...
Going the route of more 'Powered by GURPS' could work... but whoever chases or chooses licenses either needs to stop with their pet projects or be given something of a budget.
GURPS The Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game anyone? How about Humanx? Uplift? New Sun? Lensman? (To be fair, that's the ONE I had heard of.) Horseclans?...
For the most part, they seem to have licensed stuff no one else wanted, ...
This always seems to be the case when you say: "What GRUPS IP?" and the reply is: "But, but, but they had IP x, y, z..."
Ummm, yeah, nobody cares about IPs x,y,z...
They had Conan, and made it... dull.
WTF What!? I didn't know that. I had to go and look that up...
So they had one of the RPG hobbies evergreen IPs, and proceeded to go absolutely nowhere with it...
The same IP that Mongoose did two editions and piles of supplements of. The same IP that Modiphius uses their 2d20 house system that nobody cares about, yet their Conan line still sells very well for them.
I mean they had the license back in 1989, when GURPS was very much still something in the hobby, and they couldn't even leverage the Conan IP to show the GURPs system in its best light, it in their heyday!?
#wowjustwow...So yeah for SJG, GURPS will continue a slide into obscurity. Evidently the signs were there
much earlier than I had first supposed.
It seems that GURPS is a typical example of a company that had a good idea that hit, but from that point forward they just couldn't get out of their own way, and when the hobby moved on, they didn't.
More than ever I'm convinced I'm right about what I posted earlier this year back in reply #65:
I think that they just don't have it in them to take a step back,
re-evaluate the system from the top down, and then take the plunge with a properly focused and supported game.