Ranger REG said:
Hmm. Did that product [The Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary] released before or after 3.5e (July 2003)?
It was released before 3.5.
We faced a tough choice when we got word of the 3.5 revision. The Bestiary had already taken about 3 months of full-time work each from Michelle and Scott in late 2002 and early 2003. We had to ask ourselves two questions.
1. Would the months of additional time (and employee salaries) required to update the whole book to 3.5 be repaid in extra sales?
2. Would the delay to well after the release of 3.5 mean more or less sales?
Ultimately, I decided that the answers were "no" and "less," respectively. Based on how we saw sales on new d20 books plummet after 3.5's release, I feel confident that it was the right decision. We probably sold 25%+ more books because we released the Bestiary during the comparative lull of new releases prior to 3.5, rather than during the flood of titles that had been held back until after the new edition. We were simply able to get the book on more game store shelves by having it out earlier.
Atlas Games is a full-time business, and has been for me since the early 1990's. We have salaries and health insurance to pay on four full-time employees, and this has a definite impact on the decisions we have to make, and how we make them. There are ways to make money on d20 in the current marketplace, but for the most part they don't fit into our business plan. (For example, they often involve paying writers considerably less than the 4 cents per word that Penumbra offered; printing multiple books simultaneously overseas, in order to economize on printing; and developing OGL properties that have an identity distinct from the generic "d20" perception; etc.) Hearty congratulations are due to all of those who are thriving in the face of the difficulties of this market, especially those who are continuing to publish top-notch quality material. But based on the resources we have and the way we like to work, we can do better right now by focusing on things other than d20. Just by way of example, our Cthulhu 500 card game sold more copies in its initial shipment to distributors than the Penumbra Bestiary has in its whole sales life to date...and C500's reorders are going strong.
As far as "running a business," part of doing that well is long-term planning. We made the decision to exit d20 more than a year ago...even before the Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary was released. I felt the trends in d20 were clear, and I was concerned about the impending effect of 3.5. I had some hope it might rejuvenate the market, but a bigger concern was that it could split the gamer base and increase confusion about the usability of third-party products. (Plus, making things properly 3.5-compliant means a dramatic increase in editing time [and expense] -- a lot of it rote checking for things like spells that have new names or other minor changes which authors often forget or not aware of.) As a company, we discussed a reasonable plan for how to do d20 profitably, and debated whether it was worth doing, compared to other endeavors we could turn our energies to. Ultimately, we decided there were greener pastures available to us. (Ars Magica 5th Edition was already almost a year into development; we made a deal to acquire the Dungeoneer card game; we shifted resources to additional card game products that have been coming out this year, such as Beer Money and Once Upon A Time: Dark Tales.)
We probably gave up market share by choosing not to allocate more resources to promotion and marketing the d20 lines after we made that decision. I know we've had a lower profile to d20 fans, even though our decision didn't go public until someone asked about it at Origins. (I know other publishers who have come to the same conclusion since we did, but similarly have not acknowledged it publicly, since they don't want to undermine the sales of the products still in the pipeline.) We have continued to publish all the books we'd committed to in the Penumbra line -- the last will be Seven Civilizations, in about two weeks -- while spacing them out to 2-3 months apart, compared to the original 1 per month schedule. I'm really proud of excellent books we've published, such as ENnie Award winner Crime & Punishment, and sorry that really cool books we wanted to do are not likely ever to be written.
However, we had zero debt and a healthy "war chest" in the bank thanks to the d20 boom, and it carried us through the transition, in spite of the weak d20 sales. (We even lent money to other game publishers, and most of it was repaid!) The transition has worked out great. In spite of the downturn in RPGs, our 2003 wound up beating 2002 by about 9%. Our company-wide sales this year are so far up 22% over the first eight months of 2003, and I expect the year to get even better with two new Dungeoneer sets about to arrive (I was expecting them today, but find myself frustrated that they did not show up!), Keith Baker's transparent card game Gloom in October, and Ars Magica 5 in November.
We plan one more d20 project in 2005 -- Northern Crown, formerly known to the web as "Septentrionalis." We're just too in love with this cool setting not to do it, and we're hoping it will, like Nyambe, be a solid and long-lived product in its unique niche. Beyond that, nothing is currently in the works, but we're flexible enough to respond to opportunities, should they arise.
And we still are fans of D&D and d20. Heck, Michelle is playing in two d20 games right now -- a weekly Forgotten Realms campaign, and a monthly Weird-Wars-with-d20-Modern campaign. If we wanted to do a new RPG, we'd certainly consider d20/OGL a viable option for the base system.
Random Side Note, since someone brought it up: We distributed the Pandemonium! RPG for MIB Productions (a company created by Steve Sechi and Joel Kaye) back in 1993, but we were not its publisher. We did not own the game and did not determine its content or presentation.
-John Nephew
President, Atlas Games
