Or Harry Potter for that matter.

I suspect that the Street Fighter rpg was a big enough flop that they've written off the idea of introductory products ever since.  Steve Jackson seems utterly hooked on the idea that starter sets based on obscure properties are going to work better than generic ones.  I don't know if the numbers bear him out.  He's so busy shouting "D&D is stupid" that he's pretty much stopped supporting GURPS.

Quote from: SineNomine;686692I've been thinking about this a great deal lately, myself, because I think something drastic has happened to RPGs in the same way as it's happened to conventional publishers. Publishers now have the power to build an immortal backlist.

For the first time in the hobby, it is theoretically possible to have a publisher's entire corpus made easily available to a buyer. You can use OBS to buy every Sine Nomine book ever published just as easily as you can use it to buy the most recent release. Watching my sales numbers, I see it often- some new guy downloads Stars Without Number, and then the next day he's back buying half a dozen books. He doesn't need to worry about whether they're on the FLGS shelves or finding them on ebay, he just clicks the button and gets his book from a reliable, well-known POD printer.

RPGs are essentially impulse purchases to the most financially remunerative chunk of the market. $20 to these customers is something they drop on a whim. If they hear about something, if they notice something on the website, and they can get a $9.99 PDF of the book, they'll hit it just out of idle curiosity. When your entire backlist is sitting right there in front of them, you have a much better chance of making that sale.

Now, combine that immortal backlist with the "do it cheap" publishing ethos. One guy or a small handful of collaborators will put together the game, farm out any art or design work they can't perform themselves, and then pitch it with little to no marketing. These games do not even exist as far as most FLGSes are concerned, let alone mass-market outlets. The only place they[ll ever get sold is through the author's website, OBS, and maybe a few secondary online outlets. Gross sales will be tiny compared to even the minor releases of the bigger publishers. But it's not gross sales that defines your profit- it's gross sales less expenses. Not paying health insurance? That's a saving. Settling for small publisher b/w art and production? That's a saving. Doing your own layout and editing? Saving. By the time you pare your overhead down to the bare essentials and make some compromises you'd rather not make, you can get a product out the door at a ridiculously low cost.

I'll take two of my own products as examples here. I published Skyward Steel around January of 2011. I did all the layout myself in InDesign and shelled out about $50 on stock art for the interior. As of today, the net profits on it are $3,817.81 before taxes. For my my recent campaign book, Suns of Gold, I spent the heftier sum of $300 or so for the art. I released it in early June this year and my profit on it so far has been $2,184.55. These numbers are not going to get me to quit my day job, but they're not trivial, either. And they're not my only products. So far this year I've moved $30K gross sales worth of product, and $21K of that was product with an initial release before January 1st of this year. Hell, my backlist paid off my student loans this year.

So I keep building my backlist, doing callbacks with fresh product and trying to keep as much of it alive and useful to new buyers as I can. The only way I run out of buyers is if I manage to saturate the entire game-buying market with my material, with no new influx of curious buyers or first-time readers. And I have precisely zero inventory or fulfillment costs- that warehouse full of unsalable late-era TSR stuff? Never going to happen to people like me. That's an entire huge chunk of the old industry that simply does not apply to me.

I think it's too early to tell if the "live on your backlist" model is going to be long-term viable, but it seems to be pretty hot with a lot of old publishers on OBS right now. And as it stands now, counting only my after-tax net game income, I'm still making more than the federal poverty level, which is a positive triumph by writer/musician/artist standards. What are those numbers going to look like after another three years of publishing, when my backlist is theoretically three times as large?

I have heard the same arguement made for spotify.
Yes the numbers per song are tiny but the theory is that you go on streaming massive back calogues for ever. Of course the only hard bit is building up a decent back catalogue.

The business approach to rpgs is going to vary wildly depending on who is producing the material and for what purpose.

Is it a hobbyist wanting to share some cool stuff with fellow rpg enthusiasts?

Is it a small company looking to make a modest living selling gaming material?

Is it a large company trying to figure out a way to turn gaming product into a cash generating machine?

Like any other business, the way to go about it depends on the desired goals of the business.

Quote from: Warthur;686817If your tabletop RPG's setting is evocative enough, it can support all sorts of other games. If it isn't evocative enough, then you should reconsider publishing it in the first place. (Obviously, if you're deliberately making a generic game this model doesn't work, but even then companies like SJG have always understood that RPGs are not the only fruit.)

Exactly, 100% agreed. The recent rash of settingless systems like DW and company aren't ever going to be more than RPGs, whereas a good setting can spawn books, comics, cartoons, movies, merchandise of all sorts.

With that said I've been approached by two parties interested in developing the Floodlands concept I babble about here from time to time, one was a MtG online type effort and the other was a phone app which sends out fake news on your phone, like a real newsfeed except set in the future earth. GMs could log on to the website and send updates through the world feed to their players only to help keep things moving, ad supported.

The latter was kinda neat but I turned them both down because I'm not ready with the setting yet, the coolest stuff by far is still melting out of the cheese between my ears, and I don't want to undersell the whole package if I ever get round to releasing it, aka going off half cocked. A good setting draws interest and talent, a good system draws collectors.

Quote from: SineNomine;686701I'm curious to see what I'm going to be able to do after another nine or ten years of this.

That depends on whether you desire a spouse and/or family?

I read an interview with Shane at Pinnacle a couple of years back where he said that their approach was pretty much like that used in "freemium" MMO games. They try to get the core product out to you as cheaply as possible, and to give you something that you could just play "free" forever with, to get you locked in as a customer. And then they try to upsell you with "cool stuff" - be that setting books, adventures, custom dice, game tokens, whatever. Their view is that beyond the core rules you don't need anything they can sell you - so they try to make things that you'll want to make your game better.

They seemed to be very explicitly rejecting the WotC/D&D 3e approach of making all products for the widest possible audience of D&D gamers, and rather saying that they would be happy to have only 10% of their audience buy anything but the core book, as long as they were adding happy customers over time, and that some proportion of the new folks dive in and buy a setting or two.

You can see the same approach in their current Kickstarter for Weird Wars Rome, where unlike many RPG Kickstarters there have been no add-on products via stretch goals - everything added in the stretch has been additional free stuff for everyone who pledges. They're all about sweetening the pot.

Quote from: J Arcane;686807Despite what came of 4e itself, all the reports I've heard were that the Encounters program got more people in stores and actually gaming than anything has in years. That was smart of them.

Encounters was a great Idea and well executed, yes. They need to keep that up for Next (and hopefully address the single most common complaint I've heard about Encounters being a linear string of fights)

Quote from: David Johansen;686846Or Harry Potter for that matter.

I suspect that the Street Fighter rpg was a big enough flop that they've written off the idea of introductory products ever since.  Steve Jackson seems utterly hooked on the idea that starter sets based on obscure properties are going to work better than generic ones.  I don't know if the numbers bear him out.  He's so busy shouting "D&D is stupid" that he's pretty much stopped supporting GURPS.

God damnit I love/hate SJgames. :mad:

"Oh lets spend our meager GURPS resources for YEARS trying to get out a Vorkosigan book! And when we're done with that we'll plow those limited resources into a Discworld game! Hey but at least you're getting a Zombies book! Zombies aren't played out yet... are they...? Ummm... guys where did you all go? Well I guess we can't invest in GURPS because it doesn't make any money"

Gah!

The RPG industry has munching on nicely buttered seed corn for a long long time now. Eventually someone will have to target the pre-teens again in a meaningful way...

GURPS should do a lite beginner's game box for Discworld with high production values, slick design, and good marketing.

Quote from: Daztur;686888The RPG industry has munching on nicely buttered seed corn for a long long time now. Eventually someone will have to target the pre-teens again in a meaningful way...

That's my impression as well. At some point then the fadishness started wearing off in the mid-late 80's the industry, lead by TSR, decided to respond by doubling down on the hardcore fans.

Which kept them afloat but also alienated casual gamers.

Now we're living in that world and I fear that most of us, and especially the folks in charge, have very little to no conception of a 'casual' gamer and what it would take to get them back.

To carry your metaphor a little further we've been eating seed corn for so long we forgot how to plant it.

I talked about this a couple of years ago.

The short version is that:

(1) You need consumable products. The supplement treadmill burns out and forces a new edition to reboot the treadmill because after 5 or 10 or 25 books, people saturate on reusable content like character options and monsters. (The individual threshold on this stuff varies, but pretty much everybody has one.)

What you need instead are products that get used up: Adventure modules are an obvious example which Paizo leverages very well. Whether you're dealing with someone who reads them for pleasure or actually uses them in play, an adventure module generally gets used once by each playing group and then the group needs a new module.

WotC screwed up the DDI pretty badly, but a subscription service that gave you valuable tools (like a digital tabletop, character creator, campaign management, etc.) would be another example.

(2) I also think there's a market to be explored in strong, alternative game structures.

For example, D&D has strong game structures for combat and dungeoncrawling. (Although recent editions have been steadily losing the strong dungeoncrawling structure.) These structures support vast libraries of support material.

Now let's hypothesize someone creating a strong game structure for, say, a pirate-based D&D campaign. (Note that I'm not just talking about a bunch of rules for ships and ocean weather; I mean a complete, robust game structure.) That would potentially support a core product for the new game structure and then a whole library of support material. It might be a way of refreshing your product line without needing to reboot the whole game. And if you could get a sequence of such products, you might be in a position to significantly or even indefinitely extend the lifespan of your product line.

Quote from: David Johansen;686846Or Harry Potter for that matter.

I suspect that the Street Fighter rpg was a big enough flop that they've written off the idea of introductory products ever since.  Steve Jackson seems utterly hooked on the idea that starter sets based on obscure properties are going to work better than generic ones.  I don't know if the numbers bear him out.  He's so busy shouting "D&D is stupid" that he's pretty much stopped supporting GURPS.

The answer, simply put, is that major licenses cost a great deal of money, have far shorter shelf lives than you think, and generally come with a great deal of interference from the property holders.  SJ Games already's been there and done that with Conan.

Think about it: how many major literary or cinematic properties, with wide public name recognition, are not only currently in print, but have been in print for more than a decade?

Quote from: Grymbok;686869Their view is that beyond the core rules you don't need anything they can sell you - so they try to make things that you'll want to make your game better.

That's basically what Evil Hat is doing.  They're giving away the Fate Core/FAE books (well, pay-what-you-want), and hoping to cash in on supplements and dice.

Also, by creating an ecosystem of games built on Fate, they're hoping to increase the Fate audience more, and again, cash in on supplements/etc.

And FAE is explicitly designed at new players, being a streamlined version of the core game that weighs in at under 50 pages, and even the book is available for only $5.

I think it's a good strategy - and I think that their strategy with FAE is something that other companies need to look at.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686898Now let's hypothesize someone creating a strong game structure for, say, a pirate-based D&D campaign. (Note that I'm not just talking about a bunch of rules for ships and ocean weather; I mean a complete, robust game structure.)

Watch it, you're starting to sound like Storygame Swine.

Quote from: Piestrio;686873Encounters was a great Idea and well executed, yes. They need to keep that up for Next (and hopefully address the single most common complaint I've heard about Encounters being a linear string of fights)

Organizationally, I think Encounters was the right idea.  I'm just not sold that a linear series of combats is really the best way to highlight the game.

I think if you ask most players what's awesome about RPGs, they'll tell you it's being in character, and the things that happen.  They don't talk about the super-awesome tactical rules.

Quote from: Piestrio;686893Now we're living in that world and I fear that most of us, and especially the folks in charge, have very little to no conception of a 'casual' gamer and what it would take to get them back.

I agree with you on this.  I think people who are already playing have a much different idea of what an entry rpg should be- much more complex than what a casual gamer is looking for.  Basic D&D was a great intro at the time, but I don't know how great it is these days for the same job.

Quote from: Ravenswing;686907The answer, simply put, is that major licenses cost a great deal of money, have far shorter shelf lives than you think, and generally come with a great deal of interference from the property holders.  SJ Games already's been there and done that with Conan.

Think about it: how many major literary or cinematic properties, with wide public name recognition, are not only currently in print, but have been in print for more than a decade?

Except that my point is that there's a point where an obscure licenced property is less viable than a generic book.

Big properties generally kill the holder eventually.  They tend to have fallow periods where there isn't a new Starwars or Startrek or Lord of the Rings movie to drive your sales.