drnuncheon said:
So you're cutting them slack on the art and layout, right?
You have lower standards that you would not accept if the same game were put out by WOTC.
I never said standards ought to be exactly the same. Overall quality should be consistent, but amatuer and semipro work needs to do something out of the ordinary conceptually to earn a place. The industry does not need more of the same, and startup companies that prduce precisely that should be shown the door.
(I don't know how I can make this any clearer: Break it down into indices of utility, maybe? That product category X and Y should both have 20 levels of utility, but those points can be lower for one type than for another, but must be higher for one type than another? Would a chart be helpful?)
If someone's already producing work for that niche, they should be left to it. In that case, you shouldn't be asking about how wild and crazy-different it is as much as whether or not it meets the professional quality standards of its niche compared to the front-runners.
...anyway, I'll just say things one more time. If I go to RPGnow to search for a fantasy game that's not D&D, where am I going to look? Hm - non-d20 Fantasy sounds like a likely place.
If instead I go to RPGnow and I am faced with 'professional', 'semi-pro' and 'amateur', it helps me not a bit. If those categories are merely added on to the 'non d20 fantasy' then it doesn't help the person looking for a specific game (nothing about the title 'The Riddle of Steel' helps me decide whether it's pro, semi-pro, or amateur).
This is a false dichotomy. A new tage does not get rid of previously existing tags. Nothing automatically requires someone not to tell you that TRoS iis a fantasy game if it's also listed as semi-pro.
It might possibly help someone who is into indie games for the sake of them being indie games, but is that the majority of the customer base?
So what you're saying is that something that will only help people make money is no good, because it's not the way everybody else makes money? In that case, give up on .pdfs completely.
Is it even a significant enough portion to warrant making and supporting these changes?
Ask Ed Cha; he seems to think so.
And, perhaps most importantly, why is it so difficult for you to accept that other people have different critera for game selection than you do?
That's an interesting inference -- and inaccurate. I'll be blunt: It's not a matter of accepting consumer choices. Most of the sellers are completely unaffected by consumer choices. If they made anything resembling a rational business decision they would pack it up. There are, as I have said, most assuredly *not* 300 distinct companies making mad dough on RPGNow. There are maybe a double handful of viable businesses and lots and lots of gamers willing to pour time and effort into putting product out at a loss, making RPGNow more difficult to navigate at the source.
More to the point, when we get to the small scale of .pdf publishing, I do feel it behooves the consumer to make choices that are good for the hobby. Good choices for the hobby mean supporting successes and picking distinct new work.
Plus, even though everybody swears by exceptions, successful companies usually actually pay people, and if you want the hobby to thrive, you want people who can draw a check from it.
(Believe me, though: I'm as aware of exceptions as anybody, but that's a different issue that does not pertain to this topic, really.)
Here's a suggestion: How's about RPGNow segment based on sales? We'll call it the "sink or swim" policy.
You put a .pdf up. It's filed as a new release. If it garners a set, high-ish number of sales, it goes into the "Gaming Gold" (or whatever) category (this is where stuff from Ronin Arts would probably go, it the target number was a good one). If it doesn't, it goes into "New and Notable" (or whatever). When a Gamer's Pick drops below the threshold it goes into a category set up for it. Everything else goes into another, unmourned and unremarkable category.
This creates a core of successful releases and increases the utility of the site stats and shows us who's wearing the trousers (so to speak) in the RPGNow family. Somebody's bound to poke around in the less sales-driven categories (because people do that in *any* entertainment medium). And the words "pro" and "amatuer" don't get used.
