The Forge Booth 2009

[Ron Edwards]

This is a companion thread to Independence, Adept Press, and Indie Press Revolution and The New Thing.

Well, as painlessly perceived and agreed upon during GenCon this year, IPR won't be part of the Forge booth next year. For those of you who don't know the history, the first Forge booth was in 2002, with the possible "first draft" being the Sorcerer booth in 2001 (see GenCon retrospective for an informal summary). IPR joined the booth for 2006, 2007, and 2008. So really, it's not much of a change - the Forge-booth side of things was what it was before 2006, was pretty much the same in tandem with IPR for three years, and now simply continues as is.

Actually, there is one change: there aren't going to be any primary sponsors, i.e. initial buyers of the booth, besides me. The whole indie revolution has successfully happened, and no single booth can be it any more. So this is more than ever, basically going back to 2001-2002, the "Adept Press presents the Forge" booth, as one of many representing the various aspects of the community. It functions as a low-cost entry point for new independent games.

The buy-in policy for newcomer companies and games remains the same, as does the whole demo philosophy and approach. If you have an independent game and give me $125 or $250 (for the second year), and your badge fee, then you and your game are welcome at the booth and the latter will be sold there. I am hoping for at least a few of the first-timers from this year to return, and for perhaps five or six, newcomers to be there. In case you're wondering, I exert no authority over whether your game is being sold anywhere else at the con; that's your decision.

For buy-in games, ashcans are welcome and I plan to present the full Ashcan Front concept as a "thing" which visitors to the booth can learn about. People who were at the 2001-2003 booths will remember that's what we did back then anyway. Some of this is pending what Paul wants to do with the Ashcan Front, but my current understanding is that he's OK with what I'm describing.

Physically, I anticipate a two-booth space, probably along an aisle. It's not ideal, but endcap costs are a stone bitch, and I have enough GenCon points to make it very likely that the endpost neighbors will be graduates of the Forge booth anyway, or very close in community terms. Brennan and I have already committed to naming one another as desired neighbors in our applications too.

I plan to put a lot of energy into demoing buy-in games, as usual, and I think that'll be easier for everyone with only about a dozen games involved. I also plan to set up a very powerful Adept Press presence, possibly with the return of the eye-catching Sorcerer cover banner from hell, prompter of whiplash. Christopher Kubasik plans to be there with his new book Play Sorcerer. The new Trollbabe is quite close to completion right now, and it will definitely be available by early next year, and featured at the booth. There's a certain gap in knowledge about my company and games that's grown up in the website community over the past couple of years, and I hope to correct that. Oh, and by then, I'll also have an ashcan version of the partner book to Spione, called Shahida, about the civil war in Beirut.

There are a few loose ends. The chairs are still the booth's. I'll either have to buy the flooring from Greg Porter or buy some new squares of my own. What about organizing sales on-site? What about long-standing relationships with high-impact booth contributors like Greg? There are some things to work out.

Anyway, all of this is subject to questions, concerns, ideas, critique, and more. Please help me out with those.

Best, Ron
edited to set up the links - RE

[Eero Tuovinen]

A starting question: being that you're working from an Adept Press -centric concept for the Forge booth this coming year, what do you think of other publishers explicitly and prominently featuring the Forge as a brand at their own booths? If somebody wants to make another large Forge banner and present "another Forge booth, featuring publisher me instead of Adept Press", what'd you say to that? So far other designers have preferred to create their own brands (and even continue with them from year to year, as Play Collective does) and only feature the communal connection verbally, but perhaps that'll change with this shift.

(I personally realize that there has been no particular policy change in this regard, and people have always been able to use the Forge name at conventions, as I've done at times here in Finland. Regardless, it's good to clarify these things, especially as there has never been two "Forge booths" in one convention as far as I know.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

There are several layers to that question, some of which you know, but I'll outline here for everyone.

Regarding the booth itself, being more Adept-centric doesn't diminish my commitment to the buy-in publishers and the demo + sales model geared especially towards them. It only means that I'm not going to forget about promoting my own stuff like I typically do.

Now for the more general points.

First, the Forge isn't a company or an organization. It's a website defined by a project. Second, there are in fact people who can make a solid claim to ownership of the Forge as a website and project. I'm the primary conceiver, co-founder, and content moderator of the Forge throughout its history; Ed Healy is the currently inactive co-founder and was the site designer for the original Hephaestus' Forge. Clinton Nixon is the curently inactive co-founder, and was the original site designer and site manager for the modern Forge. Vincent is the site manager for the modern Forge.

I want to stress that point one is a not a "common license" for anyone to claim they are representing the Forge, and that of all the people in the world, only those named in point two can fairly claim any authority to do so. The Forge is an owned thing.

So billing oneself as an active participant and beneficiary of the Forge seems like a fine plan, and I'd love to see it. What's not a fine plan is being someone besides those listed, and saying that you or your booth is the Forge. I can do that because I'm on that list, or someone else on that list can do it with a separate booth if he wants (and would be cheered by me). You can't. This can be enforced through my discussion with the leadership of GenCon LLC.

To be clear, this has nothing to do with the demo-emphasis and other policies at the historical Forge booth, like buy-ins. Those are merely tactics and are certainly not owned or authorized by anyone.

Best, Ron

[jag]

Is there a lesser branding for a "non-forge but forge-community" booth that might be satisfactory to both you (plural) and to the owner of the hypothetical booth?  Something that:

1. Shows your connection/gratitude/etc to the Forge.
2. Does not imply that you are in any way the Forge.

I'm thinking of something like, on a big "Happy Cow Publishing" banner, a smaller (perhaps even standardized) badge saying  "Graduated from the Forge!" or "Forged Indie!" or similar...

Similar to clustering similar products on a web site, this could help people who discover one Forge-y/Indie both find the next one.

James

[Ron Edwards]

Totally! In fact, anything that doesn't say "The Forge" in an authoritative, here-it-is way. Which is practically anything. So yeah, go to town, and the more of that the more wonderful it would be. You don't have to run it by me or anything; my basic assumption is that people are going to be good-hearted about this issue, and as I say, even the most simple or minor modification of phrasing would be sufficient.

Best, Ron

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

James, that's pretty cool.

[Valamir]

I don't know where I'll be at GenCon in 2009, but I'm having trouble seeing this return to the 2001-2002 model as being very successful.  2008-2009 is a very very different gaming environment than 2001-2002.

In 2001-2002 gamers were so desperate for something...anything...that wasn't more White Wolf, D20, GURPS, etc that they were willing to take a flier on untested, unproven, unknown games / game designers / game companies.

I think the era of "If you build it, they will come" is dead for indie games and has been for the last couple of years.

I think we are now in the era of "If you build it, no one will really care"

Gamers are no longer desperate enough to try anything.  They've already had their mind blown, their horizons widened, their paradigms shifted.  Now I think they're more concerned with figuring out how to play all of the indie titles they already own and love more than they are interested in snagging the next generation of freshman offerings.

The core Indie Game buying audience is pretty thoroughly saturated.  Moving backwards to a more grassroots booth isn't going to expand that audience...its just going to make it less likely to reach anyone who isn't already part of that audience.  And I personally don't see that audience getting all fired excited by Yet Another Story Game by Yet Another Game Company We've Never Heard of Until Now.  In 2001 it was "Oh my god, I never thought a game could be like this".  In 2008 its "Yeah, so what, I already have 5 games that do that".

I don't know.  Prognistications are worth what you pay for them, but I don't see a 2001-02 strategy having much relevance in a 2009 market place.

[Darcy Burgess]

Hey Ralph,

I think that we have saturated our market.  However, that's following the definition of market as "folks who have one or more indie titles on their shelves".

However, my convention play has shown that the new folks coming into the hobby, most of whom are playing d20, are interested in something else.  This is a rediculously small sample of people, but it's what I can speak to.

Maybe the model needs to be aimed at broadening the market.  I'm not particularly adroit at this kind of stuff, but I bet there's a way to do it.

D

[Valamir]

I define success at GenCon as being:

1 make enough money for the trip to pay for itself...or at least give you a nice chunk of walking around money.
2) generate sufficient buzz to see a post con surge in sales...or at least website hits
3) maintain an on going presence in the minds of the consumer to contribute to the fat tail.

To do this you need to generate booth traffic.  Even traffic that doens't result in immediate sales (#1) can result in future sales (#2) and market recognition (#3)

I think there are basically 4 sources of foot traffic into a GenCon booth:
a) your booth makes an impact, gets people's attention and makes them think...oh wow, I need to check that out.
b) your booth is getting solid referrals from elsewhere.
c) your booth is a destination that attendees are already planning to seek out.
d) a handful of people (like me) that make a point of trying to check out every thing there.

In reverse order:
d) I think this number of people is so small as to have little impact in driving traffic.  I think it was much bigger in 2001-2004 where people were coming to GenCon and actively looking for something new, but I think the experience of Forge Booth 2008 / Ashcan Front 2008 both suggest that there aren't as many of those any more.

c) is just attracting the existing audience; the market that's already saturated.  In point of fact, many of these sales are just selling to people that would have bought your stuff anyway on-line.  We made a ton of sales to this group in years past but I see this as a shrinking sales base going forward.  The booth helps with #3 for this demographic, but its going to do a decreasing amount for #1 and #2 going forward.

b) has been tried.  Referrals from other booths in the form of the Indie Passport.  Referrals from G.O.D.  I didn't get the sense that either of these were a major driver of traffic in 2008 or 2007, so something much bigger / badder / and better would be needed to make it so for 2009

a) A big impactful attention getting booth...a two space mid Aisle grassroots kind of booth isn't going to get it done.  Better, IMO, would be to take a page from the GPA, get one ginormous Wizards of the Coast size space and sublet it out to the folks who want their own booth space...but hit it with a consistant theme, something bold and inviting and welcoming and likely to be noticed even by the non-indie-gamers.

But barring that...I'm not really seeing what's going to drive enough traffic to the GenCon booths to actually hit items #1-3 above...Forge Booth or other Indie Booths included. 

Personally, I think scattering and downsizing was not the way to go and is just diluting the impact that a single hopping space used to have...making it less likely to attract anyone new to the scene.

[Paul Czege]

I agree with Ron and Ralph. Folks are hungry for creative relevance and they're not seeing it. I'd love to see the "ginormous booth" solution. But I can't imagine anyone funding it besides Gen Con.

Paul

[Eero Tuovinen]

I compare my experience at the Forge booth this year with the sort of indie booths I run myself at Finnish conventions. The greatest negative difference from my viewpoint is that the Forge booth at Gencon lacked a great deal of focus and brand synergy - when I've done booths at Finnish conventions with 20-30 indie titles, there has been a much higher degree of coherence in the inventory: running a booth full of games I've hand-picked myself, I can vouch for certain points relating to their history and quality, and I've known the inventory better. These booths have been much more of "Forge booths" in the strict sense that they've emphasized the common cultural ancestry and the development process of the games we've sold. If you buy a game from Arkenstone at a Finnish convention, you're pretty much going to get a game that's been created within and through the Forge social environment. They're also all games that I vouch for personally in terms of quality, and can explain to each customer to make sure they get what they're looking for. Comparing this to the Forge booth at Gencon this year, the promise of value in the brand was much weaker: the booth included and sold plenty of all sorts of indie games of varying quality, which makes it more difficult to sell the whole booth to a prospective customer. "Indie" alone is a pretty diluted brand to use in explaining what a booth is about to the audience.

Now, this notion of hand-picked elite products runs partially counter to Ron's explicit mission of enabling and featuring new, fresh indie designers who need the support and experience to get out there. I accept that, but also note that the reason I think that Ron's move towards a smaller booth is a good choice is that having a smaller number of games present, chosen for a tighter set of qualities, helps focus the booth concept and make sales more efficient even if the games are not chosen for being ones Eero likes or something like that. I expect that having a smaller booth will enable the booth personnel to know the inventory better, and having the booth include strictly up-and-coming indie designers on their first or second Gencon outing will give the booth back some focus, any focus.

Still, I agree with Ralph that sales-wise more powerful branding is necessary to penetrate the market more fully. (I also concur with him about success at Gencon, those are essentially my own goals as well, insofar as my own success goes.) I find that a large common booth, based on this year's experiences, is not the answer in that regard: the major monetary outlay of such a booth would require one to bring in many designers, often enough going with very lax criterions in who to take. This in turn would mean that instead of having a clear customer service concept, the booth would be crammed full with all sorts of games and designers of different backgrounds, who instead of knowing each others games and cooperating in running the booth would be forced to concentrate on their own games only, those being the only ones they know with any degree of confidence.

A large booth would have location and audience flow on its side, making it clearly more of a money-maker in that regard. Dilution of responsibility and product concept would be difficult to combat in that environment, however. That being said: if Ralph can make a booth that is ginormous, has solid internal structure and retains some concept with more zing than "we're all small publishers", then that has potential.

I think that it was quite a shame that the booth passport thing didn't manifest this year, as it seems to me that small, conceptually clear booths cooperating closely should provide for a more flexible and responsible overall marketing process that'd benefit all participants. I would have liked to observe the passport if only to see if it has potential, and to see if inter-booth cooperation could be improved upon further. It seems to me that if the small, independent booths are to outcompete the large booth solution in terms of attention-grabbing, they need to make a potential customer aware of the larger phenomenon the small individual booth represents. I'm almost tempted to hire somebody to make sure the booth cooperation and developing a common concept works better next year.

[Ron Edwards]

Here are a few more thoughts on con booths and this booth.

Ultimately, I can only work toward the benefit of my own company and those companies that I choose to help. Since the independent revolution in RPGs has, essentially, succeeded far faster and to a greater extent than I'd imagined, I had to choose who those latter companies would be. "All of'em!" was no longer a viable answer. I did so in 2005 once the number of independent companies hit a critical mass, staying with my commitment to new games, especially by people who had no other reasonable way to come to GenCon. I think I can do a better job for them in the kind of booth I'm describing here than I did for them in the 2008 booth.

Heh - why do I always think in crude metaphor? ... What I want is for the independent Big Bang to be a multiple-climax affair, not just one pulse in 2001-2003. So I'm staying at the center, i.e. connected to newcomers in the effort, people like Marshall Burns, helping to keep the pulses coming. (Oh God, there it is again.)

This idea is connected to another one - that the goal of the early Forge booth was not merely a meeting & feeding ground for people who already knew one another from on-line, but rather a direct outreach to the con-goers who did not know what "independent" meant or what it might offer to them as customers and gamers. I regard that effect as the real success of the Forge booth as a concept. That's why I think, in 2007, the Ashcan Front was the "real Forge booth" of the year.

Ever since I instituted the two-years-only rule in 2006 and encouraged people to begin their own booths, tracking the booth's income became non-comparable. To continue the financial tracking begun in (umm) 2003 (?), we'd have to combine all the related booths. With that in mind, I think it's fair to say that there was no actual drop in independent RPG sales at the "Forge-ish et al. community" booth complex. Nor do I think any such drop is likely.

The only drop that concerns me was in the sales of the buy-in companies at the Forge booth, and of my own books, both of which were way below my satisfaction bar in 2008. So, clearly, the way forward is to make those things into a showpiece of their own - a return in spirit to the earlier booths, although with any luck also benefiting (a) from multiple lessons learned and (b) heightened mutualism with as many of the others as want to maintain that.

Again, whatever sales and participation are forthcoming from the Forge, Story Games, Collective Endeavour, et al., crowd is wonderful, but my real target, for whom my sales-floor attention is aimed, is the GenCon attendee who goes, "Cool poster. Sorcerer? Is that like Mage? What? You published your own game? How does it work? Whoa - all these games are self-published?"

As far as I'm concerned, we have already established an Indie Alley at GenCon. We did a good job of promoting it, too, starting in 2007, although it's a work in progress. My hope is that it will eventually become exactly what you're describing, Ralph, although not as a booth so much as an area. Interestingly, although it's off-site, Games on Demand is perhaps its most important glue, as we keep ironing out how it works.

Best, Ron

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I think it's pretty clear that the overall, Burning Wheel/AshcanFront/Design Matters/Playcollective/IPR/Forge increase in sales this year was comparable to when it was just the Forge Booth. This will become clearer when we finally finish our numbers. Plus, I was noting people I'd never heard of before, people with whom my connection was hazy at best, getting interest because they were selling independently produced games, whatever their design aesthetics. I'm thinking about the buzzing Hellas/Maid/Ninja Burger booth, in particular.

[Gregor Hutton]

Oh, crucially I think have an Indie Alley allows the booths to show different faces and takes on the scene. It's something that I think a single booth cannot do as well. If you have too many messages coming out of a single booth then it becomes confused what they are actually saying.

The underlying message is the same across the indie booths, of course: independent publishing is enjoyable, rewarding, possible and profitable, and there are many ways to do it. Now more than ever before.

I feel that having a range of booths pitched at the levels right for each booth's participants will really help the scene be more diverse and grow. We don't all have to follow the same model or huddle together purely for financial reasons.

Though every booth has to make sure that they can cover the costs of being at GenCon and turn a profit, they also should evaluate why they exist as a booth in the first place.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

That is absolutely and powerfully true, Gregor. I have been harping on this business about know why you're teamed up for a couple of years now. Design Matters was the perfect application of what I've been dreaming of seeing, and I fervently hope that such booths proliferate in 2009. The Play Collective, as I see it, suffers from a failure of that exact point. I wish everyone in that team-up the best of luck individually, but a booth defined by "our games are good! and we're friends!" is more like a flea market than an inspiring experience.

Malcolm, Joshua, Tony, et al., I ask that you not make this an emotional issue - I am not attacking you. This is about real money and real marketing strategy, not about who's buddies with whom. It's time to get real about all of these issues and not generate some fog of Thumper-esque niceness.

It also strikes me that I am no longer going to permit multi-booth publishers to participate at my booth. In other words, if you sign up at this one, then be at this one, and work at this one. The idea is to promote all the related booths as defined and exciting entities. It'd be fine to have games of yours somewhere else (most obviously IPR), but this runnin' back-and-forth business dilutes the power of the unity-in-diversity principle that you described so well.

As a final point, one of the nifty things about Design Matters is that it's not intended necessarily to persist as that particular team-up indefinitely. It may or may not be present next year and it may or may not include the same people. It was created to serve a solid marketing vision for this con, for this people, at this time. (Gregor, Kevin, Nathan, Shreyas, correct me if I'm mistaken about this.) I think that idea would serve everyone well too.

Best, Ron