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<blockquote data-quote="macd21" data-source="post: 8057763" data-attributes="member: 6683793">And the answer is ‘it isn’t worth it.’ Firstly, because the amount of effort the publisher would have to put in to VTT to build that community is high. Small publisher’s don’t have the resources to spare for such an effort. And secondly, even if you succeed in creating such a community, you probably haven’t significantly boosted your sales, and your game is still going to die anyway.You mentioned getting a ‘critical mass’ of 1000 players. That’s not enough to sustain an RPG. Most players of a game don’t buy supplements. GMs do. Let’s say of those 1000 players, 250 are GMs. So that’s maybe 250 sales. But not every GM will buy every supplement (each book you release generally sells a little less than the previous one, with some variation due to things like page count or nature of the book). So let’s say 200. But how many of those sales are actually due to your VTT support? Because odds are a lot of those customers would have bought your book anyway, whether or not there was a VTT community.So getting a VTT community big enough to support an RPG would be a huge endeavor, far beyond the ability of a small publisher. And the time and effort put into doing so is going to cost you in other areas. Resources spent on VTT support means less spent on the next supplement (and for a small publisher, the key resource may be time, given it might be 1 writer and 1 or 2 freelancers). Having VTT support is less important to maintaining that critical mass than getting out a new book.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="macd21, post: 8057763, member: 6683793"] And the answer is ‘it isn’t worth it.’ Firstly, because the amount of effort the publisher would have to put in to VTT to build that community is high. Small publisher’s don’t have the resources to spare for such an effort. And secondly, even if you succeed in creating such a community, you probably haven’t significantly boosted your sales, and your game is still going to die anyway. You mentioned getting a ‘critical mass’ of 1000 players. That’s not enough to sustain an RPG. Most players of a game don’t buy supplements. GMs do. Let’s say of those 1000 players, 250 are GMs. So that’s maybe 250 sales. But not every GM will buy every supplement (each book you release generally sells a little less than the previous one, with some variation due to things like page count or nature of the book). So let’s say 200. But how many of those sales are actually due to your VTT support? Because odds are a lot of those customers would have bought your book anyway, whether or not there was a VTT community. So getting a VTT community big enough to support an RPG would be a huge endeavor, far beyond the ability of a small publisher. And the time and effort put into doing so is going to cost you in other areas. Resources spent on VTT support means less spent on the next supplement (and for a small publisher, the key resource may be time, given it might be 1 writer and 1 or 2 freelancers). Having VTT support is less important to maintaining that critical mass than getting out a new book. [/QUOTE]

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