the CCG craze and that lead to more than a few of them crashing. Some well before the CCG craze puttered out around 2000.

Seriously, "reeling" from the death of a guy in his 90s??