Successful RPG Line

[Ian O'Rourke]

On 2001-12-17 00:59, pblock wrote:

Not a horrible idea.  I think they do that with White Dwarf, too.  But is it a commercially viable one?  That is the real question.

I get the feeling it would be a milage may vary.

I think you hit the fanbase problem again - if your fanbase is not big your magazine is not going to increase the fanbase. If your fanbase is big (WotC/WW) then your mag may well survive but your building on the good numbers anyway.

In my experience, though this is a UK perpective, any gaming magazine beyond a fanzine cannot survive in the UK. Numerous people have tried it in numerous models and they don't really survive by any business definition of the word.

[Anon LeBlanc]

 This Message was edited by: Anon LeBlanc on 2001-12-17 10:30 ]

[Ron Edwards]

With a sidelong glance at Anon, two points.

1) I forgot to mention in my last post that Gareth and I clearly disagree about the "conflict of interest" issue among the tiers of RPG commerce. That's definitely a subject for another thread, but I didn't want to deal with it here by pretending it hadn't come up.

2) The Forge is indeed a mechanism such as this whole thread called for. "How do we promote our games?" "How do we generate a user base for our games?" "How do we provide ongoing contact for the user base?" The entire vision for this site is to provide such a service, at the boundary of design and commerce (or free distribution, your choice).

This can work at the individual as well as group level. I strongly urge anyone who asks the question that defines this thread to consider your website to be your company magazine.

Best,
Ron

[Ian O'Rourke]

On 2001-12-17 11:52, Ron Edwards wrote:

This can work at the individual as well as group level. I strongly urge anyone who asks the question that defines this thread to consider your website to be your company magazine.

An excellent idea. In the UK magazines tended to fail because you could not satisfy enough of the market to make a profit (or in one case enough of a profit) to make it worthwhile. I assume this links into the base market as a whole, as if your maximum readership is small, but the time you cut that down because: you mag does not have adventures in, covers CCG's or has nothing in for the one game I play - you end up with a relatively small readership.

It's all a bit fragmented. And of course, a lot of gamers don't buy a mag because they can get it off the web, so they say, which links into the above.

[Ryan Ary]

One way MANY d20 publishers are building a fanbase is simply providing a tremendous volume of web enhancements for their products. In this way, new user's see the free material and (if it any good) become interested in the for sale material.
Clearly, many net prowlers are just scroungers and will never buy. That actually is one possible reason to make the majority of the material available only to paying customers via a code in the product that gives them access to limited access webpages (of course this isn't perfect but magazines get read and never purchased in the point of sale too). In principle, the stuff the web browser can't see might be more enticing than the stuff he or she can. Moreover, the cost saved in not printing material intended for a product anyway may be very much better than that made by a struggling or even marginally sucessful magazine. The key is making sure customers know the website and material is there. Clearly spelling that out for them in the product is important but creating news for traffic sites (like Eric Noah's) is as well.    

my 2p

Ryan