RPGNow and the competition . . .

[ukgpublishing]

Professional or Amateur??

I shall start by introducing myself, my name is Kevin Scott and I have been making my money from the gaming market for the last 12 years as an independant game store and producer. I have kept largely quiet and have low profile in the industry but most of the Europen people will know me by sight or name, mostly through my work as a card game tournament organiser. I wouldn't normally even bother to reply to an internet posting that doesn't affect me personally, but I think there are a few issues here that need some clarification

There's another issue at work here: Namely, that RPGs need better-defined semipro and amatuer markets.

Why? I have been buying products for many years and even the best of the current games market had to start somewhere, I could have supported the importation of the first and second production run of magic into the UK, I didn't. My goof? perhaps but at the time I was shifting an awful lot of Games Workshop product and didn't think that a card game was self sustaining, and would probably have a limited run. Don't forget there was nothing before it to compare sales with. However I did buy some for myself to play with, with my friends. I'm still playing and judging, and it is now about 20% of my instore sales So back to the question define professional? As it is even most dictionaries cannot any on a standard meaning for the term as it is a word which has many connotations and is very contextual depending on the situation.

DTRPG is there to get at a specific segment. The reason they use the annoying "professional" moniker is because they want some kind of indicator that their focus is on high quality professional offerings. The reason they have DRM (which I'm not too fond of) is probably to attract clients who would normally never sell their material in electronic form.

Now this phrase is one of the biggest loads of rubbish I have come across in a long time, they use the word professional, because they want to. I as senior partner in UKG Publishing make many descisions in the course of a working day and one conscious decision I made was that we as a company would not use digital rights management, as in my opinion the best way to counter piracy was to make a product at a price where piracy was worthless. I say this as I've been around since before computers and copy issues became a problem, and watched the mess commodore and IBM made of it as everyone tried to protect their "rights"

some trimming here
1) You should know the difference between pro and nonpro work so that you can make a choice knowing the production values have a chance of beeing significantly different for nonpro work.

2) You should be able to distinguish nonpro work for innovation and ideas that don't necessarily fly past the vetting process elsewhere.

3) Distributors should be able to tell them apart so that they can assess whether or not to invest in professional-quality .pdf producers without getting stung. I can only imagine the hideous amount of work involved sifting through stuff to find what's worth supporting

4) Writers should have a better idea of who's going to pay them and pay them well. I can attest to this personally, since I've been stung once by a company who ended up being far less professional than they purported to be.

5) It would discourage products that neither make money nor offer anything distinct to the hobby.

It seems like the percentage increase isn't a very good idea, though (shouldn't quality be its own draw, here?), and I would prefer it if DRM was not a mandatory part of doing business with DTRPG.

Some valid points here, but at the end of the day most of a distributors work and even that of people in this industry is done on knowing people, who they are and what they do. If you want to produce something have a go you will soon find out if the expense was worth it

Kevin Scott
UKG Publishing

 

[GMSkarka]

It's not destructive, it's apparently a fact. I have not seen anything to dispute it. It's also not low expectations either, it's from not only running AAP, but hearing from people like Gary Gygax on down. My business seems to bring an average of about $50 per month. I would seemingly need about 20 times my current offerings to make money.

I'm sorry, but it is low expectations.

I don't know how to say this without sounding like I'm slamming you, so please take this as gently as possible: You have (according to your RPGNow vendor page) 5 products available. If you're only bringing in an average of $50 a month, then something is very wrong. Adamant currently has only 11 products available, and is making a bit more than the level that you cite as desireable. The problem is not the number of products. The problem is releasing material that people want to buy.

 

[FoolishFrost]

I'm sorry, but it is low expectations.

I don't know how to say this without sounding like I'm slamming you, so please take this as gently as possible: You have (according to your RPGNow vendor page) 5 products available. If you're only bringing in an average of $50 a month, then something is very wrong. Adamant currently has only 11 products available, and is making a bit more than the level that you cite as desireable. The problem is not the number of products. The problem is releasing material that people want to buy.

<sigh>

No I don't take it as a slam. You speaking of facts from your POV. My POV reinforces my statments, since as you just showed: I'm not doing as well as I had hoped.

It's fine to make the statment: "Make what people want." Perhaps you could keep in mind that not every direction a company can head in leads to success. I HAVE attempted to make products that people wanted to buy. I have just been having limited success in that field.

Do I take it personally? No. Am I happy about it. No. Can I fix it? Yes. I just have to find my place in the market.

On the bright side, people don't avoid my products as crap. Sadly, they don't flock to them either.

Anyway, I'm glad you're doing well.

Later,

 

[eyebeams]

I shall start by introducing myself, my name is Kevin Scott and I have been making my money from the gaming market for the last 12 years as an independant game store and producer. I have kept largely quiet and have low profile in the industry but most of the Europen people will know me by sight or name, mostly through my work as a card game tournament organiser. I wouldn't normally even bother to reply to an internet posting that doesn't affect me personally, but I think there are a few issues here that need some clarification.

And I'm Malcolm Sheppard. I've produced about half a million words for the RPG industry. I perhaps need less clarification than you might believe.

Why? I have been buying products for many years and even the best of the current games market had to start somewhere, I could have supported the importation of the first and second production run of magic into the UK, I didn't. My goof? perhaps but at the time I was shifting an awful lot of Games Workshop product and didn't think that a card game was self sustaining, and would probably have a limited run. Don't forget there was nothing before it to compare sales with. However I did buy some for myself to play with, with my friends. I'm still playing and judging, and it is now about 20% of my instore sales So back to the question define professional? As it is even most dictionaries cannot any on a standard meaning for the term as it is a word which has many connotations and is very contextual depending on the situation.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say with the first part of this. As for the second, my point is, in fact, that this industry needs better defined categories. It requires the imposition of context to move forward.

Now this phrase is one of the biggest loads of rubbish I have come across in a long time, they use the word professional, because they want to. I as senior partner in UKG Publishing make many descisions in the course of a working day and one conscious decision I made was that we as a company would not use digital rights management, as in my opinion the best way to counter piracy was to make a product at a price where piracy was worthless.

I've looked at your stuff. You don't need it because you don't produce intellectual property that needs to be protected. Your produce generic play aids. Your situation is nothing like that of R. Talsorian Games (whose Cyberpunk I{ is still incredibly valuable even though they've stopped producing new material), GDW (owners of the seminal 2300 AD line) and others. DTRPG is catering to a specific segment: companies who have high profile properties and would like to get into e-publishing but are concerned about protecting their property. Some companies with valuable licenses can get away with it for various reasons (WotC doesn't necessarily care about 2nd Ed Forgotten Realms books because their selling the successors for 3.0/3.5). Their situation isn't really the same as your, and naturally there would be no point in availing yourself of their services.

 

[Ralts Bloodthorne]

I'll introduce myself first...

I'm Timothy Willard...

Loudmouthed.
Arrogant.
I like to fight.
Insaitably curious.
Opinionated.
And a jerk.

Oh, yeah, and I also produce cheap, easy to use PDF's now and then when my schedule allows.

You want to know why I think DRM is less than worthless?

Check KaZaA, LimeWire or any of the others. Heck, check Yahoo...

Downloads or instructions for a DRM crack.

Those who steal PDF's...

Will steal them anyway.

As was repeatedly pointed out to me after my experiment with altered PDF product samples, the people who repeatedly used the sample, and those who downloaded the sample, were extremely unlikely to ever purchase the product.

A "Browse User" click on the file sharing programs often resulted in some rather interesting PDF's on thier hard-drive, and guess what....

THEY WERE CRACKED!

DRM doesn't slow anyone down who copies illegally.

If you doubt...

Check for yourself.

 

[eyebeams]

This is a common fallacy: "It's possible to crack X, so it's like X doesn't exist!"

In real life, though, people choose what they're going to crack based on opportunity among a group with uneven skills. It's far more important to provide a delay that keeps piracy from affecting the erarly peak period in a book's sales cycle.

Fact of the matter is that folks who crack games are an irregular community of folks without consistently good skills (many of White Wolf's hacked files come from *one* person in the Netherlands named Ruud Dirven, for instance). For all the crying about how Dark Ages Fae (a book that was in great demand) would immediately go into wide fiesharing distribution, a Kazaa search using my buffed up plugins shows *nothing.*

I don't agree with DRM in principle but it exists for a reason, and I suspect it's the difference between a deal or not with many of DTRPG's clients. For one thing, I highly doubt that WotC would have *ever* sold a non-DRM electronic version of Frostburn.

 

[francisca]

This is a common fallacy: "It's possible to crack X," so it's like X doesn't exist!"

In real life, though, people choose what they're going to crack based on opportunity among a group with uneven skills. It's far more important to provide a delay that keeps piracy from affecting the erarly peak period in a book's sales cycle.

There is obviously no easy answer about the DRM and it's ability to prevent/curtail piracy. I'll offer up this train of thought:

If you were previously a print-only publisher, and you sign on to DTRPG, your backstock just became easier to pirate. Before, somebody needed to buy the book and actually go to the pain to scan the book and assemble the images into a file. Now, the pirate can buy the book (often cheaper) and in about 10-15 minutes have a copy to distribute.

While I see your point about delaying pirated copies until sales tail off, I'm not sure that the jerk who is downloading a scanned copy was ever going to buy a hardcopy anyway. I think it is even less likely if they get their paws on a good clean OCR copy that came from DTRPG.

(I'm not a lawyer, take this with a grain of salt.)
I think the big point in favor of DRM is in the court of law. If a work was only released in print and in DRM-protected formats, and some illicit copy is found, it is easier to show that a publisher did due dilligence to protect their property, and somebody made an effort to circumvent the protection.

Having said that, I think DRM sucks, both technically and as an approach to dealing with piracy.

 

[drnuncheon]

But I feel that the fact that nobody can really point to your work as being of a type, it's going to be less successful than it could be. If it was frankly looked at as semiprofessional work, then it would be easier to hold it up as being distinctive for its category.

...I still don't get it. I've never looked at an offering on RPGnow and said "Well, I'd buy that if I knew it was done by 'a professional', or 'a semipro', or 'an amateur'". And frankly, I'm not going to cut any slack to people in any of those designations, because it really comes down to what I get for the price I pay, and whether the author makes PDFs his sole living or not is not necessarily an indication of that.

This is a common fallacy: "It's possible to crack X," so it's like X doesn't exist!"

DRM is not like a car security system, where you have to disable it individually for each car you want to steal. All it takes is a single person to crack the DRM, and then the genie is out of the bottle. That's the point that T's making.

 

[eyebeams]

...I still don't get it. I've never looked at an offering on RPGnow and said "Well, I'd buy that if I knew it was done by 'a professional', or 'a semipro', or 'an amateur'".

Of course not; that's part of the problem. You have no easy opportunity to do so.

And frankly, I'm not going to cut any slack to people in any of those designations, because it really comes down to what I get for the price I pay, and whether the author makes PDFs his sole living or not is not necessarily an indication of that.

Like several other people, you're countering a statement I never actually made. It's not about giving anybody "slack."

DRM is not like a car security system, where you have to disable it individually for each car you want to steal. All it takes is a single person to crack the DRM, and then the genie is out of the bottle. That's the point that T's making.

Yes, bit there are far fewer RPG crackers than car thieves.

 

[D_Sinclair]

Um....I like it, AND it earns my entire paycheck. This is what I do for a living, and I know of a bunch of other folks who do as well.

I don't want to sound like I'm stirring up trouble, but this just begs to be asked... If sales from Adamant earns you your entire paycheck, does that mean that the customer service work you do for RPGNow is done for free? I'm sure I'm not the only one that considers such work to be more in line with working at walmart or any other retail sales outlet, rather than considering it earning a living directly from the production of game material.