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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnNephew" data-source="post: 493331" data-attributes="member: 2171">Re: Ok, im a business guyIt's more complex than that.  Retailers and distributors are having a lot of trouble handling the flood of titles.  Have you checked the listing on ENWorld of upcoming titles lately?  Hundreds of new D20 releases due out in the next few months, hundreds already on the market.  Overall, the anecdotal report is that the total sales of the industry are up in a healthy way.  However, there are more products dividing up that pie.  Maybe a year ago there were 10 new books selling 2,000 copies apiece in some window of time, or 20,000 books total.  This year the sales are up 10%, which is healthy, to 22,000 books total in the same time window -- but there are 20 books, so they're only selling 1100 copies each, which probably takes the manufacturers of those books from a profit down to a loss.  Meanwhile, retailers have plenty of unsold product from over-optimistic purchases earlier on; they have learned that if there are 20 products, instead of 10, you can't buy 5 of each and expect them all to sell; you have to cut back to 3 of each, or two, or maybe play it safe at 1.  After all, next week there will be a dozen new titles (and for that matter, why reorder then? a reordered title has at least one less potential customer than any brand new title, right?).  The consequence is a sharp reduction in sales per title.If you want to compete, the temptation (or necessity, unless you have other things to fall back on, such as different target categories or different markets)  is to produce as many of the titles as possible.  If 11 of the 20 titles are yours, and you can restrain your costs (by not devoting as much time to editing or revisions or playtesting, paying authors less, etc.) while producing more titles, you can grab a bunch of the money while elbowing competitors off the shelves.  The thing is, ultimately, selling 5 different books is less profitable than selling 5 copies of one book.  But it's a tragedy of the commons situation; who wants to volunteer to take fewer pieces of the pie?In theory, at some point, quality will win out; the retailers, distributors, and consumers will all put into place methods of winnowing the field, create barriers to limit the amount of product on the market, and reward the producers of the best product so that they will generate more of it.  However, reality is hampered by chaotic patterns and finite timeframes.  Publishers can't wait until the hypothetical infinite point on the horizon when the statistical distribution has reverted everything to the mean and determined and rewarded the true measurement of quality; as a rule, they do not have the financial ballast to survive severe short-term fluctuations.  As for chaos, a publisher could be pulled into bankruptcy because some third party upon whom they depend is hurt or bankrupted by another publisher (perhaps a publisher of non-quality items).Imagine this scenario.  Publisher A does Good Stuff.  Publisher B does Mediocre Stuff.  The market, not knowing anything much about either at this point, orders equal quantities of both.  Publisher A's stuff is devoured by the quality-hungry masses.  Publisher B's stuff languishes on the shelves.  All good?  Well, multiply this by a bunch of releases, because the market still hasn't figured out how to deal with all this.  At some point, some interesting things happen.  For example, the games might be sold into the book trade -- on returnable terms.  Then one day a big return comes back.  A and B both use a fulfillment house, which did not make a reserve for returns (or made an inadequate one).  As a result, the fulfillment house breaks the bank paying back the book trade for the return of all of Publisher B's books (or, what isn't much different, ships them a bunch of Publisher A's books but doesn't get paid beause the credit for the return covers it, and so the fulfiller has no money to pay A).  It was the B stuff that was not quality...but when the fulfillment house can't pay its bills, Publisher A doesn't get paid for their stuff (even though it's all sold out and is clearly loved by consumers), money it needs to pay its printer, artists, and make payroll.  Consequence: Publisher A goes out of business, in spite of publishing the superior products to universal acclaim.  (In the past, this kind of thing would happen all the time, but not on as big a scale -- distributors would go bankrupt, with a warehouse full of Crappy CCGs X, Y and Z...and other publishers whose items all were selling great would get shafted with unpaid bills, sometimes more than they could survive.  What's different today, and may make more publishers vulnerable to a sudden die off -- D20 or not -- is that more publishers are dependent on the common nodes of fulfillment houses.)We're all lucky that the retailers and distributors have recently gone through a Pokemon-slowdown-induced purging/die-off, so the ones that remain are not so likely to get killed by inventory glut.  That's good in the long run (I don't foresee a lot of stores driven into bankruptcy by overbuying RPGs they way they did from CCGs in the mid-'90s), but in the short run it may exacerbate the pain for manufacturers.Blah, it's late, I'm rambling, it's bedtime.</blockquote>

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