PatrickLawinger said:
The RPG market presently has a distribution/retail system that is antique and ready to break down completely in the "modern" world. Those publishers that are selling into the "book trade" are doing relatively well. The C&GR reports are pretty widely considered a joke, though they can be useful for detecting trends. The several local retailers I have spoken to about them scoff at them (they also don't send in any information).
These are very important points, and I'm somewhat surprised that they often tend to be "forgotten" in these discussions, although I see some of the same people in all of these threads
. The C&GR figures look only at a part of the RPG market (game and hobby stores), they have only part of the numbers of this segment (from volunteers) and, last not least, the big slump of sales reported for spring 2005 was simultaneous with a change in their method of data acquisition (which makes those data useless). Nevertheless, the crisis of the conventional distribution/retail system is obvious to everyone, and it's clear that this has consequences for those companies that depend on this system.
I don't use the (F)LGS system and make all my purchases online, not because I don't have a game shop in my vicinity (actually, there's one on my way to work), but because I made this choice. I use different online vendors, but let's just take amazon as a source for - purely anecdotal
- observations.
Amazon offers discounts, and these discounts are usually coupled to product that moves or comes from an active distributor. WotC products are (nearly?) always discounted. The same is true for White Wolf stuff. In the same league as WW, we find those companies publishing through WW, like Malhavoc and Necromancer Games. They get the usual "one third off of MSRP" discount and the 24 hours shipment. Necromancer reported a slow but steady increase in sold units per product during the recent months (though coming from low level). If we look at a relatively small company without these benefits, like Goodman Games, we often see that ugly "usually ships in 4 to 6 weeks" tag, and I can only imagine that this hurts sales in a market that has a putative 12 week life cycle per product (
in the (F)LGS at least; who brought this up?). This might explain why Goodman Games now used White Wolf for their "Etherscope" project; this should get rid of that ugly tag. Mongoose is an example where we saw a big change for the positive from the beginning of this year on. The discount went up, the delivery times went down; seems to fit Matthew Sprange's claims.
The whole Green Ronin debacle with their distributor was easily visible on amazon. At the turn of 2004/2005, they had 12 week delivery tags on most of their products. Amazon regularly canceled orders of Green Ronin product. Blue Rose was finally marked with "currently unavailable". They still don't offer the book, except through 3rd party vendors. Discounts vanished. Things changed for the better with the Black Industries stuff (WFRP2), but this might be due to GW behind it. Some of the actual Green Ronin stuff starts to re-appear in the system just now, though often still without discount. If you type in the search term "Green Ronin", you find exactly 21 products, and only 3 of those are not from Black Industries. If you look hard, you will find other titles, but still with the usual attributes:
"Advanced Gamemaster's Guide, usually ships within 4 to 6 weeks, $1.99 surcharge for "hard to find title" on top of full MSRP (no discount)". That's a nice glimpse on the distribution problem. No wonder that Green Ronin talks of a crisis in the RPG market.
