President's reply
Well after all these posts I guess it’s time I spoke up. Robert J. Williams. President of United Playtest and publisher of Gaming Frontiers here. I appreciate the support that our readers and contributing publishers have offered in this thread. I also appreciate the constructive criticism offered by others. But it hasn’t all been constructive has it? It is those statements that I must now address. Captain Kantrip, since you are one of the more vocal personalities on this thread a lot of my comments will be directed at your statements. Please don’t misconstrue these as a personal attack, merely a response.
Price: Our MSRP is $17.95 even though many here insist on rounding that up to $20. Some here have said that you would be willing to buy the book at $15, only $3 less than our cover price yet you round the price up $2. $17.95 rounded up is $18 folks. And as Talon Games mentioned you can buy the book a number of places that offer a discount (For the record, Talon, You are always included in my email to inquiries of where people can purchase the book).
I don’t appreciate you putting down our product or placing it in a niche without ever reading it. CK from your description of Scenario I am not interested in buying it especially for $20. But I don’t intend to go to their website (whoever publishes Scenario) and tell them they are doomed for failure because I don’t understand their marketing plan hence I won’t buy their product.
On that note, I recommend anyone interested to go to our website and read reviews of our product written by people who HAVE read our product. A number of them bring up the price issue but they all agree it’s worth it after having had the opportunity to read the vast amount of original content held within.
To quote someone from this thread: No matter what kind of spin they want to put on it Gaming Frontiers is still a magazine (or words to that effect). Again I believe this was written by someone who opted to not by the product. I find it personally humorous that everyone here who has bought Gaming Frontiers agrees that it isn’t what you would generally classify as a magazine yet everyone who hasn’t bought it insists that it is.
The big difference between us and a magazine: Original content. Aside from Dragon or Dungeon magazines every other gaming magazine published (most of which don't exist anymore) offer previews and excerpts of upcoming product but precious little original material. What of it there was was usually written by the magazine's staff members and was hit or miss in my opinion. More often than not you got a "player/GM assistance"-type article that while intriguing or thought-provoking added little to my game. We offer original content from existing d20 publishers (more so in Volume 2 and more yet again in Volume 3) that can be used as stand alone or in conjunction with the product(s) the article is related to. And we pay for our content unlike magazines which usually get their stuff for free (hence the unoriginality)
I don’t pretend to believe that Gaming Frontiers is for everyone. At best we create a niche product for a niche industry. If you would rather spend your money elsewhere I suggest you do, I certainly don’t want any unhappy customers. But if you are a fan of d20 that appreciates and purchases products from multiple companies and settings whether for actual game use or as reference material then Gaming Frontiers is for you. It provides a nice sampling of the d20 publisher’s products while leaving you with good quality original material you can instantly use in your game.
Robert J. Williams, President
United Playtest, Inc.
www.gamingfrontiers.com
and enjoy most of it, and even if my items were not in GF it has some great stuff to look at and I would have bought #1 and continued to buy it. I will say from TG view we create all new stuff for each issue but may use it and post it at a much later date...we have come up with some neat people and places for #3 that CAN fit into Bluffside but can be used in any city...as well as one Dragonstar place of interest, so with or without TG in it, I like it and would be buying it for the varied info and the quality of stuff that is appearing in it.
