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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rasyr" data-source="post: 2016732" data-attributes="member: 2855">As GreatWyrm has pointed out, Hero is not scaling back anything. They are changing marketing and sales tactics however, so that things like what happened to Gaurdians of Order, Decipher, and several other companies (one distributor even went out of business recently as well) will not happen to them.Hero is basically doing what the new ICE did when it went into business a few years ago. That is to NOT rely on distibutors. The CEO of ICE made a post on the ICE forums back around the beginning of the year. In that post, he mentions that about 3% of ICE's sales come from distributors, the rest comes from direct sales of books and PDFs. Already starting to happen. Green Ronin has already started selling PDF versions of products and now have their own online store after a couple of years of not really having one. Other companies will shortly be following suit.The biggest problem right now IS the distributors and the distribution system. When a FLGS buys a game book to sell, it pays upfront. When a distributor buys a game book to sell to retailers, it pays for the book 30-90 days later (IF they pay on time). When a publisher pays to have a book printed, they have to pay upfront for the printing. Can you see the break in the system?The problem here is that with increased online sales, conventions are normally money-losers to the publishers, unless they have a product that is debuting at said convention, that cannot be gotten online before the convention or some similar promotion to increase sales at the convention. Just my opinion one this one.</blockquote>

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