MongooseMatt
First Post
Hi guys,
Getting towards the end of the year and it seems like an appropriate time to take a step back, review what has gone before and start peering at what may be. I did this in the first year of Mongoose and it seems to have become something of a tradition to speculate and reflect in this way every December - so, ignore me or carry on reading but remember, these are only my ramblings about the RPG industry and they are only from my perspective.
Mongoose is rapidly approaching its 4th birthday now. What is significant about this is that there are two main 'hurdles' for new businesses to leap over before they can assume any sort of longevity. Many fail within the first 12 months, usually because their business plans were flawed or even (and this happens a lot) non-existant. The next barrier is at 3 years, where a bad (rather than faulty) business plan can manifest itself or, more critically, a business can fail because it does not handle expansion properly. Having come through the fire of the third year, I can now very much appreciate the dangers of expansion. However, the Mongoose has come through it intact, bigger and more stable than ever!
We have certainly grown. Our last office was an embarressment. Really. Six people crammed into a sardine tin. But now we have new digs that allow real expansion - three thousand square feet of plush office space with enough room for (at the moment) four full-size gaming tables and two roleplaying areas. There is even enough room for us to put in more tables and hold tournaments, as our recent (and very successful) Open Day proved. We'll certainly be holding more of those and there is a Call to Arms tournament being held in February.
More people have also joined the ranks of the Mongoose, most recently David Young, who has been brought on as the Sales & Marketing Manager, a position we somehow managed to survive without up to now - it is essential though and I am already wondering how we got so far without someone dedicated to this work. He brings the total Mongoose full-time complement up to 15, spread across the Atlantic, with a veritable legion of freelancers and part-timers that enable the wheels of the company to stay on track.
Overall, we have been very happy with the progress our products have made this year. The back catalogue continues to be very popular (which is perhaps the greatest factor in making Mongoose so stable as a company), with even books we published our first year enjoying regular sales. The focus is always on new projects, however, and we have been very fortunate this year. Aside from our continuing line of OGL rulebooks, we released three full-blown RPGs in 2004. The first was, of course, Conan and (we are told), for a long while it remained the best selling RPG of the year after D&D - it was never going to keep that crown with the coming of the new Vampire of course
Conan also experienced, shall we say, some 'difficulties' on its first release and perhaps the less said about that, the better. If you don't know the story, no doubt it will be easy to pick up on most RPG forums. However, I _am_ pleased with the way we were able to handle the crisis. As soon as we realised just what had happened, we beavered away at a revised rulebook (the Atlantean Edition), compiled as much free material as we could in PDF format to give to those who had bought into the game early and trashed all remaining copies we still had in our possession. This resulted in Conan actually going out of print for a month, which is a fairly suicidal approach when fanning the flames of a new game but it paid off in the end. It is going to be a long, long time before we can live down the problems with the first release of Conan but that we will take that on the chin. We have an all new staff line up now and a system of editing and production that is heavily procedural so problems like this simply _cannot_ happen again. The side effect of this is that the quality of all our publications has grown in leaps and bounds this year, effectively making us a very different publisher. There will, of course, be those gamers out there who still relate Mongoose to the books we published when we first appeared but we take a fairly philosophical view to this - our aim is to, in one way or another, get you all on side 
It will take time and a lot more releases but that is the basic plan. Even if you are dead set against the books we are doing at the moment, sooner or later we _will_ publish something that will cause you to break down and buy one of our books. Critics, you have been warned. . .
The other two RPGs were Paranoia XP and Lone Wolf. Paranoia was a 'no-brainer' in anyone's book. We loved the older incarnations of the game here at Mongoose and when the chance of the licence arose we literally jumped for it. It is truly one of the greats among RPGs and Allen Varney did a superb job with the new edition. Less than six months from release, and we are already reprinting it (and we did a very large print run initially), so look out for books marked 'Service Pack One'. No revisions internally, just carrying on the joke. . .
One of the things the stability Mongoose has with its strong back catalogue sales allows us to do is have 'fun' or 'cool' projects. This basically means that myself and Alex Fennell (the other Director at Mongoose) can, every now and again, choose to do projects not because we think they will smash all sales records but simply because we enjoy them or think they are fun. This is where Macho Women with Guns came from, for instance. It is also the source of Lone Wolf. You see, I have known Alex from primary school and our very first brush with fantasy gaming was with the original Lone Wolf gaming books (no doubt _that_ made some of you feel _really_ old!). So, when we finally tracked down Mr Joe Dever, the creator of Lone Wolf, we had to make an offer to do the game - and miniatures, as it turned out. What we were not expecting was the huge wave of support Lone Wolf has, even after all this time. An average print run was annihilated very quickly and yes, this is another book we are currently having to reprint, after woefully underestimating demand.
There have been other notables across this year's range too. For my money (and it was, literally!), the Book of Hell, written by Adrian Bott, is perhaps the best written book Mongoose has released to date. Check it out. Seriously. We are going as far as basing an RPG on it next year. . . The Pocket Games Master's Guide joined the Pocket Player's Handbook and its success makes us think there may be something in this approach - so, we are just about to release the Pocket B5 rulebook and will be doing the same with Conan early next year. My personal 'baby' at the moment is A Call to Arms, the space combat game set in the Babylon 5 universe, which straddles the RPG and miniatures markets. We are taking a new approach to this game, having involved gamers with its continuing development since its release and it is thus becoming a very 'organic' game. If you are a player of this game, join in on the fun on our forums and have the chance to directly influence the course of this game. It is a lot more fun than us just producing a game and saying 'there it is, start playing and wait for the first supplement'. Here, you can have a say on the supplements before they go anywhere near a printers. . .
This time last year, I made two predictions. First off, that RPG companies would begin to diversify into board games, card games and other related areas. This is happening - kind of. What I did not appreciate at the time was the _massive_ amount of effort it takes to do this and this is something we have discovered with our own efforts. We have board games, graphic novels and miniatures all waiting in the wings. But it took us a full year to get to the stage where they are actually ready in any meaningful form. It sounds great to diversify into other areas (it makes a business more stable for a start - so long as it can handle the expansion) but it is not easy. It is the equivalent of trying to start a new business from scratch, _while_ you are still running the existing one. Frankly, I am exhausted
The second prediction was that many RPG companies would not start going bust as the boom subsided but that more and more companies would switch from full-time businesses with a number of employees to part-time enterprises with no full-time staff and the owner being forced to go out and find a real job. You won't have heard much about this but it has happened in droves and is continuing to happen even now - I won't name names but you would be surprised at some of the companies being forced to do this. This is not restricted to just the d20-boom companies either, and even some of the longer term and 'traditional' mainstay companies are being forced down this route. None of this will be announced, of course, as it would be fairly suicidal for the company concerned. They are also not going to disappear entirely, as their bosses love games and the gaming industry and once you re-adjust priorities, an RPG company _is_ something that can be attempted part-time, especially if you have another source of income to support your real life. So don't worry about your favourite games going down the pan. In one way or another, they'll all still be here this time next year.
So, is this the death knell of the RPG industry? Umm, no. For every handful of companies in real trouble, you'll find one still going strong and earning enough crust to keep its employees gainfully, well, employed. Yes, Mongoose would be one of those A number of things have happened (I believe) to cause this situation to arise. First off, remember those hurdles I spoke of earlier? A number of companies hit the one year and three year brick walls. Simply put, they either did not have or follow a solid business plan (and I have had a number of conversations with various company owners who did not know what a business plan actually _was_), did not handle expansion well (this seems to be a very rare cause, actually, as many companies never got the chance to expand in the first place) or, and this is the biggie, failed to adapt to a market that continually changes. The 'generic fantasy d20' market could not go on forever. It didn't. Even we are stopping the Quintessential range at the end of this year because there was only so far we could take it. If you want a book that expands, say, the Dwarf race or Necromantic Magic, then you already have a multitude to choose from - and people are still buying those older books, as our back catalogue sales demonstrate. There are only so many ways you can reinvent a wheel. Basically, d20 gamers had been playing D&D for three long years, with all the support they could possibly wish for. They wanted to try something else. For us, they flocked to Conan, Babylon 5, Lone Wolf and our other RPGs (a process that, incidentally, started long before the beginning of 2004).
In short, if an average product was produced, it would sell in average numbers. However, this was compounded by the fact that this average book likely had 2 or 3 direct competitors that had already been bought and used by gamers, so there was really no need for it to show its face. Sales slumped, vocal members of the industry start shouting about a dying hobby and you guys start wondering about the stability of RPGs in general. RPGs are doing just fine. There _is_ a general slump across the board at this time among all forms of fantasy gaming but that is the nature of the industry - it moves in cycles. Personally, I am happy that if Mongoose can survive and prosper in such times, then we are going to be in a very good position when the 'glory days' come back. And I am sure there are other publishers who can identify with that sentiment. The approach of the others was, whatever its final course, just wrong. A little harsh? Well, you chaps were the ones that stopped buying their books
So, what will be up for next year in RPGland? You'll see the regular turnaround of new games, new licences and older games dragged kicking and screaming into the new millennium. And it will be good. However, I have a feeling there will be less freelance work to go round next year, so get your projects lined up quickly or you will start to feel to pinch come Christmas 2005. As for new fads and cycles, I believe in the RPG market in general you will see a return of an old favourite - I think scenarios will come back in a big way in 2005. Scenarios and campaigns together will replace the 'generic' rules supplement and, in some cases, sourcebooks. Up to now, especially in the d20 market, rules supplements have been the 'default' releases for publishers, providing more crunchy bits for players. There is, however, an inherent flaw in continuing this approach and, as I say, I think scenarios will be the things to replace them. Can't tell you what I am basing that on but maybe that is something that can be covered if I have another waffle of this nature next year
So, a bunch of companies going part-time and a new wave of scenarios. Is that all you have to look forward to for next year? Of course not. The RPG industry is a big beast that sometimes finds it difficult to change directions quickly. So you will get the continued support of all your favourite games and new games will arise that will become your favourites. Maybe you'll introduce someone new to gaming just as you see an old warhorse of a roleplayer hang up his dice for good (don't worry about him, he'll be back).
For us, I think the medium term future will be miniatures - given the economics of that particular market and its own dynamics (not to mention our existing investement in it!) that is inevitable. In terms of marketing as well, miniatures enjoy certain advantages that RPGs simply do not have, which is rapidly becoming a factor for us as we grow. Is the Mongoose to leave the RPG market in 2005 or beyond then? Not a bit of it - we would not be so easy on our competitors We have planned this out for a couple of years now and, gradually, been making our RPG production team a seperate, self-contained department. So long as the RPG market exists, there will be an RPG production team within Mongoose. There are just too many 'cool' things we have yet to do with RPGs and, funnily enough, RPGs themselves have several massive advantages when it comes to tackling other projects. For example, there are all sorts of companies doing all sorts of things in various industries with the Conan licence. However, when you do an RPG, you lay out the entire setting and re-create it, chapter and verse. In effect, you create a 'Bible' for the setting. So, whose books do you think the other licensors are using as reference to Conan? Whose map of the Hyborean Kingdoms are they referring to as official? Yup, the ones that the little RPG company produced This process has not passed unnoticed by us and, as they say, I think there may be 'something in this. . .'
But we'll see. There are lots of big plans and very little time in this world. For now, we are concentrating on getting the Starship Troopers RPG and wargame out on schedule (or something very closely resembling it, in the case of the latter. . .), hooking the 'big' licence of 2005 and supporting all our existing games.
I'll stop the waffling now. As I said right at the start, these are just my views, so take them or dismiss them as you will. All I can do is tell you what is happening from the perspective of our little bunker. No doubt others have different experiences. What is important is that we all keep gaming because, well, it is a pretty cool hobby to be involved with.
Oh, and as a parting shot - keep your eye out for a new RPG released in March next year called Infernum and written by Gareth Hanrahan. It will be pretty cool
Getting towards the end of the year and it seems like an appropriate time to take a step back, review what has gone before and start peering at what may be. I did this in the first year of Mongoose and it seems to have become something of a tradition to speculate and reflect in this way every December - so, ignore me or carry on reading but remember, these are only my ramblings about the RPG industry and they are only from my perspective.
Mongoose is rapidly approaching its 4th birthday now. What is significant about this is that there are two main 'hurdles' for new businesses to leap over before they can assume any sort of longevity. Many fail within the first 12 months, usually because their business plans were flawed or even (and this happens a lot) non-existant. The next barrier is at 3 years, where a bad (rather than faulty) business plan can manifest itself or, more critically, a business can fail because it does not handle expansion properly. Having come through the fire of the third year, I can now very much appreciate the dangers of expansion. However, the Mongoose has come through it intact, bigger and more stable than ever!
We have certainly grown. Our last office was an embarressment. Really. Six people crammed into a sardine tin. But now we have new digs that allow real expansion - three thousand square feet of plush office space with enough room for (at the moment) four full-size gaming tables and two roleplaying areas. There is even enough room for us to put in more tables and hold tournaments, as our recent (and very successful) Open Day proved. We'll certainly be holding more of those and there is a Call to Arms tournament being held in February.
More people have also joined the ranks of the Mongoose, most recently David Young, who has been brought on as the Sales & Marketing Manager, a position we somehow managed to survive without up to now - it is essential though and I am already wondering how we got so far without someone dedicated to this work. He brings the total Mongoose full-time complement up to 15, spread across the Atlantic, with a veritable legion of freelancers and part-timers that enable the wheels of the company to stay on track.
Overall, we have been very happy with the progress our products have made this year. The back catalogue continues to be very popular (which is perhaps the greatest factor in making Mongoose so stable as a company), with even books we published our first year enjoying regular sales. The focus is always on new projects, however, and we have been very fortunate this year. Aside from our continuing line of OGL rulebooks, we released three full-blown RPGs in 2004. The first was, of course, Conan and (we are told), for a long while it remained the best selling RPG of the year after D&D - it was never going to keep that crown with the coming of the new Vampire of course
Conan also experienced, shall we say, some 'difficulties' on its first release and perhaps the less said about that, the better. If you don't know the story, no doubt it will be easy to pick up on most RPG forums. However, I _am_ pleased with the way we were able to handle the crisis. As soon as we realised just what had happened, we beavered away at a revised rulebook (the Atlantean Edition), compiled as much free material as we could in PDF format to give to those who had bought into the game early and trashed all remaining copies we still had in our possession. This resulted in Conan actually going out of print for a month, which is a fairly suicidal approach when fanning the flames of a new game but it paid off in the end. It is going to be a long, long time before we can live down the problems with the first release of Conan but that we will take that on the chin. We have an all new staff line up now and a system of editing and production that is heavily procedural so problems like this simply _cannot_ happen again. The side effect of this is that the quality of all our publications has grown in leaps and bounds this year, effectively making us a very different publisher. There will, of course, be those gamers out there who still relate Mongoose to the books we published when we first appeared but we take a fairly philosophical view to this - our aim is to, in one way or another, get you all on side It will take time and a lot more releases but that is the basic plan. Even if you are dead set against the books we are doing at the moment, sooner or later we _will_ publish something that will cause you to break down and buy one of our books. Critics, you have been warned. . .The other two RPGs were Paranoia XP and Lone Wolf. Paranoia was a 'no-brainer' in anyone's book. We loved the older incarnations of the game here at Mongoose and when the chance of the licence arose we literally jumped for it. It is truly one of the greats among RPGs and Allen Varney did a superb job with the new edition. Less than six months from release, and we are already reprinting it (and we did a very large print run initially), so look out for books marked 'Service Pack One'. No revisions internally, just carrying on the joke. . .
One of the things the stability Mongoose has with its strong back catalogue sales allows us to do is have 'fun' or 'cool' projects. This basically means that myself and Alex Fennell (the other Director at Mongoose) can, every now and again, choose to do projects not because we think they will smash all sales records but simply because we enjoy them or think they are fun. This is where Macho Women with Guns came from, for instance. It is also the source of Lone Wolf. You see, I have known Alex from primary school and our very first brush with fantasy gaming was with the original Lone Wolf gaming books (no doubt _that_ made some of you feel _really_ old!). So, when we finally tracked down Mr Joe Dever, the creator of Lone Wolf, we had to make an offer to do the game - and miniatures, as it turned out. What we were not expecting was the huge wave of support Lone Wolf has, even after all this time. An average print run was annihilated very quickly and yes, this is another book we are currently having to reprint, after woefully underestimating demand.
There have been other notables across this year's range too. For my money (and it was, literally!), the Book of Hell, written by Adrian Bott, is perhaps the best written book Mongoose has released to date. Check it out. Seriously. We are going as far as basing an RPG on it next year. . . The Pocket Games Master's Guide joined the Pocket Player's Handbook and its success makes us think there may be something in this approach - so, we are just about to release the Pocket B5 rulebook and will be doing the same with Conan early next year. My personal 'baby' at the moment is A Call to Arms, the space combat game set in the Babylon 5 universe, which straddles the RPG and miniatures markets. We are taking a new approach to this game, having involved gamers with its continuing development since its release and it is thus becoming a very 'organic' game. If you are a player of this game, join in on the fun on our forums and have the chance to directly influence the course of this game. It is a lot more fun than us just producing a game and saying 'there it is, start playing and wait for the first supplement'. Here, you can have a say on the supplements before they go anywhere near a printers. . .
This time last year, I made two predictions. First off, that RPG companies would begin to diversify into board games, card games and other related areas. This is happening - kind of. What I did not appreciate at the time was the _massive_ amount of effort it takes to do this and this is something we have discovered with our own efforts. We have board games, graphic novels and miniatures all waiting in the wings. But it took us a full year to get to the stage where they are actually ready in any meaningful form. It sounds great to diversify into other areas (it makes a business more stable for a start - so long as it can handle the expansion) but it is not easy. It is the equivalent of trying to start a new business from scratch, _while_ you are still running the existing one. Frankly, I am exhausted
The second prediction was that many RPG companies would not start going bust as the boom subsided but that more and more companies would switch from full-time businesses with a number of employees to part-time enterprises with no full-time staff and the owner being forced to go out and find a real job. You won't have heard much about this but it has happened in droves and is continuing to happen even now - I won't name names but you would be surprised at some of the companies being forced to do this. This is not restricted to just the d20-boom companies either, and even some of the longer term and 'traditional' mainstay companies are being forced down this route. None of this will be announced, of course, as it would be fairly suicidal for the company concerned. They are also not going to disappear entirely, as their bosses love games and the gaming industry and once you re-adjust priorities, an RPG company _is_ something that can be attempted part-time, especially if you have another source of income to support your real life. So don't worry about your favourite games going down the pan. In one way or another, they'll all still be here this time next year.
So, is this the death knell of the RPG industry? Umm, no. For every handful of companies in real trouble, you'll find one still going strong and earning enough crust to keep its employees gainfully, well, employed. Yes, Mongoose would be one of those
A number of things have happened (I believe) to cause this situation to arise. First off, remember those hurdles I spoke of earlier? A number of companies hit the one year and three year brick walls. Simply put, they either did not have or follow a solid business plan (and I have had a number of conversations with various company owners who did not know what a business plan actually _was_), did not handle expansion well (this seems to be a very rare cause, actually, as many companies never got the chance to expand in the first place) or, and this is the biggie, failed to adapt to a market that continually changes. The 'generic fantasy d20' market could not go on forever. It didn't. Even we are stopping the Quintessential range at the end of this year because there was only so far we could take it. If you want a book that expands, say, the Dwarf race or Necromantic Magic, then you already have a multitude to choose from - and people are still buying those older books, as our back catalogue sales demonstrate. There are only so many ways you can reinvent a wheel. Basically, d20 gamers had been playing D&D for three long years, with all the support they could possibly wish for. They wanted to try something else. For us, they flocked to Conan, Babylon 5, Lone Wolf and our other RPGs (a process that, incidentally, started long before the beginning of 2004).In short, if an average product was produced, it would sell in average numbers. However, this was compounded by the fact that this average book likely had 2 or 3 direct competitors that had already been bought and used by gamers, so there was really no need for it to show its face. Sales slumped, vocal members of the industry start shouting about a dying hobby and you guys start wondering about the stability of RPGs in general. RPGs are doing just fine. There _is_ a general slump across the board at this time among all forms of fantasy gaming but that is the nature of the industry - it moves in cycles. Personally, I am happy that if Mongoose can survive and prosper in such times, then we are going to be in a very good position when the 'glory days' come back. And I am sure there are other publishers who can identify with that sentiment. The approach of the others was, whatever its final course, just wrong. A little harsh? Well, you chaps were the ones that stopped buying their books
So, what will be up for next year in RPGland? You'll see the regular turnaround of new games, new licences and older games dragged kicking and screaming into the new millennium. And it will be good. However, I have a feeling there will be less freelance work to go round next year, so get your projects lined up quickly or you will start to feel to pinch come Christmas 2005. As for new fads and cycles, I believe in the RPG market in general you will see a return of an old favourite - I think scenarios will come back in a big way in 2005. Scenarios and campaigns together will replace the 'generic' rules supplement and, in some cases, sourcebooks. Up to now, especially in the d20 market, rules supplements have been the 'default' releases for publishers, providing more crunchy bits for players. There is, however, an inherent flaw in continuing this approach and, as I say, I think scenarios will be the things to replace them. Can't tell you what I am basing that on but maybe that is something that can be covered if I have another waffle of this nature next year
So, a bunch of companies going part-time and a new wave of scenarios. Is that all you have to look forward to for next year? Of course not. The RPG industry is a big beast that sometimes finds it difficult to change directions quickly. So you will get the continued support of all your favourite games and new games will arise that will become your favourites. Maybe you'll introduce someone new to gaming just as you see an old warhorse of a roleplayer hang up his dice for good (don't worry about him, he'll be back).
For us, I think the medium term future will be miniatures - given the economics of that particular market and its own dynamics (not to mention our existing investement in it!) that is inevitable. In terms of marketing as well, miniatures enjoy certain advantages that RPGs simply do not have, which is rapidly becoming a factor for us as we grow. Is the Mongoose to leave the RPG market in 2005 or beyond then? Not a bit of it - we would not be so easy on our competitors
We have planned this out for a couple of years now and, gradually, been making our RPG production team a seperate, self-contained department. So long as the RPG market exists, there will be an RPG production team within Mongoose. There are just too many 'cool' things we have yet to do with RPGs and, funnily enough, RPGs themselves have several massive advantages when it comes to tackling other projects. For example, there are all sorts of companies doing all sorts of things in various industries with the Conan licence. However, when you do an RPG, you lay out the entire setting and re-create it, chapter and verse. In effect, you create a 'Bible' for the setting. So, whose books do you think the other licensors are using as reference to Conan? Whose map of the Hyborean Kingdoms are they referring to as official? Yup, the ones that the little RPG company produced This process has not passed unnoticed by us and, as they say, I think there may be 'something in this. . .'But we'll see. There are lots of big plans and very little time in this world. For now, we are concentrating on getting the Starship Troopers RPG and wargame out on schedule (or something very closely resembling it, in the case of the latter. . .), hooking the 'big' licence of 2005 and supporting all our existing games.
I'll stop the waffling now. As I said right at the start, these are just my views, so take them or dismiss them as you will. All I can do is tell you what is happening from the perspective of our little bunker. No doubt others have different experiences. What is important is that we all keep gaming because, well, it is a pretty cool hobby to be involved with.
Oh, and as a parting shot - keep your eye out for a new RPG released in March next year called Infernum and written by Gareth Hanrahan. It will be pretty cool
