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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steve DriveThruRPG" data-source="post: 3145064" data-attributes="member: 39738">It's nice to see a vigorous thread.As I have mostly been focusing on the dedicated publisher forum that we have for OneBookShelf publishers and on private e-mails from some publsiher partners, I regret I'm a late-comer to this thread.I would submit that over the two and half years of DTrpg's extistence, our record is indisputable that we have helped grow the RPG pdf market, and we have helped grow the revenue of the publishers who have joined us as partners. We have continually added more publisher tools and features to make it easier for publishers to use our site. We have full-time staff to help publishers get set-up on site or run promotions.For customers, we have worked our tails off over these past years to get a lot of publishers to bring greater selection to the pdf market. I submit that we have clearly succeeded in doing so. We also continually improve our site to make browsing and shopping easier (Yeah there's a lot left to be done, but relative to where we started, we continue to make significant improvements). We have full-time staff to solve customer problems in a timely and professional manner.I also submit that James at RPGNow is indisputably a pioneer of RPG downloads and has done as much or more than any other human on the planet to grow this market.It is therefore rather difficult to read a thread where fellow professionals like John Nephew frame James and I (and our now collective company) as some great evil that will be the ruin of our publisher partners and the RPG download market. It is hard not to interpret this message as "Hey, that money of yours you spent starting this business and that ton of work you've done for years to make this market better for everyone, well now that you've done a good job of that and created a bigger market, you're now enemy number 1".If DriveThruRPG and RPGNow have succeeded in creating more market and market share than our esteemed competitors at sites like e23 and Paizo, doesn't that mean we've been doing something right for publishers and our customers?When we talk about our optimisim that the download market has lots of room left to grow and that we believe we can continue to put more total royalty dollars into the hands of our publsiher partners (a great many of whom James and I consider friends) and more value in front of customers, well according to some on this thread, that's just insubstantial "smoke" we're blowing.Haven't we earned a little credibility yet? Don't we have a 2 1/2 year and over 4 year track record of evidence of helping grow the market? When we say we believe we can continue to do so, I think we have a record to support that.The point was raised that rather than OneBookShelf receiving a higher fee from publishers so that it could go out and spend money to grow the market, OneBookShelf should instead receive a lower fee and let publishers retain that money to grow the market however they feel best serves them. In many market situations, I would agree. We are and our publisher partners are entreprenuers and with that comes a lot of desire for self-determinism. Sometimes though that's not the best road forward.For example, "Got Milk?" or other cooperative marketing campaigns for oranges, almonds or all sorts so items. I don't know the whole story behind any of thess efforts but what I surmise is that dairy farmers were smart enough to understand that they would all benefit more if some of their promotional resources were pooled into a joint marketing effort to grow the total market of milk drinkers, rather than dedicate their promotional resources to battling each other.With the RPG download market growing steadily year over year and with it only comprising 11% of the total RPG market, we believe that this is a situation where everyone will be best served with what is essentially a co-operative marketing program focused on expanding the market. If that proves to be wrong then we will have financially ill-served our publisher partners AND ourselves.To clarify another point. The merger of DTrpg and RPGNow was not about consolidating overhead and cost savings. No employees were laid off, both sites continue to run in tandem. We'll negotiate a slightly more favorable rate for payment processing, but otherwise there's not a lot of cost savings going on. The merger is about putting more resources to work in a unfied effort to grow the market, not about paring things down.I'm not one for long messageboard discussions or point by point debates. Our publisher partners can better reach me by private e-mail or phone call or on the private publisher forum. I don't mean to be exclusionary with communication, it's just an issue of time and quality of conversation.Steve WieckOneBookShelf</blockquote>

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