Store owner complains about Kickstarter and Twitter and D&D

[payn]

I feel for the owner, but if not for KS a lot of RPG stuff would never get made. I dont know much about production but a few comments here in this thread make it seem like there are hurdles that KS removes. Not sure how much ability FLGS owners have to make that an easier and smoother process?

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

And nobody's making decent buggy whips any more, either.

 

[Morrus]

I feel for the owner, but if not for KS a lot of RPG stuff would never get made. I dont know much about production but a few comments here in this thread make it seem like there are hurdles that KS removes. Not sure how much ability FLGS owners have to make that an easier and smoother process?

For small publishers, it's the big distributors who are the difficult hurdle. We've been lucky that Asmodee took a bunch of stock from us here in the UK. We've been flatly rejected by one US distributor, another one won't even take our calls. It's not easy. So we sell directly, use Kickstarter, and look for other options. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to 'support' those distributors when they won't stock our games.

Luckily, we do very well anyway. So it all works out!

 

[Sacrosanct]

For small publishers, it's the big distributors who are the difficult hurdle. We've been lucky that Asmodee took a bunch of stock from us here in the UK. We've been flatly rejected by one US distributor, another one won't even take our calls. It's not easy. So we sell directly, use Kickstarter, and look for other options. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to 'support' those distributors when they won't stock our games.

About 10 years ago, I had used Impressions. The minute the requests from the retailers start declining, they want to ship all remaining stock to you and out of their warehouse. And it's a lot of stock, because you have to do a large print run in the first place. I understand why, space is money after all, but I don't see how any small time publisher could use the distribution model. The sales #s just aren't there.

 

[prabe]

I don't want to pry too much into anyone's business, but where is the cutoff for "small publisher" in this context? Like, is Monte Cook Games? Evil Hat? Kobold Press? Goodman?

 

[Morrus]

I don't want to pry too much into anyone's business, but where is the cutoff for "small publisher" in this context? Like, is Monte Cook Games? Evil Hat? Kobold Press? Goodman?

I don't have any insight into their operations, but -- using the terms as relative to other RPG publishers, not as relative to all companies -- I'd consider those to be medium-sized. I run a very small company. I'd call those of Paizo's size large. WotC is not on that scale; it's a billion dollar international corporation.

That's just my impressions though. I have no data or information to back it up.

 

[Jer]

The guy hasn't thought about the numbers there...

A million-dollar kickstarter, at about $100 per order, is only 10,000 units, total. That's a small print run to do broad, scattershot distribution in brick-and-mortar venues. That's a production run begging for direct-to-customer distribution.

Yes. And most kickstarters aren't getting to the million dollar order. For example, Ulisses Spiele is doing their 8th Torg Kickstarter right now and it's at $160K with a little over 900 backers. 900 customers spread, potentially, around the world. A more popular campaign might be the Savage Rifts Atlantis supplement that they kickstarted a while back - that had 1800 customers buying it on Kickstarter. Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu 7th edition had under 4K people back their Kickstarter. Modiphius's Conan kickstarter had fewer than 5K people buying it.

I think there's a lot of not understanding the numbers going on in that article. The "big" game companies that he names I suspect are operating on much smaller budgets than he thinks and the projects they're kickstarting are much riskier than he might think. Being able to reach an audience that is diffused across the country - or possibly around the world - and having it paid for in advance might be the only thing that gets the books published in the first place.

 

[prabe]

I don't have any insight into their operations, but -- using the terms as relative to other RPG publishers, not as relative to all companies -- I'd consider those to be medium-sized. I run a very small company. I'd call those of Paizo's size large. WotC is not on that scale; it's a billion dollar international corporation.

That's just my impressions though. I have no data or information to back it up.

Thanks.

I don't have any trouble finding the publishers I listed (and some others I don't know by name) at any of the good stores around me. I wouldn't have expected to find LevelUp, though--that's most of why I backed it.

 

[Morrus]

The guy hasn't thought about the numbers there...

A million-dollar kickstarter, at about $100 per order, is only 10,000 units, total. That's a small print run to do broad, scattershot distribution in brick-and-mortar venues. That's a production run begging for direct-to-customer distribution.

And those will likely be spread across multiple (often dozens of) products; it's rare to see a million dollar Kickstarter that's 10,000 copies of one product. Usually there will be various books, add-ons, all sorts of stuff. So it's not really a 10K print run.

 

[MGibster]

Gone are the days when I could walk into a game store and find oodles or role playing games like I could in the 80s and 90s. These days, most game stores I go to have tons of D&D and Pathfinder books but not much of a selection for anything else. After D&D and Pathfinder, my LGS has RPGs on their shelves from the following companies: PEG, Inc., Modiphius, Chaosium, Fee League, and occasionally a few others, but all of them combined pale to the number of books they carry for D&D and Pathfinder. And I don't blame the LGS, they have a business to run. But I certainly can't fault publishers for distributing their product in whatever way works best for them. They have a business to run as well.