d20 Will it go the distance? (skylarking)

[jrients]

We have a game store here in Champaign-Urbana called the Dragon's Table.  As far as I can tell, the owner is a pretty shrewd fellow.  A year or more ago he would get in multiple copies of all the new d20 stuff coming out.  Nowadays he seems to get one copy of a new release, or zero copies with special orders if asked.  D20 Modern would be the only d20 thing I've seen him get multiple copies recently.  Meanwhile, he's willing to risk buying 6 or 8 copies of products like tri-stat Silver Age Sentinels.  (I think he just got M&M in, I might have to drop buy to see how many he ordered.)

Now admittedly, that's anecdotal evidence, but it seems to support what Ron is saying.

[Pramas]

Let's talk about bubbles, and about "performance." Publishers get their money from distributors, and they have a widespread, and fatal, tendency to equate sales to distributors with sales to customers.

That is indeed a famous rookie mistake to make, but there's a really easy way to find out if your products are selling to consumers: look at your reorders. If you sell a bunch on month one and sales immediately die off, that usually means the channel took too many and they didn't move. If you get regular reorders, that means stuff sold in stores and those stores ordered more from their distributors. Also, the days when distributors order a six month supply of a new product are long gone. They want enough onhand for 2-4 weeks tops. If a distributor reorders from you then, that means they've exhausted their stock AND they have retail demand for more. So while you can never know exactly how many copies of something sold through to customers, you can definitely see the larger trends.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Chris,

That's correct - but the key, as I emphasized before, is time. Time to see those re-orders, time to interact with retailers to encourage the re-orders, and time to interact with customers who actually play the game. I'll focus on the final point: actual play takes months to build up the desire, to organize, and to play long enough for word on the game's quality to move to other role-players. In some cases, years.

It also involves ignoring the initial spike of sales, which is a really hard thing for most people to do. Once a person moves 500-1200 copies of a self-published game into distributor warehouses within a few months after release, the giddy feeling of success and taking the market by storm and being able to pay the printer for the next book are overwhelming, to many.

Add to this the difficulty of retailers consistently ignoring both of the above points, and their tendency to be desperate about the nigh-worthless stock stuffing their shelves (and representing debt that can lose them their lease within six weeks).

I tend to think of this mistake as being a widespread industry phenomenon among all the tiers as well as among consumers, rather than a characteristic "rookie" thing. Some cunning few use it to their advantage in a kind of scorched-earth new-edition new-hot-game way; most others sputter along in one form of debt or another based on failure to understand "sales."

Best,
Ron