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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morrus" data-source="post: 5983916" data-attributes="member: 1">Under the Hood – The Future of SalesOnce you have a game designed, tested, and ready to engage a skeptical public, there’s still one last hurdle to overcome: selling the damn thing. And if you thought you busted your hump just getting a finished product ready, you’re in for a nasty surprise. Read this excellent article over at <a href="http://roleplayerschronicle.com/?p=25598" target="_blank">Roleplayer's Chronicle</a>. This touches on some comments I made in a recent thread - that the RPG industry is a growing number of thousands and thousands of small-press publishers, and a handful of larger full-time companies. The former operate in an arena where it's getting tougher to sell more than a few dozen copies simply because there are so many publishers, selling through so few online retailers which are taking in close to 50% of the gross revenue of each of those products.  So the selling of product is getting increasingly hard for those in the small-press market. The sheer volume of them exploded with the PDF market, and again with the Kickstarter trend (I know - I've taken advantage of both!) When I started selling PDFs over a decade ago, back when RPGNow was just starting out, our "Wild Spellcraft" supplement for D&D 3E sold thousands of copies in a short period of time. These days, a product of ours at RPGNow will sell perhaps a couple of dozen copies - it stays on the front page for a matter of hours before disappearing into the vast backend warehouse. Where I'm lucky is that I have EN World subscriptions to back that up and keep me selling the numbers I need, but not everyone is that lucky. And I feel it's likely very difficult for a lot of small-press publishers - it's never been easier to produce content, and the result of that is that it's becoming increasingly harder to sell it.  That's great for consumers, of course!</blockquote>

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