The Supplement Treadmill vs. The Alternatives
- Thread starter mhacdebhandia
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buzz said:
Direct sales have nothing to do with the supplement treadmill and the indie publishing model has the defining characteristics of the supplement treadmill, especially now that it is frankly promoted as a single brand.
What you really have are a handful of core indie brand exemplars that sell consistently and their externalities*: games that don't make net profit but enhance the prestige of the brand by their numbers, which ends up mostly benefitting the leaders, while everybody else sells next to nothing for the privilege of being considered an indie designer. Plus, of course, a whole bunch of talented people let themselves get exploited, because somehow, getting slave wages from some guy you talk to online is better than getting them from a Faceless Corporation.
The "long tail" claimed as an element of distinction compared to mainstream products also exists for mainstream products (see Palladium, RTal and WW's electronic back catalogue). Larger companies often "cut off" that tail when it becomes too marginal, but indie publishers are not necessarily rational economic actors and sometimes report gross profit despite net loss. Witness discussion at the Forge about merchants who need daily reciepts from their booth sales to attend Gen Con, which indicates attendance at a loss.
In many ways, asking for an alternative to the supplement treadmill is like asking for a way to eat without using your mouth. It's possible, but rarely the first, best choice. WotC made a lot of noise about how it was just in the core book business, but of course it went back on that right away, using the now-popular dodge of throwing a hard cover around a supplement to make it look more core book-ey. No slouch itself, WW's gone with pretty much the same thing. What White Wolf excels at is dropping the axe the moment a line would probably reach a certain threshold in diminishing returns.
buzz said:
No. It's whoever produces for profit product and hires layout and art at substandard prices or for nothing for the sake of producing a book they claim is for profit. Is it ethically consistent for a creator/publisher to pay crap wages to people who provide production assistance while boasting about the prifitability of their model, or is that really the kind of boasting more appropriate to, say, slumlords?
Yet that's part of the indie SOP: use the goodwill of the community as a pretense to undercompensate people involved in production. And of course, it also helps to glorify the creator/owner at the expense of everyone else involved, so that you can ignore their contribution -- including how much they got paid. Naturally, this doesn't apply to true "one man band" projects, where everything is produced by the creator. But it's clear that the definition of indie held dear by that community only applies to things the creator signs off on -- Heroquest's acceptance by the Forge proves that the creator doesn't even need to design the game himself.
The experience that made me decide that the community's practices were't acceptable to me was when at one point, I was due to release a game with an indie designer/publisher. I whinged about paying for art and layout, but was told:
"Oh, in this community, they'll do all this great work for free! Like the cover of my game, [redacted]/ Art, layout, none of it's going to cost you anything, really."
This person also volunteered to do his bit for nothing, too.
No thanks.
People deserve better, even when they think they don't.
buzz
Adventurer
EDIT again: I've talked to a bunch of indie publishers, and eyebeams' assessment, as far as I can tell, is not wholly accurate. Granted, it's not wholly inaccurate, either.
FWIW, take the "indie" out of my original statement (to avoid bias) and instead emphasize the idea of simply maximizing per-book profitability. That's certainly an alternative, if you can pull it off. And i'm not talking about doing so via shafting employees and contractors; I'm thinking of other ways to minimize costs (printing, warehousing), or simply increasing the per-book price.
FWIW, take the "indie" out of my original statement (to avoid bias) and instead emphasize the idea of simply maximizing per-book profitability. That's certainly an alternative, if you can pull it off. And i'm not talking about doing so via shafting employees and contractors; I'm thinking of other ways to minimize costs (printing, warehousing), or simply increasing the per-book price.
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This is relatively common knowledge from Steve Jackson's Stakeholders' Report. Due to Munchkin's current popularity, keeping their retailers and customers supplied with Munchkin sets and expansions is their top priority. That's not to say that GURPS will be ignored, however, but demand is higher for Munchkin than their other product lines. They've already sold out of Munchkin water!Dannyalcatraz said:
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