GAMING FRONTIERS: A $20 magazine! Are they nuts?

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

Cutting all fiction and (most) reviews would be a good place to begin overhauling GF.

Fiction is something I never read in magazines unless fiction is the main thrust of the magazine (Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, Cemetery Dance, whatever). I skip over the fiction in Dragon and Asgard every issue. In twenty-plus years of gaming and after buying/reading hundreds of issues of Dragon, I've never once read a complete fiction story in it, and never intend to. I want crunchy bits, not fluff. If I wanted fiction, I'd buy a novel or all-fiction magazine.

Cut GF's color, drop the price/page count, sell more ad space, maybe increase the frequency of publication... all things to consider.

There is no way GF will survive at $20 per issue. IMO, it's foolish to think so, and detrimental to GF's success to even suggest that they can. I'm not trying to bash anyone, just inject a healthy dose of reality into these proceedings. Optimism and "happy thoughts" don't pay the rent.

 

[reapersaurus]

Re: Re: I would just like to add this....

When GF offers "exclusive" content I can't get anywhere else, I get upset that I should have to waste $20 on a magazine for material that the d20 company should have either included in the books I bought or given to me for free online.

This brought me out of lurking.

I have been waiting for months to get a peek at Kenny's work on dinosaurs in GF 1.
Unfortunately, this nice, niche content is locked up with an albatross of content from various other d20 publishers.

I'm interested in a small number of things as an adult gamer: not the whole dang d20 industry!

I would have to be SO involved in gaming, (to be that interested in d20 stuff that I'd pay $20 for an independant smattering of stuff) that I couldn't have a full-time job.

And here's my consumer opinion:
books are too overpriced.
I've seen Arms & Armor... it wouldn't be worth more than $14 by any stretch.
Apparently there's enough consumers to support those kinds of books, but when it comes to small bits of content like Gaming Frontiers seems to contain, I don't think you can compare it to an entire deeply-researched setting or rules book.

Part of the reason why people buy those items is to get the whole campaign info together.
With GF, it seems the material is a much more cobbled-together approach.

This reduces the value of the book taken as a whole.

And finally, as a totally personal opinion, I'm wondering why d20 publishers seem to value their efforts so much.

Seriously.... why would a tiny rules supplement on dinosaurs (which I'm nuts about) be worth charging someone lots of money for?
I can make up my own dinosaur stats, etc.
I can modify other people's work on dinosaurs that they share.
I can take people's work that they freely share from House Rules, and places like that.

And that's just the one area I'm interested in - could you not say the same about many of the other parts included in GF?

no offense, I really just don';t see how d20 publishers are doing that much better work than I have read on free message boards.

 

[KnowTheToe]

$20 bucks is steep. I don't think the splat books are worth $20, that is why I only buy them thru Amazon for $14. Don't lecture me about shopping though. It is stupid to pay more than what you think something is worth. I do make quarterly trips to Games Plus (a kick-A$$ gaming store) and spend 50-100 bucks a pop.

I would not purchase the publication for $20. The gaming industry is already close to overpricing a major part of its market, the young and up and coming gamer.

 

[reapersaurus]

The gaming industry is already close to overpricing a major part of its market, the young and up and coming gamer.

And the mature gamer who doesn't have the amounts of time or opportunity to use these blizzard of overpriced products...

 

[Setanta]

I would be interested in checking this out, but my FLGS just went out of business, and he wasn't taking risks like stocking $20 periodicals for some time before going under. So, I haven't actually seen this anywhere. It would be cool if the free preview book was available as a pdf on their website.

I'd like to check this out because it would be a good opportunity to get some content from companies I don't normally buy from. Right now, I've got a list of about six companies that I buy from, and I pretty much skip everything else. If I read something in GF from another company that looked good, that might get me to expand my list of companies to buy from (though that might a bad thing ).

As for the relevance of this forum's reaction to GF's price, I personally don't think that it is necessarily significant to the overall market. Something like GF should appeal to a gamer who wants a broad selection of material to checkout various D20 publishsers. Someone who uses resources like EN World and its boards and reviews to research products is more likely to find free web previews and such and therefore not need GF to whet their appetitie for a particular companies content. So, the fact that most non-publishers on this thread think GF is overpriced and not terribly useful doesn't surprise me. However, I also wouldn't be surprised if someone who isn't into the online thing might find GF very helpful.

Does anyone know of a good gamestore on the westside of Los Angeles that I might be able to take a look at GF (and other D20 stuff, now that Games of Westwood is going under)? I'm not a fan of the WotC store in Santa Monica Place.

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

As for the relevance of this forum's reaction to GF's price, I personally don't think that it is necessarily significant to the overall market. Something like GF should appeal to a gamer who wants a broad selection of material to checkout various D20 publishsers.

And how many of these gamers are there and how many of these are willing to shell out $20?

 

[Mark]

And how many of these gamers are there and how many of these are willing to shell out $20?

You forgot to repeat that you think it is a magazine.

I'm going to have to take a look at this next time I'm in a store. I'm glad to see they are broaching new territory with this idea.

A quarterly supplement, of that size and quality, will surely appeal to people who wish to sample the d20 market in all of its forms. It should also appeal to the collectors who like to keep their shelves complete with all things put out by this company or that company.

It might be interesting if they added listings on the two blank pages (inside front and back covers?) of all of the current (when printed) d20 companies. Heck, that'd be interesting just to see how the market is changing from quarter to quarter...

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

You forgot to repeat that you think it is a magazine.

WHAT?! It's a magazine? I hate it! LOL

 

[Tewligan]

Cutting all fiction and (most) reviews would be a good place to begin overhauling GF.

Fiction is something I never read in magazines unless fiction is the main thrust of the magazine (Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, Cemetery Dance, whatever). I skip over the fiction in Dragon and Asgard every issue. In twenty-plus years of gaming and after buying/reading hundreds of issues of Dragon, I've never once read a complete fiction story in it, and never intend to. I want crunchy bits, not fluff. If I wanted fiction, I'd buy a novel or all-fiction magazine.

Do you purposely not read the fiction in Dragon because you don't like to read short fantasy fiction in general, or specifically because it's in a game magazine? It seems kind of stupid to me to not use the full content of something you paid money for just because you don't approve of where it appears. Some good fiction shows up in Dragon pretty often. If nothing else, you could go back and read it when you're in the mood to read something other than game rules.

 

[D'karr]

Price

First of all the magazine costs $18 not $20.

I happen to use the Internet on a regular basis but I can't take the Internet with me on long trips or to the can for that matter. In addition, there is a whole world of gamers out there that have no interest or use for the internet.

I will always be more comfortable with a hardcopy of material than with an electronic copy. That said, PDF's are great for those that use them. However, they are not the end all be all for everyone.

I purchased issue one of GF and was impressed. I used a lot of the information there for ideas to include into my own campaign. I can say the same for most of the splatbooks. I never use all the content but there is never a book that doesn't give me some ideas for use.

I agree that less reviews would be better, however I found the book to be very good for the price and I didn't have to put up with half of it being absorbed by ad space.

People are going to complain about almost everything. If someone likes color they complain if a book is black-n-white. If they don't like art they complain if a book has "too much" art and not enough content. On an on it goes. Those that complain that they should have gotten the material in the original book or for free on a website are missing the point of how hard it is to keep your product down to a viable page count.

Like I said before I found the book to be a very good value and will purchase issue two. As a matter of fact the book served as great advertising (at least to me) for the Iron Kingdoms campaign from Privateer Press. So the book does both advertise as well as provide good content.

One thing they could do to make the book more appealing would be to make the content more homogeneous. For example a whole issue on dinosaurs or everything you ever wanted to know about pirates, etc. If all the d20 publishers that submitted for the issue had a basic idea of what the issue will be about then they can promote their products that deal with that issue. For example a Seafaring Issue with articles from every publisher that put out a Seafaring book in the last 6 months. By keeping most of the content related then you get a lot of content on the subject instead of a little bit of content on many subjects. This of course is probably as hard as herding cats since many d20 publishers don't have similar products.

I personally hope that GF can continue to make this product regardless of all the naysayers.