Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnNephew" data-source="post: 2720266" data-attributes="member: 2171">Jeremy,I could debate the minutiae, but in broad outline you're mirroring our self-analysis in 2003.  We looked at what we knew we would have to do in order to compete in the d20 sphere, since the easy money was past.  (I think we earned our easy money -- when we went ahead with our first d20 product, Three Days to Kill, just on Ryan Dancey's verbal assurance that they really were going to release the d20SRD under the OGL, that was a risk that only a handful of us publishers were willing to make; many scoffed at the idea of trusting WotC to come through, or gamers and retailers to accept the idea.  We, and Green Ronin, proved the concept in practice.)  We concluded that what was necessary to compete effectively in a declining market were many of the things you identify, as well as others (such as producing more titles and ganging multiple printing projects, most likely overseas, to reduce printing costs; reducing the 4 cents/word we were paying writers down to 1 or 2 cents a word, as many d20 competitors were; sharply reducing the amount of money/time we put into things like editing, which mattered a great deal to us but were not really rewarded in the marketplace; and doing things like aggregating and reprinting the OGC of other publishers, which could be done without paying again for the writing).We came to three conclusions.(1) We weren't really interested in publishing on those terms.(2) We were not confident that those changes would matter that much in the face of the fundamental market trends to the downside.  (I learned the lesson the hard way about trying to fight the current -- by spending tends of thousands of dollars on advertising and marketing initiatives in the mid 1990s to promote a floundering CCG, rather than accept the evidence of what was going on in the market.)(3) We had much more attractive areas to invest in.  (For example, a lot of the things we learned in the d20 market were more profitably applied to our Ars Magica 5th Edition launch, rather than d20 products.  The first printing of Ars Magica 5th Ed. was five times larger than the print runs of d20 books we were doing at the same time.)Succeeding in business isn't simply a matter of doing what's necessary to compete; it's knowing when to compete and when to take your profits and move on to a more attractive opportunity.  Just as poker isn't won over the long haul by always raising every bet -- sometimes you win more by being willing to fold and wait for the next hand to be dealt.-John NephewPresident, Atlas Games</blockquote>

Verification