Lions of the North!

I talked about funding at length in another article, and it’s worth mentioning that Kickstarter has become a haven for funding games. One particularly promising, original game is Lions of the North, a post-post-apocalyptic game with a fantastic take on humanity might turn out.

Lions of the North is a roleplaying game that takes place in the future after the destruction of our current civilization. New nations and states have appeared in Northern Europe, struggling for their place in the sun. The new nations have abandoned the dead past and have embraced equality in a way our society hasn’t. Racism and sexism are things of the past.

The nobles of Peimar, the traders of Kirkoslet and the despots of Hanö are all seeking fortune and power. The pirates of Bornholm seek to gain wealth by raiding merchant vessels and the Gotlanders try to keep control of their island when the great powers of the age start encroaching on their territory. It’s The Age of Lions, and it means means that anyone is free to carve out their own destiny on land or at sea. It’s an age of free women and men, an age where your birth and gender don’t mean anything, having a strong swordarm or a cunning mind means a lot more.

Beyond this struggle, mythical creatures and strange magic appears on the new frontier. What are the dark forests hiding and are you brave enough to find out?

I really like the idea, and Kemper’s blog puts out some more fantastic details about his setting and system. Please support this awesome project by pledging!

Dooming Yourself From Day One

I have a friend who decided to start a small press (Small Tomatoes Press) to print her books and a few others authors’ works. She reads this blog, and she asked me for advice on how to make it successful. Mind you, this was after she set up her business, ran to a high-cost POD distributor, and set up her Amazon, blog, and all those wonderful things that people call “marketing.”

I like her. I wanted to help her. I want her to be successful. If she’d asked me a month or two before that, I might have been able to help her. If I’d had a hand in catalyzing the business concept before it was all set in stone, maybe, just maybe, I might have had some miracle to increase her sales. However, the sad, cold reality is that her ship was scuttled as soon as she launched it.

Self-publishing in any industry (including tabletop games) is just a thin green line from vanity publishing. If you publish, they will not come. The real mistake here, however, is not the type of publishing venture she entered; it’s that she dived into it with very little research or consulting. She had it all set up before she even called me.

She’s not alone; actual, real companies do this all the time. Mongoose Games spent tens of thousands of dollars on a POD setup, only to realize it didn’t work. In the process of trying to fix it themselves, the managed to break it so that an actual expert couldn’t fix it without spending a lot more money*. Wizards of the Coast pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into a virtual tabletop for Fourth Edition that never materialized (I still love the ad in the back of my original printing PHB).   As I write this, Paizo is sinking time and energy into a Pathfinder MMO that reeks of vaporware.

It’s one of the largest mistakes you can make in business, and even the wisest aren’t immune; if Lisa Fucking Stevens can be convinced, anyone can.

So let’s be clear: don’t doom yourself. Don’t dive in. Do the research, do the work, and do it right. Stop writing your game; start planning your business.

*I would link a source, but they have apparently taken down that State of the Mongoose. So much for their whole “transparency” bit.

Piracy and Sales

Intellectual Property Piracy is a ridiculously divisive issue in our culture, and despite my “in your face” leanings, I’m not here to take a moral stand. Piracy is, generally, illegal in my country, and the noose is likely to get tighter before it gets looser; the looming threats of SOPA/PIPA are evidence that the money is going to try to protect the money.

What I am here to talk about, after my long absence, are the effects of piracy on the gaming industry. It’s no joke to smalls publishers; there is a distinct feeling that the proliferation of digital ‘scans’ has been a major factor in the ruining of the market. As Matthew Grau, creator of the game CthulhuTech, notes:

That doesn’t even address the issue of piracy. I remember a day when a mediocre release of a game book sold 3000-5000 copies, with healthy restock orders. Now, a successful release might sell 1000, if you are lucky, selling through the rest of your 3000 unit print run in three years – many companies print far less. Not only is the industry shrinking, but people don’t have to pay for their gaming books anymore if they don’t want to. Unfortunately, unlike the music industry, we are not made of money. It costs a surprisingly large amount of money to develop a well-written and attractive gaming book and the return is not so hot. Without those extra sales, the traditional model of core plus regular supplementation isn’t really viable.

Oh, really?

A follower of mine, Old School GM, posted an interesting article about the sales of Eclipse Phase, taken straight from the horses’ mouths: their company report. This got me thinking, much as my article and blog got him thinking. We don’t have any concrete idea just how big the industry is, but the numbers behind those links show some fantastic progress for the folks at Posthuman Studios.

What is most interesting is that Eclipse Phase is FREE. Free as in beer. You can download it, legally from torrent sites, sanctioned by the publisher. What’s more, you have free reign to remix or redo the game and publish it yourself. In the spirit of the posthuman information age, ownership is nothing. Want to pay? Sure! Thanks! Don’t want to pay? Here, you can have it, from us, for free.

Under this model, Posthuman Studios sold a tremendous 8,422 units in 2010. That’s big numbers for a small press publisher. One could crunch the numbers and reveal their probably gross, but I won’t do that to them. It’s not important. They’re moving units of a product that they’re also giving away for free. Meanwhile, the Cthulhutech guys are spending a lot of time whining about how piracy is ruining their business. A not-insignificant amount of time and effort is wasted by them (and many other small press companies) “chasing down pirates.”

So, we have two games of comparable scale. Why is one selling, when it’s available for free, and another is struggling? Well, friends and grognards, I think you already know the answer. It’s Quality.

You see, Eclipse Phase is a magnificent game. The setting is a genius take on the idea of a Posthuman world; the background and adventure work is top-notch. Players love it, because it’s an empowering, vast solar system of intrigue and information. There are nearly infinite possibilities for adventure, and new sourcebooks are being released all the time. And, despite the fact that you can have them for free, many customers are willing to pay for the books and PDFs.

Cthulhutech, on the other hand, is a mess. The system sucks, the setting is full of stereotypical, mustache-twirling demons that betray the basic principles of Lovecraft’s mythos, and the developers are fond of telling the players that they are playing the game wrong. New supplements aren’t coming out (mostly because of the aforementioned whining about sales).

It’s worse than that, though. The books and adventures are chock full of fetishistic descriptions of murder, rape, and misogynistic and/or racist portrayals of, well, just about anyone the authors can think of. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to read Ettin’s reviews of Cthulhutech and its supplements. One of the adventures ends in a narrated rape scene. (One of the writers once claimed the game was only around 2% rape.)

Yeah, I’m really wondering why one of these games is selling, and another isn’t. If you’re not convinced, though, I encourage you to look at a big player: Paizo, who literally gives their core rules away for free. Do people pirate their PDFs? Sure, almost certainly they do. However, they’ve chosen a winning business practice out of making people desire their actual products.

We see the same themes repeated throughout the industry: if a release is good, if the art is beautiful, if the rules are laid out well, if there are useful game aids and accessories, customers will want to purchase the product.

It’s almost like I’ve said this before.