Another RPG company with financial difficulties

[Erik Mona]

Last i heard, "big" RPG publishers pay 4 cents/word, and if you're a big name, it *might* get as high as 6 cents/word. And you [the generic you, not Telfon Billy in particular] wonder why they keep leaving the industry. We gotta pay them more, especially established, well-liked (i.e., heavily-bought) authors.

Paizo _starts_ at $.05/word and can go as high as $.10/word for the right author (there are maybe three such people in the universe). If someone writes several pieces for us or is a "draw" (and we do note a difference in sales based on authors, particularly in Dungeon), we'll pay more than $.05/word.

Just as an FYI.

--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon & Dungeon

 

[Greatwyrm]

Four things have to change for e-publishing to take over.

Who says it has to take over? I don't think real books will disappear in 5 years, but I do think pdfs will be a much larger part of the market by then. There is a growing segment of the market that wants them, so the publishers need to accomodate them to keep market share. Some of the bigger players are only now getting around to doing that.

1.) Marketing- An effective way to market online.

That's the Holy Grail of advertising, isn't it?

2.) Browsing: There has to be a central place to browse that is effective. For instance, you would need the equivalent of going to a bookstore and looking at what is there. Right now that does not exist.

Maybe not in an ideal form, but RPGnow and DriveThruRPG aren't that far from it. As more publishers take advantage of something like the "demo" feature on RPGnow, online browsing will become more of a reality.

3.) E-Reading: Something has to replace PDF that allows for FREE searching. Also, we need a venue easier to read. Books are easy to read. Screens are not. Especially PDAs or laptops.

Tough to argue with that. What do you mean by "FREE searching", though?

4.) PC portability. Books are big, no small screens, can be carried and thrown about in a bookbag, and passed around with ease.. Until computers can do the same, then the point is mute.

Moot.

I think this is probably the biggest limiting factor of the ones you've thrown out. Maybe somebody will make a dedicated e-book reader that's about 8x11. Hook up via USB and load your books like songs on an iPod.

The online model is not going to develop these items quickly.

Never underestimate creative people who want to make money.

And before anyone says...looks at the net and the difference between now and 1990. The internet had been in development for decades before the great revolution of the 90s. We just got to sit back and see the tech and the internet mature and come together at the same moment.

But there's a point of critical mass where stuff like this just takes off. Sure, the internet was around since the '60s or something, but didn't have real consumer applications until recently. Since then, everybody and his brother has a webpage for something or something to sell.

Same with TV. How many decades did we have just 3 or 4 channels? Then somebody comes up with cable TV. Everyone "knew" that nobody would pay for TV when they could watch it for free. Now we've got more channels than anyone knows what to do with and people watching all of them.

Stuff like this may not happen overnight, but it happens.

 

[Wrathamon]

I really like Hero and I actually know several of the original designers and have worked with them before. I know they really have nothing to do with this version anymore. I did purchase Fred and played it many times, so this is very sad that they are having difficulites.

Maybe this was already mentioned, but Hero has an inheritant problem in that you only need 1 book "ever" to play the game. The other books are really just support (idea) books, but no real rules or new mechanics or any heavy "crunch" is required. This leads to the problem of once you have sold the main book, how do you get the consumers to buy your support books?

I think this has always been a problem for Champions/hero in general.

Great system... I really hope that it stays alive, but I know alot of Hero players that still play the big blue book and refused to buy the new one. Too bad, it was a HUGE book for a really good price.

 

[msd]

Paizo _starts_ at $.05/word and can go as high as $.10/word for the right author (there are maybe three such people in the universe). If someone writes several pieces for us or is a "draw" (and we do note a difference in sales based on authors, particularly in Dungeon), we'll pay more than $.05/word.

Just as an FYI.

--Erik Mona
Editor-in-Chief
Dragon & Dungeon

Just as a point of reference (and because I don't feel like counting) what is the "average" wordcount per page. I know it varies all over the place, but what is a rough estimate?

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Just as a point of reference (and because I don't feel like counting) what is the "average" wordcount per page. I know it varies all over the place, but what is a rough estimate?

The 1-page class acts are about 600-700 words. 700 seems to be the industry standard for magazines, insofar as an industry that has only 2-4 magazines at a time has a standard.

 

[trancejeremy]

As I was watching my newly bought Buck Rogers DVD set, I had a thought that may be relevent to this: Maybe we're looking at it half-empty. There are lots of fads from that general era (mid-70s, early 80s) that haven't survived nearly as well as roleplaying.

Roller Disco, for instance. Even though it still exists, it's nowhere near the scale it originally was (though thankfully it makes a big comeback in the 25th Century).

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Oh, and to educate anyone who may feel like saying that writers are overpaid for what they do, many publishers are now only paying a flat sum or .01/word depending on the project and its size.

That's pretty lousy. Pyramid pays a flat 3 cents per word for published, or twice that amount if you buy Steve Jackson Games products for it...

 

[philreed]

Scrye pays $0.10/word.

 

[Seeten]

I must say this: The Massively Multiplayer Online RPG phenomenon is bringing all sorts of people who are potential RPG players, and focusing them in one place. A previous poster cried out about the ways he had lost his group to this phenomenon, I too play World of Warcraft, and City of Heroes before it, but I still find the time to game 3 times a week.

Problems that plague the industry(Or perhaps they just plague me):

Time. When I was young, we played every day in the summer, for some epic campaigns. Now, We are lucky to find a day each week where everyone is free. We all have wives, children, girlfriends, etc, and there are also movies that play, etc. Basically, the entertainment allotment is smaller, and the amount of things to do is larger.

Choice.
I can, and have, designed my own systems from the ground up, to do what I wanted for a genre. My group will play diceless, or with rules made up on the spot for what makes sense. This means if a system is rules heavy, it had better be consistent, and if Joe Schmo publishes works for it, they better follow the rules or I wont buy it. What the industry does not need is yet another take on material done 91 times already.

Availability.
To be frank, a quick search 5 minutes ago on Kazaa shows about 100 different and unique D20 products available to download. This cannot possibly be helping the industry any more than it helps the music industry sell CD's.

Things that I do not consider problems:

PDFs.
Aside from the piracy angle, my group now brings at least one laptop to every session. We have about 4 gigs of material on that laptop(game related, that is) including all the character sheets in fillable pdf's, etc, and it makes the game truly shine. A sheet that does my accounting for me? WooHoo! Trouble reading a pdf? More convenient for me than a book. I dont have time to read books, I am chained to a computer all the time. I only have time to bring up pdf's in the background.

Miniatures and Dungeon Tiles.
I want more of these. They add so much. I want good and reasonably priced choices.
Not cheap mind you. I might not have the time to play any more, but I certainly have the money.

I love the RPG industry, but it doesnt market itself at all, I never heard of half the products available until I signed up for ENWorld, and ENWorld isnt well advertised either. I mean really, its pathetic. How can you expect to sell a volume of product with the type of marketing thats done? Its like preaching to the choir. You need to reach the masses.

So in short, we bring laptops to the game already, it isnt 10 years down the road, pdf's are great especially for on the move professionals, and the glut of current material thats basically the same thing needs to stop being produced. If some of the publishers consolidated, we might have less extraneous material, and higher quality material, and more profit to go around. If 10,000 people bought Mongooses Complete Drow, and 10,000 people bought Green Ronins Drow supplement, that could have been 20,000 buying the one or the other, for the same outlay of art, writing, etc.

This only makes sense, from a business perspective.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

I love the RPG industry, but it doesnt market itself at all, I never heard of half the products available until I signed up for ENWorld, and ENWorld isnt well advertised either. I mean really, its pathetic. How can you expect to sell a volume of product with the type of marketing thats done? Its like preaching to the choir. You need to reach the masses.

Yeah, but the advertising cost of one inch of the Washington Post is US$500. Advertising on a major political site (that I obviously won't link to) for one week is $1,500. Advertising on ENWorld is $300 and I know gamers are going to see it. If I shovel out $1,500 to advertise on a major website to get the masses, I can flat out tell you that I'm not going to get that money back.