There's A New Online Gaming Store In Town

Billing itself as the home of open gaming, particularly D&D 5th Edition OGL products, a new online store has just opened up. It has been planned by a consortium of top OGL-supporting companies, including Kobold Press, Frog God Games, Troll Lord Games, Green Ronin, Rite Publishing, Super Genius Games, Expeditious Retreat Games, Hero Games, and more. Already it stocks 5E products from these companies, both in electronic and print form. The store is called Tabletop Library. They have announced themselves with a press release which you can see below.

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The new store's main competition is, of course, the monolithic OBS (DriveThruRPG, RPGNow, and now DMs Guild, etc.) and, to a lesser extent, Paizo.com, Warehouse 23 (over at Steve Jackson Games) and smaller outfits like d20pfsrd.com's web store. There have been other stores in the past - YourGamesNow closed a couple of years ago (a casino now appears to have the domain) and the EN World GameStore was bought by OBS about 10 years ago. It's a tough market. In terms of sales, I'd estimate that 95% of my own (EN Publishing's) direct PDF sales are at DTRPG, and about 5% at Paizo (not counting Patreon, Kickstarter, and so on, which are an entirely different story). I have tried products on YGN and d20pfsrd's store, but never sold a single item on either of them, which speaks to how tough a nut to crack that segment of the industry is.

The fees at the new store are pretty low. For PDFs, it only takes 25% of a seller's revenues, which is 5%-10% lower than the competition (and 25% lower than DMsG which takes 50%).

PRESS RELEASE

Kobold Press, Frog God Games, Troll Lord Games, Green Ronin, Rite Publishing, Super Genius Games, Expeditious Retreat Games, Hero Games, Rogue Comet, Metallic Dice Games, Pacesetter Games and Simulations, Eldritch Enterprises; Far Future Enterprises and TableTopLibrary.com

March 10, 2016

Kobold Press, Frog God Games, Troll Lord Games, Green Ronin, Hero Games, Rogue Comet; Pacesetter Games and Simulations, Eldritch Enterprises; Far Future Enterprises and TableTopLibrary.com are jointly announcing that, effective immediately, our companies will all be offering our Fifth Edition products through a new RPG download store called TableTopLibrary, as a one-stop shop for OGL Fifth Edition products. TableTopLibrary, website https://tabletoplibrary.com/ is a newly-formed online store for RPG books and pdfs designed to offer both electronic versions and hard copy versions of books produced by your favorite publishers. TabletopLibrary will also offer a full slate of products and resources for other role-playing games, including Pathfinder and OSR-games. All of us will continue our own websites and stores, but TableTopLibrary offers a place to draw all these products together in one place for convenience.

At this time, by coming together as a consortium, we can offer the high-quality products we pride ourselves on; provide a one-stop shopping spot with outstanding customer service; and allow a better experience for publishers, and more importantly, for customers . Centralized electronic book fulfillment, kickstarter fulfillment, and single-location warehousing will improve our delivery speed, accuracy, and customer service in the RPG download market.

Our reasons for setting up a consortium at this time include (1) each partner retains ownership and editorial control over the individual campaign worlds and other “intellectual property” that our fans have known and loved for years; (2) our desire to offer physically higher-quality printing, paper quality, and binding than print on demand outlets offer; and (3) the desire to continue drawing upon and increasing the vast resources of Open Game Content as opposed to other alternatives.

TableTopLibrary is committed to offering a deep and broad-based marketplace of Fifth Edition products, superior to any other online store, as well as many other game system products. We are joined in a partnership of many large publishers in this project, and expect many more to join us as time goes on. TableTopLibrary will be issuing its own press release soon, describing the advantages and the procedures involved in joining.

You can continue buying products directly from each of us, as always. But if you want to browse the whole library of Fifth Edition and other products produced under the Open Game License over the years, we’re letting you know that there’s a new online game store in town.

Check out TableTopLibrary at TableTopLibrary.com - The Leading Source for RPGs and watch us grow! We think you’ll be impressed.

 

[Kite474]

Seems nifty! Does the site give messages and alerts when material you have bought has been updated?

 

[John Reyst]

Seems nifty! Does the site give messages and alerts when material you have bought has been updated?

It will. That feature is being added right now.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

5th edition products: will be only on Tabletop Library
Pathfinder and other products: will be on both sites.

Both companies will also continue to maintain their own websites. Tabletop isn't about using exclusivity to tie publishers into the site. The only reason for our 5e exclusivity is to help build the structure of a "5e OGL Marketplace" area, and it is exclusive only "by product," not "by publisher" as OBS does. So the same publisher can, if they want, publish one set of products on DM Guild (or in the general areas of OBS) and another on Tabletop. We're all about improving the overall quality/size of the 5th edition pool of resources under both licenses, we just think that the OGL side of the 5e marketplace would benefit by having its own site rather than "competing" with the DM Guild license on the same site.

It might be smarter for us to be thinking of it in terms of business competition between sites, but in reality it's about competition between two different WotC licenses and how they affect a publisher's options and intellectual property. We're obviously no measurable threat to OBS as a business.

Thanks. That's good to know.

 

[jreyst]

[MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION]: I am not sure if I'm just mis-reading the internet or if you genuinely have serious hostility towards me. I'm going to play it safe and assume I'm just imagining it. Regardless, when I said "Regarding your success or failure at..." I should have perhaps said "Regarding the overall results of your time being listed at..." because I wasn't attempting to insinuate YOU succeeded or failed so much as the overall process didn't succeed in terms of your products at my store. If you want to say that's all my fault, that's fine. I'm not going to argue with you and I'm not interested in having a public debate about it.

I'm glad you seem to have a positive relationship with my partners behind TTL and I'll let them carry on conversations with you in the future since there's a better than 50/50 chance any interactions between you and I will go south at some point. Good luck with your projects and products.

 

[Qwillion]

I know my products sell everywhere else.

This odd to me, as there is really only two other places (everywhere sounds like too broad a term). My products sell everywhere too and at d20pfsrd.com. John does not promote my stuff (I pay for a front page ad) but only certain products do well there because its the nature of the store, Adventures don't, which I would expect is EN publishings bread and butter, but In the Company of Dragons and other player focused products sell very well for me there (its about 1/2 what I make at paizo).

The SRD is what drives sales if you don't have things that can go up on the SRD, then no you won't get sales at the SRD.

Its not just put my stuff up and expect the online venue to do the selling for you like Drivehthru (which has 15+ years of customer base), or to let the front page of the Paizo store blog point people at you and thier newsletter sent to tens of thousands of first party customers, its put stuff up on the SRD and then watch customers come buy your product.

Not everything can or should be OBS.

Just my two coppers, I could be wrong.

 

[Mythmere1]

Both of you guys make very valid points, and hopefully there's no acrimony about John's other store.

There are obviously a lot of components involved in operating a download store. The first and foremost is consolidation of customers into one market area both for their convenience of the customers and also to allow cross-over sales in which one publisher benefits from the presence of the others. For that, total traffic is the most important aspect. Publicizing individual publishers is a matter of creating methods to highlight the stronger products -- a strong reviewing system being key to this, and also previews (and we're working on the preview function as fast as we can)! Using different vectors for this helps to highlight different types of quality products: bigger books tend to bring in more money as a top seller, crowding out small products that have vast sales and popularity unless you measure both indices in different lists, total products sold aren't the same as top sales measured in dollars. Newsletters also help to highlight products.

 

[JeffB]

 

[Morrus]

but In the Company of Dragons and other player focused products sell very well for me there (its about 1/2 what I make at paizo).

I'm pleased for you. I always like to see fellow small publishers doing well.

The SRD is what drives sales if you don't have things that can go up on the SRD, then no you won't get sales at the SRD.

Its not just put my stuff up and expect the online venue to do the selling for you like Drivehthru (which has 15+ years of customer base), or to let the front page of the Paizo store blog point people at you and thier newsletter sent to tens of thousands of first party customers, its put stuff up on the SRD and then watch customers come buy your product.

I don't rely on Paizo's front page for my marketing (like I said, it's only about 5% of my sales - just enough to cover the OBS exclusivity difference). I do my own marketing - lots of it - and additionally get decent passer-by sales from OBS stores. I was mentioned in a Paizo newsletter a few years ago during the Rebuilding Kickstarter, which was awesome, but that was a special occasion.

A shop needs to do its selling. That's the main function of a shop. In the case of John's (the old one, not the new one), he needs to find new ways to market the stock he holds that for whatever reason his current marketing efforts (like his SRD compilation) fail to target rather than say to manufacturers "your products don't match my marketing and that is your failure". He can choose just to sell to a certain demographic, and that's fine, of course. There's nothing wrong with that. If he markets my products, I'll stock them with him; at the moment he doesn't, so I don't. That's fine.

It's not fair on him, I know. OBS has a near monopoly and doesn't need to market its stock. And that sucks; I totally sympathise. I know he faces a heck of a challenge, and I don't rightly know how you deal with that. I'd love it if there were three competitive stores we publishers could use, because the competition could only benefit us. With luck, this new venture will be able to do what d20pfsrd couldn't do - adding folks like Bill Webb to the mix and with support from Green Ronin, Kobold Press, Frog God, etc., I think it might have a real chance.

 

[Miladoon]

This consortium should build a one stop hub for their crowd funding? Get rid of the middle man once and for all.

 

[Morrus]

This consortium should build a one stop hub for their crowd funding? Get rid of the middle man once and for all.

It's tough to beat what Kickstarter and Patreon have to offer.

I always thought that if a store combined the crowdfunding, PoD, distribution, and general store aspects, it would kill. A focused RPG version of that would dominate the market completely. If it additionally figured how to include boxed sets, poster maps, and the like, it would be game over.