RPGNow EDGE Opens!
- Thread starter rpghost
- Start date
guildofblades
First Post
>>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.<<
I found this statement funny, as it really does not accurately represent the vast, vast majority of publishers I have ever known in the gaming biz. And I've been publishing games for 11 years now.
99.9% of publishers start a game publishing business because they love games and they lover writing and/or game design. For some, that publishing business may be run as a hobby and thats is all the owners wish to aspire to. In that role, they can easily conduct themselves as professionals and run a great small company. Others love game design and publishing so much that coupled with a significant risk threshold and a little bit of go ho, will strive to turn their game publishing business into a full time job.
The Guild of Blades is like the later. We began publishing a club zine 11 years ago and moved to publishing, just-for-fun, a couple little photo copied games 9 years ago. But with a little luck and willingness to learn and try new things we managed to stay in business long enough to grow. After publishing part time for around 7 years, we finally grew enough to employ the two principle partners.
Now, we are primarily a print publisher and our best sellers are board games. Now, having entered the PDF market, we find we have a great venues for trying some new things that we, frankly, just can not do with print products because of the costs and finiancial risks involved with print productions. We were able to bring back previously discontinued game lines, update them and are now expanding them with new content. I was able to release a little miniatures rules set called Dice Armies, which was a small pet project of mine. And now we are exploring the possibilities of producing an absolutely massively large fantasy wargame where we publish the rules in PDF format and then offer the color chit gaming units for mail order. Why? Becuse to produce this game traditionally it would have a suggested retail price of $200 to $250. But going the PDF route we'll be able to sell a PDF rules set for $15 to $20 and then all the game counters for $50 or under.
Heck, we're one of the vendors on the main RPGNow and we've partnered with G-Spot Games to sell some of their games as PDF products. You can't tell us we're in THAT just for the money. lol. I'm not sure it comes more offbeat in gaming than G-Spot Games.
In short, yes, I make a living as a publisher. My partner supports his family with his salary. So making money IS an important aspect of what we do as a game publisher. But we got into publishing so we could publish some of our unique ideas. We're still in publishing because that is what we love to do. While the GUild of Blades might now have achieved some small level of success and can pay me a salary, I assure you, I could easily still be making double that salary with my job experience in the marketing field. I'm a game publisher because I love being a publisher, not for love of money. But it is ok, I do like money too. You are all welcome to come throw some of it at my feet it you like.
The Split at RPGNow happened mostly because there were many complaints that the available catalog of PDFs for sale had simply become too large. There were many complaints that it was becoming hard to find anything. This split of sites has made both sites a lot easier to browse. I myself have spent some time browsing the edge site and have now seen a lot of unique products there that I just would not have seen otherwise, and the same is now true of the main RPGNow site as well. All lumped together, many good products were getting lost in the crowd. Now they have a chance for greater exposure, on BOTH sites.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
RPGEdge: People who play this game and not afraid to go outside the box because they have a day job supporting them.<<
I found this statement funny, as it really does not accurately represent the vast, vast majority of publishers I have ever known in the gaming biz. And I've been publishing games for 11 years now.
99.9% of publishers start a game publishing business because they love games and they lover writing and/or game design. For some, that publishing business may be run as a hobby and thats is all the owners wish to aspire to. In that role, they can easily conduct themselves as professionals and run a great small company. Others love game design and publishing so much that coupled with a significant risk threshold and a little bit of go ho, will strive to turn their game publishing business into a full time job.
The Guild of Blades is like the later. We began publishing a club zine 11 years ago and moved to publishing, just-for-fun, a couple little photo copied games 9 years ago. But with a little luck and willingness to learn and try new things we managed to stay in business long enough to grow. After publishing part time for around 7 years, we finally grew enough to employ the two principle partners.
Now, we are primarily a print publisher and our best sellers are board games. Now, having entered the PDF market, we find we have a great venues for trying some new things that we, frankly, just can not do with print products because of the costs and finiancial risks involved with print productions. We were able to bring back previously discontinued game lines, update them and are now expanding them with new content. I was able to release a little miniatures rules set called Dice Armies, which was a small pet project of mine. And now we are exploring the possibilities of producing an absolutely massively large fantasy wargame where we publish the rules in PDF format and then offer the color chit gaming units for mail order. Why? Becuse to produce this game traditionally it would have a suggested retail price of $200 to $250. But going the PDF route we'll be able to sell a PDF rules set for $15 to $20 and then all the game counters for $50 or under.
Heck, we're one of the vendors on the main RPGNow and we've partnered with G-Spot Games to sell some of their games as PDF products. You can't tell us we're in THAT just for the money. lol. I'm not sure it comes more offbeat in gaming than G-Spot Games.
In short, yes, I make a living as a publisher. My partner supports his family with his salary. So making money IS an important aspect of what we do as a game publisher. But we got into publishing so we could publish some of our unique ideas. We're still in publishing because that is what we love to do. While the GUild of Blades might now have achieved some small level of success and can pay me a salary, I assure you, I could easily still be making double that salary with my job experience in the marketing field. I'm a game publisher because I love being a publisher, not for love of money. But it is ok, I do like money too. You are all welcome to come throw some of it at my feet it you like.
The Split at RPGNow happened mostly because there were many complaints that the available catalog of PDFs for sale had simply become too large. There were many complaints that it was becoming hard to find anything. This split of sites has made both sites a lot easier to browse. I myself have spent some time browsing the edge site and have now seen a lot of unique products there that I just would not have seen otherwise, and the same is now true of the main RPGNow site as well. All lumped together, many good products were getting lost in the crowd. Now they have a chance for greater exposure, on BOTH sites.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
Steve Conan Trustrum
Explorer
Autologin doesn't want to work on Firefox. Is it javascript, because Netscape and Firefox have all sorts of problems with them.rpghost said:
Steve Conan Trustrum
Explorer
What version? Mine worked about 3 updates ago (say, about 8 months)BryonD said:
