Indie Effects on Existing Industry

[Matt Gwinn]

I had a recent debate on another forum that stemmed from CafePress'  decision to do print on demand publishing.  The debate basicly revolved around how that will effect the current distribution system and how places like Wizard's Attic make it too easy for game designers to get their games on book store shelves.

The debate was with an employee of an established game studio which will remain nameless.  It was his contention that it is too easy for crap to make it to book store shelves and that the mass influx of new games brought about by the D20 OGL and Indy movement is "clogging up the channels" thus making it harder for established publishers to make a profit and remain viable buisinesses.  It's his belief that established businesses that are out to make a profit are being forced to compete for shelf space with vanity press publishers.

What I want is for people to be able to make a living designing and
selling games. The current system makes that difficult because a lot of
people who are not in business to make money (whether knowingly or
otherwise) are competing for shelf space. They're not making enough
money for their businesses to be viable, but they're draining cash away
from other businesses, making them less viable.

What I gather from this is that there is only so much cash floating around in the hobby and that there are so many new products out there that the money is being spread too thin.  

He also believes that game publishers should prove themselves before they can take part in the existing system and that the industry should "raise the bar to entry".

You have a right to publish and find your audience, but if you want to get into distribution and onto retail store shelves you need (in my opinion) to be able to work the channel -- produce a professional looking product, research distributors, send them samples or sell sheets, and
pitch buyers on why they should carry you. You need to get a membership
on the Games Industry Forum and sell retailers on your product. You
need to be at the major shows (GTS, Origins, and Gen Con) making a show of being in the industry as a full-time publisher and attending local
small cons to build a groundswell in your area.

And if you can't do that because you don't have the time or the money,
then get yourself a web site and sell your product via .pdf or PoD.  There's no shame in being a micro or vanity press. If you sell the book off your web site, you cut out the middle man, increasing your profitability so that you get more money out of your endeavor. You also don't put largely unviable product into the standard distribution channel where it hurts the guys who are trying to make a living at this (and I mean at all three tiers).

Being an employee of a game company and relying on the stability of the industry to make a living obviously influences his view.  I felt that the subject should be presented to the other side of the spectrum (the Indy side) to see what you all have to say on the subject.

Do vanity press games indeed clog up the channels?

Should they be allowed to compete for shelf space with more viable businesses?

Is the recent flood of new games hurting or helping the industry?

Speak up.

,Matt

edited for typos

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Matt, thanks for laying this out so clearly. I've been wanting to provide my own position about this issue - which I hear about a lot, as you might imagine - for a while now.

According to you, this fellow said (and again, I've heard the same from many):

What I want is for people to be able to make a living designing and
selling games.

In my experience, this statement is often accompanied by grievous accounts of bills to pay and of kids with large eyes, gazing trustingly upwards.

My response is simple: No one owes anyone else a living. If that weren't the case, I could moan about not being able to make a living posting here at the Forge. Or singing in the shower. Or selling badly-handcrafted playdough sculptures on the sidewalk in front of my house.

Quite a bit of the usual discussion around this and similar statements evaporates in the face of my response.

Best,
Ron

[b_bankhead]

What I gather from this is that there is only so much cash floating around in the hobby and that there are so many new products out there that the money is being spread too thin.  

Do vanity press games indeed clog up the channels?

Should they be allowed to compete for shelf space with move viable businesses?

Is the recent flood of new games hurting or helping the industry?

Speak up.

,Matt

Screw 'em and screw him too.  Who is to decide when someone should be allowed into the market?  Those who are already on the market and benefit from its present nature of course!  It sounds to me like the big boys are being squeezed and they are whining about their problems.  If you the present market is crowded why dont you create a new one?  I think the whole static market mentality is one of the biggest problems of this so-called industry.

  What point of the system is to decide who gets on the shelves?  Who is to enforce this consensus? The distributors?  The whole movement is a reaction to and a workaround for the politicized and innefficient distribution system, so they have no way of enforcing it. The shops?  They always have to choose what to buy,sounds like this guy is whining  because they have TOO MANY choices for his comfort.  This barrier would prevent them from having the chance to choose. The buyers?  The whole point is to freeze products that are supposedly 'unviable' out of the market before buyers see them, gee I thought the test of viability was that people bought it, silly me!  Who decides what is crap and what isn't?  Apparently we the buyer shouldnt get to decide, if you dont meet certain criteria that benefit the already 'established' your product shouldn't even exist.

  If the 'established' (with their whole 5-6 person staff) publishers can't figure out how to make a living against peolpe who are giving it away (the hated 'vanity press') then they should go out of business.  Why should I feel sympathy for those complaining they cant make a living selling ice in Antarctica?

[Valamir]

Funny Matt, I had this exact same conversation with a guy whose been in the gaming business (mostly wargaming) for decades and his position was very similiar.  Too many game companies turning out too much product.

Personally, my take on the whole issue is simply that there are two kinds of game companies:  hobbiests and businesses.  A hobbiest should have zero expectations of anything.  He should evaluate $3000 spent on a print run the same as he'd evaluate spending $3000 on a plasma screen tv and home entertainment theatre.  If you can afford to blow the money and the entertainment value of what you're buying is worth it to you, go for it...but write off any thoughts of a profit and consider what you get back like a rebate offer.

What pisses me off most about the industry are people who have business expectations with hobbiest execution.  For instance, I've heard from several respected industry professionals on how difficult it is to pay their freelancers on time because the distributors don't pay them on time.  This to me is ludicrous and a prime example of how unprofessional most of this industry is.  There is a word for businesses that attempt to survive paycheck to paycheck like that...its called "undercapitalized" and its usually a step on the road to bankruptcy.  All businesses deal with accounts receivables and delinquencies.  All businesses have various means of dealing with delinquencies.  All businesses when crafting their budgets assume a certain level of non payments and account for that upfront with "reserve for bad debt" accounts and so forth.  I've not yet met a game publisher who can adequately describe their accounts receivable process to me.  Which is fine for hobbiests but totally removes my capability to sympathize with people who claim to be running a business.

Now onto the question at hand of whether the hobbiests are clogging up the channels.  I can only say that if ones business can not compete with the slap dash efforts of the majority of hobbiests than how can one consider oneself a viable business.  If your customers would rather spend their money on a product put together by people who don't do all of the things the above party suggests should be a requirement than perhaps that tells you something about those requirements.

[b_bankhead]

Funny Matt, I had this exact same conversation with a guy whose been in the gaming business (mostly wargaming) for decades and his position was very similiar.  Too many game companies turning out too much product.

.

   What he means is change is coming and since I dont know how to market my copies of the Battle of Bumfuckland to anyplace but the tiny cliques of hobby shop nerds I'm trouble because Holinthewall game shop only has so much space on its walls for promo posters.

  This is an admission the the 'established' names that they are hothouse flowers that can be upset by the smallest, tempest-in-a-teapot change in the field.   EXPAND THE MARKET! EXPAND THE MARKET! Hello,hello is anyone listening? Hello, hello....?

[talysman]

strange... is the indie industry really "clogging the channels"? from what I've been reading, most indie game companies still can't get on the shelves. I bought Sorcerer at a game store instead of online, but it was NOT on the shelf. likewise, although there's tons of third-party d20 products appearing, most of them seem to be available online only; the products I see in the stores are from an imprint of an established game company, not from a true independent.

also, on a sidenote: what's this about Cafe Press doing print-on-demand? I hadn't heard this, and I've just checked their website pretty thoroughly: no mention of print-on-demand for books at all. their business still seems to be based entirely around printing images on t-shirts, mugs, and calendars.

RPGNow is doing print-on-demand, but you still wouldn't be able to use that to get on the store shelves.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Hi Matt,

I don't think I can add too much more to the topic aside from what others have said, but I am reminded of Roger and Me a little bit. You know Documentary, Michael Moore, GM plant closing in Flint MI,... This guy is sounding a lot like Moore and the people of Flint when they found out the plant was closing and all the jobs were moving to Mexico. It amounts to so much whining on their part. Yes, it's bad that GM closed the plant and everyone lost their job. Yes, it's depressing what happened to Flint as community. But, you can either continue to cry into your beer or you can do something about it.

That and I think that the reason why "viable" companies are losing profits has less to do with the indie movement and more to do with said company's lack of understanding of business in general.

"Gee, the third edition rules aren't selling as well now as they did back when they first came out. Why is that? It must be all of those indie games competing for shelf space! Damn them!"

[Matt Gwinn]

also, on a sidenote: what's this about Cafe Press doing print-on-demand? I hadn't heard this, and I've just checked their website pretty thoroughly: no mention of print-on-demand for books at all. their business still seems to be based entirely around printing images on t-shirts, mugs, and calendars.

I don't know if that's the case for a fact, but that was the subject that started the debate.  It seemed odd to me too, but also seems to be a good way for Cafepress to expand their business.

I think I should point out that I don't want this thread to turn into an "us vs them" battle.  I would just like people's honest opinions on the subject.  If anyone has any actual experiences that relate to this topic I'd like to hear about it.

Do we have any distributors or store owners/employees that can attest to the effects on Vanity press games on their business?  Any non-indy posters out there have any input?

,Matt G.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Here's a word that doesn't get used often on The Forge: asshat. I think it applies in several situations here.

First of all, Game Guy X that has been talking to Matt: definitely an asshat. People can make a living making RPGs. The formula's pretty simple: take the capital and resources you have as a larger game company and produce work that's either bigger, better, or prettier than the small presses. Your work sells more than smaller presses. If not, then, well, you've been beaten - not because there's a low bar to entry, or anything else, but because consumers prefer other work.

(And as a tangent: when there's semi-decent articles like this in local newspapers talking about role-playing games, the market is not drying up or any such thing.)

Second, anyone who thinks the same people that buy d20 stuff are primarily the people who might decide, "Hey, I'd rather get that indie game": asshat. Completely not true.

Third, who are these indie designers that have their games all over the game store? (Ok, Hero Wars and Sorcerer and Godlike. All great games.) Otherwise, asshats, all of you. The current distribution model is seriously broken in more ways than I want to go into today. Briefly: you can reach new people and larger markets online. Beyond that, you can expand who might buy your game by not putting it on the shelves of a moldy old game store inhabited by the same dozen people each week. Look around for things like 'zine stores, which'll carry your self-published game in a heartbeat. Any decent size urban center has a zine store, or a counter-culture store, or a sex shop (think I'm kidding? I've seen Obsidian in the same store as cock rings), or somewhere where literates, freaks, musicians, and others hang out. I've spoken with the local zine store to me, Confounded Books, and they've agreed to carry print editions of Anvilwerks games, just by looking at a copy of Donjon.

Thus ends my rant for today.

[Pramas]

strange... is the indie industry really "clogging the channels"?

Not in the sense you probably mean, no.

What people are really talking about is d20 companies. An enormous number of new companies have entered the field in a very short amount of time, each trying to ride the d20 wave. In the early days of d20, it didn't matter how shitty your product was, you could still probably sell 3,000 of it into the channel. This enabled a bunch of companies to establish themselves quickly, and the imitators continue to come out of the woodwork.

Each individual d20 company has a very small effect, but together they do tax the system. Distributors and retailers have a certain amount of money to buy new product each month. If they decide to invest some of that money is 20 companies that didn't exist last year, that has an effect. If you talk to any d20 publisher, they'll tell you that numbers sold per product generally decreased throughout 2002. This is one of the reasons why.

I don't think this has much to do with "indy" the way it's defined around here. Small press games like Sorcerer or Riddle of Steel have always been a feature of the landscape.

[Paul Czege]

Whoah!

I've seen Obsidian in the same store as cock rings.

Too much information!

[Mike Holmes]

So, Matt, was that you I saw talking to that coven of new-age witches the other day, saying, "Hey, I just talked to a fundamentalist who said that witches should be burned. What do you think?"

That was you, wasn't it?

Mike

[Pramas]

Whoah!

I've seen Obsidian in the same store as cock rings.

Too much information!

We keep joking about doing Mutants &Masterminds merchandise like Atomic Brain coffee mugs. A Kalak the Mystic cock ring would really take it to another level though!

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Way off-topic, everyone, but two points:

a) Mike Holmes wins!
b) Chris - I'd buy an Atomic Brain coffee mug for certain.

- Clinton

[Walt Freitag]

You see, that's just it. I'd have completed and published several of my own indie games by now, but I didn't want to clog up the channels.

- Walt, who hopes y'all appreciate the sacrifice