Matt Sprange has put up a blog detailing Mongoose's reactions/plans for 4E post the conference call with WOTC during which the OGL/SRD specifics were revealed.
http://blog.mongoosepublishing.co.uk/
http://blog.mongoosepublishing.co.uk/
Mongoose and D&D 4E
Well, other publishers have started talking about their plans for 4e, and so it seems we should as well. . .
As you have no doubt heard, WotC have started revealing their plans for third party products to support D&D 4e, and the drive has begun to prepare titles for this part of the market - or not, as the case may be.
The question of whether to support the new game, as a publisher, is not as clear as it was in the old D20 days (indeed, Mongoose started as a 'D20 company', so our route was clear back in 2001). Mongoose's future, for the next decade at least, is going to be tied to RuneQuest and Traveller - we have invested a great deal into those lines, and they stand up well on their own. We also do not believe 4e will blat other games systems in the way D20 did for a while, so we are not too concerned about the impact on the market 4e will have against our product lines. Thus, our current games will continue in the way you are used to. No fears there.
The charge for the early adopters' route is $5,000. On the face of it, that is fair enough (and, indeed, there is some argument that WotC could have gone further in this direction, perhaps upping the charge to $15,000 or so, and extending the grace period for a year, two years, or longer). $5,000 is not an unsurmountable amount, but is it worth it?
Under a 'typical' licence agreement, with royalties (which this deal is not), that $5,000 might be matched against 10% wholesale royalties, which is effectively claimed off each book sold. If you assume a $24.95 book has a 60% discount in the trade, you get $9.98 for each book sold - thus you need to sell $50,000 worth of books, or 5,000 $24.95 books if this deal is to match a 10% licensed arrangement with, say, Warner Brothers or Sony. Sell 10,000 such books, and the equivalent royalty rate is 5%, which is by no means a bad deal. Sell 20,000 and it becomes 2.5%, and so on.
So, the question becomes, can we sell the minimum 5,000-odd books to make this worthwhile?
Under the old D20 days, the answer would have been yes, no problem, can be done on a single title in less than a month. However, I would not be convinced that 4e titles will necessarily sell as fast. On the other hand, there will be less new titles around (because that $5,000 charge will cut down on the number of companies becoming early adopters) than in the D20 days, where there were over 100 potential publishers at one point. And this 'grace' period for the early adopters having the market to themselves is a healthy few months.
There are still concerns, of course.
Can 4e products be produced without damaging the development of existing lines? The easy answer is yes - we have just taken on another full-time writer and, of course, our development of RuneQuest and Traveller is currently solid. We would merely have to decide what proportion of time is taken out for 4e books.
Will D&D 4e be popular? Probably a foregone conclusion. The real question is how popular, but I would be fairly confident there will be enough interest to push things along in a healthy manner.
Even though the number of potential publishers have been cut down to a handful of early adopters (if they all decide to proceed with 4e), will there be a D20 style glut of products? Unlikely, as most of the early adopters have nailed their colours to masts other than D20, and are no more likely to drop their own ranges to service 4e as we would Runequest or Traveller. Even so, a glut is unlikely to be an issue, as even with a flood of product, quality titles always rise to the surface - when the Slayer's Guides and Quintessentials were released (for example), they had a real fight on their hands among competing products, but they were still able to sell tens of thousands of copies (at one point, the Quintessentials were, quite literally, selling one book every thirty seconds!). Other publishers saw similar things. The right product at the right time always wins through.
So, perhaps there will be a lot of books floating around towards the bottom end of this year, all competing for your 4e Pounds, Dollars and Euros, but the market will decide which has a right to be there.
Speaking from a purely commercial point of view, the most interesting question is how many publishers will become early adopters, paying the fee and getting a lead on both development and sales time. A bit of game theory comes into play here, whereby if everyone decides to pitch in, the advantage of joining yourself is diminished. On the other hand, if no one else joins in, perhaps thinking there will be a flood of products that will be tough to compete with, that $5,000 suddenly becomes very, very cheap, as you will have the third party market to yourself!
Is the early adopter deal worth it, given everything above? Commercially speaking. . . yes, depending on how much development time you can devote to the products.
It is going to be fascinating to see what type of products will be the most popular. At the beginning of the D20 craze, it was scenarios, but they quickly fell by the wayside when rules supplements struck (pioneered, to a large degree, by Mongoose and its Slayer's Guides, Encyclopaedia Arcanes and, of course, Quintessentials). Then settings started to take over, though to a much smaller degree than before.
Will it be the same this time around? I am guessing not. I have a feeling many publishers will try to cement themselves early with their own settings and/or concentrate on the biggest sellers of the D20 days - rules supplements. However, I am not sure that is what will happen this time around, and if everyone jumps on the rules supplement bandwagon, those few who concentrate on adventures/scenarios could do extremely well. Keep an eye on Goodman Games and what they do this year. I think they will do very well for themselves. . .
_If_ Mongoose were to pitch in with 4e (and we have not made any firm decisions yet, nor will we until we see the legal paperwork from WotC), what would we do? Grab our 3e catalogue, rehash the rules and release them? That would certainly be the easiest thing to do, requiring little more than a knowledgable developer. However, I don't think it will be that easy. From what we have seen thus far of the rules, you could not take, say, the Quintessential Fighter, and just convert all the rules over to 4e - characters seem to work too differently.
In the State of the Mongoose, I did talk about a setting we have on the back burner at the moment, one that would work very well with D&D rather than RuneQuest, because of the relative power and magic levels of the games. That is a possibility, but see my notes above about which books are likely to do well.
We also have several other ideas in the works, but they all require varying levels of investment in their development. _If_ we proceed with 4e, it will likely be with a mixture of titles, some drawing upon our experience with D20, some from our experience with RuneQuest, and others completely new, as befits a new system.
One way or another, exciting times are ahead for the market!
