Green Ronin Crowdfunding Legal Defense Fund In Fight Against Diamond Distrubutors

Green Ronin Publishing has set up a crowdfunding campaign to help cover legal fees fighting to get back their inventory from Diamond Comic Distributors in what it describes as "a dire financial threat to our company, not just today, but well into the future".

Diamond, which filed for Bankruptcy in January, still holds the stock of Green Ronin and over one hundred other companies in its warehouse, and has asked the court for ownership of that inventory so that it can liquidate it and pay its creditors. The distributor, while being mainly comic-book focused, also serves as distributor for some toy and TTRPG companies, including Green Ronin, Paizo, Goodman Games, and Roll For Combat.

The GoFundMe had raised $17K at the time of writing, with over 200 donations.

Paizo Publishing, also affected, has announced that its upcoming releases will not be available at major bookstores or at Amazon because the company has stopped shipping products to Diamond. This includes 12 August releases and 10 September releases, such as Starfinder Player Core, Starfinder GM Core, Pathfinder Battlecry, and more.

The court has scheduled a hearing on July 21 to hear objections from the affected vendors.

My name is Nicole Lindroos, co-owner of Green Ronin Publishing. Diamond Comic Distributors' recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy has impacted over 100 independent publishers, including Green Ronin, putting us in a very precarious position. Diamond is attempting to use a legal technicality to claim ownership of millions of dollars worth of consigned inventory, which amounts to several hundreds of thousands of dollars for Green Ronin Publishing alone. This is stock that we still own and have not been paid for.

This is a dire financial threat to our company, not just today, but well into the future. We must secure legal representation immediately before the deadline to do so passes.

While there is no "good" time for someone to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of your property to sell for the benefit of their biggest creditors, it is especially challenging given that Gen Con is weeks away. Gen Con is not just a convention for us, it's our most important annual event for connecting with TTRPG enthusiasts, our business partners, and our community, and this year is no exception. We're launching new products and have already committed significant funds to cover everything from booth space, travel (flights, rooms), and most critically, the production of new books and merchandise specifically for the show floor.

Diamond’s bankruptcy and this legal action also mean that Green Ronin has lost its book trade distributor. We are looking for a new partner, but that will take some time. Book trade sales of literary licenses, currently The Fifth Season and The Expanse, are a key part of our strategies for those games. This is especially bad timing for The Fifth Season RPG because we recently received final approvals from N.K. Jemisin and the game is ready to go to print.

We simply don't have the cash on hand to do all of this, pay for an attorney, or participate in any collective legal actions with other publishers in our same position.

The banks are stopping at nothing to wring every last dollar out of Diamond - including taking several hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Green Ronin product to sell in order to pay Diamond’s debts - but they can't do that, and we've got a legal agreement that says as much. Now, we just need to secure a law firm to represent us in the courts.

The funds raised through this campaign will be used directly to cover the escalating legal fees associated with fighting Diamond's claim in bankruptcy court. This includes attorney retainers, court filing fees, and the costs of pursuing every possible avenue to recover our inventory and protect Green Ronin's assets.

 

[Mournblade94]

The owners of small TTRPG companies don't have personal money to 'put in'. Nobody will buy their products for their actual value. Because that apparently is also abhorrent. Any situation where the owners of a small TTRPG company aren't working for free and starving is abhorrent.

Really, if people were willing to buy RPG books for what they're worth, Green Ronin could probably absorb this hit. But we seem to have evolved a culture where paying creators fairly is wrong wrong wrong. So, here we are. It is abhorrent, but not for the reasons you said.

I think this should be the case as well, creators deserve the money. But the pool can only support so much. ALOT of ttrpg players these days can't afford the cost of an $80 dollar book (Which I am willing to pay). The college kids I teach would be pooling money for this. I think the price is at what out market can bare.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I think this should be the case as well, creators deserve the money. But the pool can only support so much. ALOT of ttrpg players these days can't afford the cost of an $80 dollar book (Which I am willing to pay). The college kids I teach would be pooling money for this. I think the price is at what out market can bare.

What the market will bear. The first and truest law of business.

What sets the greats apart, is the ability to judge exactly how much the market will bear for a specific good; too much, sales die. Too little, you are losing potential profits.

 

[Cergorach]

The owners of small TTRPG companies don't have personal money to 'put in'. Nobody will buy their products for their actual value. Because that apparently is also abhorrent. Any situation where the owners of a small TTRPG company aren't working for free and starving is abhorrent.

Really, if people were willing to buy RPG books for what they're worth, Green Ronin could probably absorb this hit. But we seem to have evolved a culture where paying creators fairly is wrong wrong wrong. So, here we are. It is abhorrent, but not for the reasons you said.

My initial reaction was: What the hell is he talking about!?!? Then I figured it out... Do you know the last time I actually used a Green Ronin book? It's been 20 years... I have pretty much the whole 3.0/3.5e era GR collection. I recently moved and my RPG library is over three tons (3000+kg), that's insane! It's too much (and will be gutting it significantly). I'm not buying anymore physical books! But paying full price for pdfs of books I already own... Yeah, also not so happy about that, thus such bundles are great for getting books I already own in pdf. Those books were not bought at a deep discount during a sale, those were bought when they came out. The physical pnp RPG books I bought in the last decade is probably D&D PHB 2014 and the PHB/DMG/MM 2014 gift set. But I have bought ~$1500 worth of FVTT modules in the last two years, a few hundred $ on Pathfinder pdfs at full price at release, and quite a bit on pdf bundles and pdf sales.

Also keep in mind, that what's somethings worth depends on the person buying it (or not). And to me, most of the RPG books are not worth it to me at full price, quite often because I don't actually use them. And when a publisher chooses to offer their books for cheap in a pdf bundle, I'll kindly take them up on the offer. You might say that the publisher doesn't value their own product when they do that... Or... You could say that they are offering their product to an audience that normally wouldn't buy their product and as it's a digital product, it's actually not costing them any money to sell them at a deep discount such a long time after release.

So Morrus, you run a business, ready to start begging people for money? GR is a business, not a charity. They sell products, we buy em if we want them and the price is right... I also run a business, I'm a freelancer and need to insure myself for all kinds of things, that's the cost of doing business as a business! I also build a buffer for when I don't have clients, for when they pay late or not at all, etc.

Now also let me ask you, when you bought a game at release at full price, and then a few years later you suddenly see that game for sale at 1/20th of the price by that same publisher. Will you buy the next game at full price? Depends if you had a great time at release playing it I would say... What if you didn't get the chance yet due to circumstances and now that it's on sale you still haven't played it... That same publisher is now shoving a bunch of deeply discounted other games in your face, that's not one, it's all of them.

And that's not just true of PC games, it's also true of pnp RPG books, especially in PDF. And why is that? It's all digital, thus costs almost nothing to sell. I would say the market is not just full, it's overpopulated, that strongly devalues the work of creators. That most are willing to work for peanuts even more so. I fill my digital library with such sales their owners consider virtually worthless... If I remember correctly there are also a couple of virtually worthless EN Publishing titles in there, that some fans bought at full price... What do you say to the customers that bought it at full price? Who is setting these expectations?

 

[JLowder]

This kind of thing is going to be absolutely crushing to the hobby. This is going to have ripples for years.

When hobby games distributors Wizards Attic and then Osseum went under in short succession in the early 2000s, burning their clients and leaving captive stock hostage at hostile warehouses, they drove some good publishers out of the market; I was working with one of them, Green Knight, who owned and published Pendragon at the time. If Diamond wins this fight and takes the product, it will be a much larger extinction-level event in games and especially comics. Even for the companies that survive, the loss will impact their plans and schedules for years.

It will also impact the creators working with the companies, and not just through potential missing payments for existing work. When this kind of thing happens, some of the damage remains invisible. Book channel returns almost put (old) White Wolf out of business in the late 1990s, an unintended side effect of WotC buying TSR and starting up the presses again. That pretty much destroyed their previously thriving fiction program, which included World of Darkness fiction and also a lot of creator-owned stuff. I had a creator-owned novel contract cancelled and some other potential WoD short fiction projects wiped out when that all went down. And I was far from alone as a freelancer in taking that hit.

Green Ronin does great work, and they try to treat the creators who work with them well. I pitched in for the GoFundMe.