Mark
CreativeMountainGames.com
From the Article said:And Now, Our Annual Rant
Here's the skinny. In theory, an RPG publisher produces a game book, and sells it to a distributor, who then sells it to your Friendly Local Game Store, who then sells it to you. Every aspect of that model is under strain. You may be playing fewer RPGs, or buying fewer RPGs, than before, given the competition for your orc-killing time and dollars now available online. You may be buying your RPGs from Internet discounters, or Amazon, or from the publisher's website. The distributor is absolutely correct to neglect RPG sales, because almost any other product in today's market sells faster and with less trouble, creating a higher "turn rate." Turn rate is how fast you can get rid of something, and the higher the better -- it's always preferable not to let your money sit on shelves. So if a single booster pack of CCG cards sells in a week for a dollar of profit, it's better to push it than to try to sell a single RPG book that might sell in three months for fifteen dollars, because the higher turn means less capital wasted. (Not only that, the margin on CCG decks is higher than the margin on RPG books.) And like I need to tell you, there are a lot more CCG booster packs selling these days than RPG books, so the structural incentives on distributors -- and hence on publishers -- are to create a "periodical model." In the periodical model, a new RPG book comes along at least once a month, and if it doesn't sell, then it's dead, at least as far as the distributor cares. That leads to crappy, hastily-produced books, and to glutting what demand does exist for RPGs even as such actual RPG demand is static or shrinking over time. Keep in mind, from the distributor's point of view, any time spent selling lower turn-rate items is suboptimal. RPGs drove wargames out of the market not merely because they were as much more buyer-friendly as CCGs are to RPGs now, but because they came out more often -- they had a higher turn rate.
When wargame publishers tried to catch up, they crashed, and now wargame publishers sell games on the "small press" model instead of the "periodical" model. They hand-sell them to their customers, they market directly to the customer at conventions and through email and so forth, and they set prices high enough to recoup their costs with very small print runs indeed. And now that the wargaming field has settled into that, you're once more seeing successful wargame companies, like GMT and Avalanche. This is the only model that can work, over the long run, for any RPG publisher that isn't publishing Dungeons & Dragons. RPG publishers have to abandon the notion that every game line must and shall be published unto eternity. We have to retrain our audience to think of RPGs the same as books -- many titles stand alone, some are trilogies, and a very few have the legs to spawn a series. More importantly, we have to retrain the publishers to think of RPGs the same as books.
A real book publisher has a hard life. Unlike game stores, most bookstores demand returnability -- if you ship them a product and it doesn't sell, they ship it back to you in carload lots. (This, by the way, is what ruined TSR -- pallets upon pallets of returned tie-in novels.) To sell into the book trade, then, you have to know your market well enough not to overprint. Plus, you have to have a title and cover art and sell sheets and so forth at least six months in advance, and you have to hit your ship date or the distributor will just laugh and hang up on you the next time. But compared to RPG publishers, at least, book publishers are surviving. Some are even flourishing. And "small press" book publishers, even those without preferential access to Borders or the chains, continue to thrive using the model I mentioned above -- hand selling, high price points, rigorous quality control. This is the wave of the future for commercial RPG design. Some companies will be able to sell into the book trade without the small press model, either with very popular game books or with associated fiction -- Chaosium, for example, has survived the last few years almost entirely on the strength of its book trade business. Some RPG companies may be able to become "imprints" of other publishers, like the alternative-history militaria publisher Greenhill is of MBI. But that is the result of decades, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, spent nurturing the bookstore market by appearing at BookExpo and acting like you want to sell your product to grownups.
Now for a little silver lining. One advantage that we have in the RPG market is that our customers -- you wonderful people -- are much more willing to buy electronic books than mainstream book readers are. Something like five to ten percent of the RPG business last year was PDF business, and that number is growing by leaps and bounds. Companies like Eden, Green Ronin, and Hero have made electronic publishing core parts of their business model. So take what I said above, about the continuing crunch-pressure of store sales, and combine it with that factor. You'll see an industry that moves ever more rapidly online, even as brick-and-mortar game stores (mostly) disappear. (It's not just game stores -- Amazon and e-retailing in general are out-competing a lot of specialty retail. But game stores are already vulnerable.) "Second-tier" game companies and "indie" game companies will move closer and closer together, in public perception especially. If you downloaded the thing off the Net, it's transparent -- the only thing you care about is quality and fun for you, whether it was Rifts or The Mountain Witch. Game conventions will be where Internet fan communities get together to play face to face and to learn new stuff likewise.
This, then, implies that good local and regional conventions can only profit from the ongoing sclerosis of RPG distribution. They can also profit from micro-booms or fads in a way that game stores can't. Right now, for example, the ConQuest shows seem to be building on the back of the "German game" micro-boom; a convention, unlike a store, can switch from boomlet to boomlet fairly transparently. Better yet for us, a convention, unlike a store, actually gains by continuing to support legacy hobbies -- wargames now, RPGs soon. A game con that stays on the good side of the RPGA can also still ride RPGs very profitably -- that sub-hobby seems very solid, from the outside at least. Such game conventions are also excellent marketing, demo, and retailing opportunities for RPG companies that aren't Dungeons & Dragons. Much as I pick up a lot of small-press SF and so forth at SF cons, game cons will become everyone's local retailer. (The few surviving good local retailers will also sell at these cons, in the areas that are so fortunate as to have them, or possibly all across the region, much as Dreamhaven Books in Minneapolis sells at Chicago SF cons.) This will give RPG publishers -- who, again unlike most mainstream publishers, already have a solid network of conventions to use for marketing -- another edge as they adjust to the harsh new world of on-time ship dates and "three books and out" Blue Rose or Orpheus style line models.
But still, the most important convention for them to attend will be BookExpo. I really, really hope to start seeing them there.
How right is he?
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