RPGNow EDGE Opens!

[WilliamAndersen]

I have given it a few days and my verdict is the same as my initial opinion of the site. The white background really kills my eyes, combine that with now I do have to go to 2 sites to check whats new.

I do agree with what someone said the other day, it is your business and you can run it how you desire. Just as I am a customer and can take my business elsewhere, I wish you luck.

Vascant,

As a publisher on RPGNow (albeit a small publisher), I respect your decision but am sorry to see you go. I hope that through the transition that improvements can be made that get you to reconsider.

William
ComStar
http://www.comstar-games.com

 

[WilliamAndersen]

Thats my problem, I don't. I will agree and admit, in my opinion most of the products that caught my eye were on the Edge site. Based on the products I seen during my short tours over the last few days, the site in my mind triggers this tought.

RPGNow: For publishers who are more geared towards making money and stay inside the box.

RPGEdge: People who play this game and not afraid to go outside the box because they have a day job supporting them.

Just a minor correction from one of the companies that got onto the main site...

Our little game company was started and continues to be a company that does games that we like to play.. it is not geared toward making money. I have been attacked by some other publishers (that will remain nameless so I don't get banned on the other site) for not putting money ahead of everything... and arguing that "quality" does not just equal 'sales'. I only do games that would be fun to me as a gamer (which I have been actively since '87).

My family is supported by 'day job' (I am a college professor and do consulting work), and not by sales from our game company. When we price our products, we base it on how much we would need to charge to give the fine people that worked on it a little for their time and effort, then we try to keep the price down so we can get a lot of gamers to be able to do play our games without spending a lot.

That is why Saloon Fights (with color maps, counters, etc) is only 3 dollars. The people that worked on it were happy to take very little, so the price could be very low.

Sorry for rambling... (a trait of many of us in academia)... but, we were 'fortunate' enough to be put on the main site because we happen to have strong sales... but the money goes to the people that worked to make the product, and not our 'business/company''s huge profits. Our fiction publishing division and computer services division makes the money of the business...

I do not believe we are alone in that... Certainly there are some companies on the main site that are just there for the dollars, but many of us are committed to making games, and are not thinking only about the bottom line.

William
ComStar
http://www.comstar-games.com

PS: Our Website is going thru an overhaul, and will be updated with a completely new design soon...

 

[Steve Conan Trustrum]

and arguing that "quality" does not just equal 'sales'.

If quality = sales were necessarily true, IE would be the best thing since Jesus instead of the plague on the Internet that it actually is.

 

[WilliamAndersen]

In any case, behave. Steve, you don't really have a right to tell Vascant whether his reasons for taking his business elsewhere are inconsequential.

I agree that customer feedback is very valuable to any business.

To be fair, Steve has articulately defended the small publisher and the value of diversity in the past. For what it is worth, Steve has earned my respect for that (even tho we disagree rather often).

William

 

[WilliamAndersen]

Yeah, I know that customers make decisions based on emotion. I've overseen market research wherin customers say they'd rather spend $300 more on a digital camera just based on the color.

However, be clear on one thing: that offers no insight into the customers beyond the fact that you can't cater to everyone. For every person who pays $300 more for a blue camera, there's someone who won't because the one that costs less comes in red, which is their favorite color. There's absolutely no further insight to be gained save judging the degree of your market that has a primary consumer concern that isn't reasonable and is illustrating there's nothing you can really do to please them without ticking off someone who has a like irrational concern coming at you from a different direction. You can't use that data to address the matter in any way. Have you ever seen the episode of the Simpsons where Homer's brother lets him design a car? Yeah, that's pretty much what would happen.

Ignoring them may not seem wise, but ignoring impractical consumer decisions is about the only recourse a company has if they want to serve what their hard data is telling them. People like to believe that because something is a make or break point for them that it must be important beyond their personal scope. That isn't necessarily so.

Steve,

You mentioned ealier that you have experience as a Marketing Researcher. I do not have such experience, but here is something that seems intuitive to me:

If a customer says "I am leaving after shopping here for 3 years" (regardless of how much money they have spent, if a customer of three years is leaving me, I want to know why). With no feedback, I began to scour my website, my employee interactions with this person to see if something was done, the quality of the products that this person has recently purchased, price changes of the products on the website, etc... trying to find out what it is.

If this person tells me "I am leaving because the color of the background" (I think the reason this particular person is leaving is more an issue of the website redesign, but I could be wrong), then I can have the answer to my question (why am I losing a customer that has been with me for 3 years). Sometimes getting feedback directly from the customer is valuable because it tells you that you lost the customer for something you are not willing to change.

That, it seems to me, can be almost as valuable as finding out that you lost the customer for something you would be willing to change. It gives you information with which to form a decision.

For what it is worth, if enough customers told James that they are going to leave because they want the background to be off-white, he would change the color (I am very impressed with how responsive he is to customers.. he can't give everyone everything they need, but it seems like he is trying to make his website what the customers want... if he fails, he fails not because he doesn't want to try).

William
ComStar

 

[Steve Conan Trustrum]

If a customer says "I am leaving after shopping here for 3 years" (regardless of how much money they have spent, if a customer of three years is leaving me, I want to know why). With no feedback, I began to scour my website, my employee interactions with this person to see if something was done, the quality of the products that this person has recently purchased, price changes of the products on the website, etc... trying to find out what it is.

If this person tells me "I am leaving because the color of the background" (I think the reason this particular person is leaving is more an issue of the website redesign, but I could be wrong), then I can have the answer to my question (why am I losing a customer that has been with me for 3 years).

Keep in mind that a retailer/vendor almost never hears why someone leaves after one sale, one month or three years. In cases like this where someone makes sure that the retailer/vendor knows, a company would look at it and say "wow, three years and now they're going? What did we do wrong?" and get to the part where the site's color is mentioned and then realize that there's not much room to reason with that. A customer who is as flightly to give up three years of enjoying offered product for something like that isn't one that is going to offer much in the way of practical advice for decisions that affect the entire business. Say James changes the background to a color Vascant liked and then another customer comes and says the same thing and insists it should be white, what then?

Sometimes getting feedback directly from the customer is valuable because it tells you that you lost the customer for something you are not willing to change.

That, it seems to me, can be almost as valuable as finding out that you lost the customer for something you would be willing to change. It gives you information with which to form a decision.

Not really. See, for that to be true there would have to be certain degree of logic tying the cause to the result. Giving up three years as a customer because of a disagreement over a color (considering the search problem has been addressed by James) isn't something a product provider should even really consider addressing unless you've a lot of people making the same statement (which won't happen.) The leap between the two is way beyond rational in the scope of an overall business even if it seems entirely valid to that one customer. Therein is the difference: what makes sense for one person is quite often absolutely worthless when considering one's overall market. That's why market research doesn't consist of sitting down with just one person and then going with what they tell you.

For what it is worth, if enough customers told James that they are going to leave because they want the background to be off-white, he would change the color

It's safe to say you won't find a significant amount of ANY customers complainging about a storefront's colors enough to quit using it altogether, especially in this case.

As a pure hypothetical, yeah, James or anyone else would be wise to make such a change. As a practical question, yeah, there's a chance a lot of people may not like the site's colors. Will it ever happen to the degree in your hypothetical? Absolutely not, which is a big part of my point: your typical consumer doesn't care enough about it for them to say "you lost a customer because of your color choice." And why is that? Because a typical customer understands that the color on a site's background has no influence on the vendor's service or their ability to enjoy the product. When someone shows me how the color at RPGnow affects how I enjoy any quality product I buy there once I've paid for it and downloaded it, I'll take back my comment about it being an irrational influence on such a decision.

 

[BryonD]

Another suggestion: Please consider moving Ralf Schemmann's Maps and More to the RPGNow site. Ralf is the artist behind much of Profantasy's Campaign Cartographer (CC2) products, and not including him on the "best of the best" site is a crime.

Heh, I didn't know those existed. I found them the day the new site opened and bought all three sets.

I found them because they were right there on the front of the new page.

So there is one data point for the new site working exactly as planned......

And if you use CC2, those files are great. Buy them.

 

[Steve Conan Trustrum]

And if you use CC2, those files are great. Buy them.

Someone needs to convince him to start doing some modern and sci-fi stuff for CC2.

 

[jaerdaph]

Someone needs to convince him to start doing some modern and sci-fi stuff for CC2.

Definitely! I'd also like to see Ralf release an Ancient Egypt/Greece/Rome set too.

 

[jmucchiello]

A black background, not so much--it's hardly a reasonable excuse to say "I'll take my business elsewhere." It's like saying you won't shop at a clothing store because they redid the floor tiles in a color you don't like. Now, if you're not going because they made it hard for you to find the clothes you prefer, then yeah, I could understand that, but floor tiles and web site background colors are hardly practical reasons to avoide a product vendor altogether.

I can't believe how far you carried this dead horse, Steve. But I must give it a few strokes myself. But there are several brick and mortar stores that I will not step into because of garish colors or loud music or music I don't like and can't ignore or scent or "this just don't feel right".

The background color for many a website has made me want to hit BACK faster than I physically could. Disagreeing with the look of a website is an extremely valid reason to stop going to the website, no matter how much you wish you could get to the content without those colors. You may be more tolerant of garish colors than most people. But I find "I don't like how it looked" an extremely valid reason for "I will never return".