Speaking of RPGNow

[Michael Hopcroft]

How on Earth did they land so much of TSR's back catalog? Not that I won;t be buying massive quanbtities of it from them, but I still wonder how they managed it.

My concern of another topic is echoed by this development, and I hope that someone from RPGNow will address this -- will the smaller publisher be forgotten, ignroed or dropped now that the company has been noticed by the ;larger firms? RPOGNow may be providing a service to the industry, but they're still a business and any business benefits from scale. Furthermore, their server and warehouse space cannot possibly be unlimited!

How will RPGnow cope with their newfound fame and fortune?

[quozl]

Where did you find TSR's back catalog on RPGNow?

[philreed]

SVGames has the TSR/WOTC PDFs . . . not RPGNow.

Edit: Just noticed what you're talking about. All that can do is help bring new customers in which should help all of us.

[Stuart DJ Purdie]

Furthermore, their server and warehouse space cannot possibly be unlimited!

With warehouse space, that's true.

On a server, it costs about 1 cent a megabyte, for high speed, high reliability backed up data, in the limit of a lot of data.

RPGnow take a 20% cut, so, it's viable for them to store a game that they only sell once, making a minimum of 100 cents.  The other costs they have do not scale per item stored (Or, rather, need not - I don't know how they do it, only how they could).  I don't have costs for bandwidth handy, but most of that will only get used after a sale is made.  (I've seen quotes of 0.5 cents a megabyte, in large quantities).  On a 5 MB PDF, the costs-per-item is around 8-9 cents.  Of course, there are far larger costs, in terms of getting the servers in the first place, people to adminstrate the systems, and people to deal with customers.  All of these, however, benefit from economy of scale.

The e-business model is one (the only one) that is viable on low turnover,  cheap products.  I think they'll do just fine, and they won't want to reduce thier vendor base (Particularly as there will be a high overlap between the vendor base and the small publisher base).

[Michael Hopcroft]

Furthermore, their server and warehouse space cannot possibly be unlimited!

With warehouse space, that's true.
The e-business model is one (the only one) that is viable on low turnover,  cheap products.  I think they'll do just fine, and they won't want to reduce thier vendor base (Particularly as there will be a high overlap between the vendor base and the small publisher base).

Given the very interesting exchange I just had with RPGNow, you may be right. They seem to still be interested in dealing with Seraphim Guard and want to help with HeartQuest 2nd Edition This should be interesting.