Origins 2013 and Lessons Learned, Part 1 of X

So a blog that I recently found and am utterly fascinated by– How Not To Run A Game Business–occasionally chastises RPG companies for publicly bemoaning and bitching about poor sales. Which is exactly the thing that drives away customers. I certainly agree with this in general, but I’m afraid that’s not enough to overcome my natural instinct for candor. If it helps, this post isn’t really about poor sales. I don’t actually think our sales at Origins were poor at all (although the ghetto-like position of the entrepreneur program booth spaces behind a long gauntlet of huge retailers eager to remove customers of all their monies before they reached the indies and artists certainly didn’t help), so what this post is really about is that I am an idiot with no idea how to estimate demand.

Welp.

So, notwithstanding a really decent gross for a small-press RPG company, Origins 2013 was a financial disaster. Now that I’ve had some time to process, I am less than shocked. I am a creative type, with all the business acumen of a capybara.

Not known for their shrewd business maneuvering.

In spite of being a financial disaster, Origins was, experientially speaking, invaluable. We gave away a shit-ton of business cards to potential future customers. I got to talk business with IPR chief, serial gaming entrepreneur, and author Jason Walters and talk superheroes with (my hero on the level of prolific++ alone, if nothing else) Steve Long, both of which were super-duper nice and accessible in spite of my fannish overenthusiasm/moping about how much money ETG was losing.

I made who knows how many other valuable connections with industry people, creators, and fans, got to meet not one but two incredible gamers/cancer survivors, while spending the entire week with my booth parked right next to the guys from Castles & Chemo (who deserve your nerd-dollar more than any other charity I can think of). I bought a copy of second edition Shadowrun for a song and got Larry (motherfucking) Elmore to sign the cover for me. I wouldn’t necessarily say I had a good time in a “yay party funtime” sense, being at the con and selling games every day was hard work and an exhausting 9-5 grind, to say nothing of getting the books there (and getting all the crap I bought back), but I do feel like I’ve gotten enough XP to go up a level. And it’s a good feeling. But even gaining all that XP, we lost a lot of gold.

Let me back this up and say that Origins 2013 was our first time exhibiting at a major con and we had…close to no idea what to expect. It wasn’t the hotel fee or the airfare itself that really killed us, and the entrepreneur booth fee was actually pretty reasonable (and made back quickly enough) though, it was my inability to reasonably estimate demand for our products. See I had read that a small RPG industry print run was 3,000 copies. A tiny print run was 1,000 copies. I thought that going with a quarter of a tiny print run…250 copies…would be about right for a con with 11,000+ attendees for our “big” Origins 2013 exclusive release, The Singularity System. Assuming that 2.5% of the people there could be sold a copy of singularity system, we’d sell through all of that. Assuming only 1%, we’d still have plenty of copies left for GenCon. Among the things I had no clue about, one of them was just how much MASS 250 copies of a hardcover book, plus 100 copies of Splinter, 100 Copies each of Wild Talents and Biotech, and a few dozen leftover copies of Phantasm(2010) and Anathema would constitute. As it turns out, about 750 goddamn pounds.

For the first time, our tiny little indie company had to deal with big-boy words like Logistics, Distribution, and Shipping. With no time to make other arrangements, I saw no choice but to send a pallet with most of our stock via UPS freight to Origins. The cost was high, but not unreasonable or prohibitive. However, I was (rightfully) terrified that the stock would not make it there on time. In point of fact, it didn’t, and UPS Freight screwed up the delivery so terribly that I intend to seek a refund, but that’s a story for another day. So, my “brilliant” plan was to split off maybe an eight of our books and fly with them on the airplane. It’s not exactly that I completely forgot about overweight bag fees, just that I had no idea how absurdly they scaled. For the two 90-something pound mega-bags of merchandise that we checked on the plane, plus one regular piece of luggage, we wound up getting charged $485 goddamned dollars. $200 (!) for each bag in the 71-99 Lb. range (fuck you very much American Airlines), plus $85 just for having three bags to begin with. This was…brutal. Without verging into TOO much transparency, this was literally more than it cost us to ship the other 650 lbs. of books from Tarrytown, New York to Columbus, Ohio with UPS Freight (although at least the mega-bags we dragged with us got there on time). Still, I reasoned, 250 copies was a small print run. This con had 11,000+ attendees, their website even said so (I didn’t know then that they counted unique badges, not actual attendees)…surely 1% would want our product. Surely we’d need all these books to satisfy demand.

Welp…later on I learned that Shadowrun 5E (which, by the way, I wrote part of) had only around 250 copies at Origins…in spite of Catalyst having bought out the front cover of the program guide, gigantic posters and standees throughout the convention center, 20+ tables throughout the roleplaying room, and a gigantic (30′x30′?) booth RIGHT IN FRONT of the Exhibitor’s Hall doors. Now to be fair, CGL sold all of the copies of SR5 they brought within a couple days, so I think they might have underestimated their demand…but nowhere near as much as I overestimated mine.

We sold out of the stock we brought with us by air, and even then, only barely. The stack of boxes that formed the back of our display for the whole con, the one we’d wrestled with UPS Freight to get there, went untouched until teardown on Sunday, when they were sent on to GenCon (where hopefully, such a level of supply will not be totally unneeded).

In the end, End Transmission printed and brought as many copies of The Singularity System (1st Edition) as Catalyst Game Labs brought of Shadowrun (5th Edition). In spite of the fact that I know full-well the disparity in brand recognition between our brand new game and Shadowrun’s 24+ years of established brand loyalty and fan base. Of course, I assumed CGL would be bringing around 2500 copies of SR5.

Lesson #1: The RPG Industry is a lot smaller than I thought it was.

Is This Thing On? From Here To Obscurity

So I have been making games quite seriously since 2000 and intermittently and half-heartedly “blogging” (that’s a word now, right?) about it since 2010 or so. But unless I know you in real life, you haven’t heard of me, or my games, and you don’t know my name. I work professionally in the RPG industry, both as a creator-owner-publisher of End Transmission Games and a freelancer, but my level of acuity at self-promotion isn’t professional, it isn’t talented amateur, it isn’t dabbling hobbyist, it’s downright incompetent.

I don’t know how to use the interwebs to draw attention to myself without being annoying. How does one not be ignored? This blog is a prime example; it doesn’t have a lot of readers. It also doesn’t have a lot of content. Which is the chicken and which the egg, who can say.

For years, I’ve been watching as writers, creators and entrepreneurs have successfully leveraged internet popularity and visibility into establishing promising brands; creative and ambitious people with far more marketing/promotional know-how than I have, even if they perhaps don’t have the same level of writing/design acumen that I do. Of course, maybe that’s just jealousy talking; there’s a sin of the seven I hit harder than that one, I know not which.

Anyway, in spite of a pronounced lack of early success at getting the internets to recognize I exist (and who wants to read about someone bemoaning their obscurity), I have doubled down with the recent investment of cash, time, and energy into End Transmission Games, my RPG Imprint. Following this flood of money, time, and energy, I must make enough noise about our little endeavor to become noticed. Because RPGs can’t really exist without fanbases, and companies can’t exist or at least can’t be successful without large mobs of vocal customers. No one could possibly be less suited for the task of promotion marketing than me, a person so private they’re afraid to use facebook to connect to their own social life. Yet…not doing it has clearly been no answer at all. And so I must venture out past the mine field of my own social anxiety into the land of the trolls. Man vs. Internet, Round XII. Wish me luck.

What are the odds of THAT?

What’s in a name? Sometimes kind of a lot. So, ironically, enough, I’ve been getting into Rifts lately, and when googling it, frequently wind up accidentally reading something about this MMORPG called “RIFT”. Well, I thought to myself jokingly, “I wonder if Kevin Siembieda is sewing those RIFT guys over his ownership of the Rifts trademark, being a notoriously litigious sort”. Turns out, he did exactly that.

Where does the irony come in? This google trail lead me to discover that there is apparently ALREADY an established tabletop roleplaying game system called the Cinema6 System. Fuck, fuck, fuck, and also shit! That is what I called the (completely unrelated) system that End Transmission Games uses for Phantasm(2010) and the upcoming Psionics RPG, because I thought it was a clever, original name, and I had absolutely no idea that Wicked North Games had already released an RPG product, related to Open D6, called Cinema6. (I knew right off the bat that I couldn’t call my D6 based system “The D6 System” because that ones is taken, but I had absolutely no idea that there was a spinoff of the D6 System called OpenD6 and a spinoff of that called Cinema6. I picked the name Cinema6 completely independently, since my game design DNA doesn’t intersect with the D6 system at all, and it’s a hell of a coincidence that an existing system of that name already exists.)

And this is why I hate naming things, because literally everything is always taken, and I can see how one can become driven to Kevin Siembieda like levels of litigiousness with “World of Warhammer Online Craft” chicken-or-the-egg syndrome. Back to the drawing board…

Tell It To Them Straight

“A cold wind off the Puget Sound stirs your hair and clothing from behind, causing the nylon-wings of the ultralight to rustle with an almost silent whisper of plastic fabric. Below you and before you glitters the firmament of Seattle’s night-time skyline, blazing to shame the stars that mirror it in the blackened sky above. The lights of corporate skyrakers and VTOL landing pads glisten with every color of the artificial light rainbow, like conflict gemstones scattered across black sand. Patches of dark clouds rolling across the night sky release flurries of snow and icy crystals of freezing rain. The precipitation makes the world look grainy and lo-res, like the feed from a CCTV camera.

Above your head, the red glow of the Space Needle’s spire radiates downwards, a hell-red beacon beckoning power to corruption, and guiding corruption to power. The 184 meter landmark is dwarfed by the corporate monoliths that rise above it in all directions, creating a sheer, vertical divide, in plascrete and mirrorglass, between Seattle’s haves and have-nots. But from the top of the structure looking down, it doesn’t seem all that short.

A final check of the Nightwing’s status reveals green across the board; the ultralight is more of a glider than a plane, but what it lacks in reassuring bulk and safety features it makes up for with its whisper quiet engine and radar absorbent wing span. The wind is picking up, and the dark clouds seem to be coalescing into something bigger and more sinister. In other words, there is no time like the present. With a silent prayer to whatever Power you think most likely to answer, you shuffle forward, carrying the glider with you off the edge.

You have a moment to contemplate how Icarus must have felt when he reached his unexpected zenith and began to fall–oh drek, he must have thought–and then a thermal current slows your descent into a controllable glide, and you watch the parallax shadowscape of Seattle scroll past below you. You can’t see your house from here, but landmarks like the Aztechnology pyramid and the massive, illuminated bulk of the Renraku arcology are visible. The few downtown blocks between you and the Brackhaven Investments skyscraper slide away quickly as you fly south, and then veer to the east.

In the streets below, the protests and picketers writhe back and forth, clashing with the line of metroplex guards and Knight Errant cops; from up here it looks like two armies of different colored ants fighting a war over picnic crumbs. Lifting your gaze, you see the helipads on the roof of the BI building, flashing with blinking red landing lights, the corners of the building blazing with arc-sodium searchlights that illuminate the mercury-dark slivers of falling rain and snow. Behind you is the cold wind, off the Puget Sound. Below you is a 160 meter drop to the uncaring streets below. Ahead of you is the anti-aircraft radar that needs to be hacked, the shield-wall of maglocks that need to be sleazed, a symphony of alarms that need to be silenced, and a small army of corpsec guards to deal with.

  You can’t help but smile.” 

I Am Grimm Shado, And I Am Here To Take It To The Limit (This Is A Post About A Lot Of Things)

Randomly wanting to stat Grimm Shado as a 20th Level Warlock for 3.5e D&D. He would then be a Warlock…and a Witchalock. God help us all.

I have been busy! I’m really not a blogger, I’m really not, it sucks because it doesn’t help my company not WALLOW IN OBSCURITY FOR ALL TIME AND FOREVER. I’m no marketing guru, but even I know that our near-absolute lack of a digital presence on the intarwebs is, as one playtester once commented with famous eloquence, “less than good”.

Aliens: Colonial Marines is bad, but not terribad as some would have you believe. I have been psyched for this game to come out since I was 10 years old, so it’s difficult to retain intellectual honesty in the face of 16+ years of hopes completely dashed. I think that a lot of the gaming media feels the same way: it’s not that the game is THAT BAD, it’s that it could have been SO GOOD. But it’s hard to maintain that dispassionate, objective intellectual honesty when your child dreams have been directly pooped on.

My warmest childhood memories are of my (awesome) dad watching Aliens with me over and over–one of the reasons my dad is so awesome is because he showed me Aliens when I was around 9 or 10. It is literally my favorite movie of all time, and I have every line memorized. It was born the same time as me, after all (1986), and I grew up with it. It’s my primary fandom, and I’m in love with/obsessed with every single aspect of it.

Aliens:CM isn’t a completely unfun game. It’s not totally broken and unplayable. It’s just…unforgivably sloppy for a full budget, full retail title, it’s lacking in fear factor compared to dead space (Alien Acid doesn’t even deal damage, it just stops you from regenerating). The bugs (the technical kind, not xenomorphs) are offensive, and there are some design decisions that made me grit my teeth in rage (you can put a red dot sight on your pulse rifle and a custom paint job too, because as one reviewer put it, this is Aliens: Black Ops. It gets worse, though, because a bunch of boring, silly, apocryphal weapons are added to the roster: you get an SMG, a battle rifle, and an assault rifle to unlock on top of your pulse rifle. Why would I want to use that when the super-iconic and awesome pulse rifle is available from the beginning, and mechanically better?

But really what’s most surprising is…ok, apart from the bugs, this is a good looking game. I don’t think the sound design is lacking. Even if the alien AI is retarded and the mechanics badly balanced, the xenomorphs LOOK good. The environments look amazing. The flaweless recreation of the Hadley’s Hope colony practically gave me chills. But the writing is so godawful it made me want to vomit, on every level, from sentence by sentence characterization and dialogue to the overall plot and storytelling. I don’t get it, guys. You sank how many millions of dollars into this license? This property? This game? And you couldn’t afford a writer with some idea how to handle the property? Fuck, I would have done it, I work cheap. I can’t say I’d have done an awesome job, but I could have at least got it somewhat closer to the AAA job this title deserved and not the aborted mess we got.

I don’t know, on some level I should be grateful. As a creator, it is useful to have an opportunity to dissect an absolute creative failure…

(Is that a good or bad segue? Probably bad…)

Speaking of failure, a helpful potential fan just shot me an e-mail asking me what the Races of Splinter were. Which reminded me that I have been promoting Splinter for the better part of a year now while being unintentionally cagey about stuff players might want to know…like the PLAYABLE RACES. So I should do a Races of Splinter thing here or on the ETG Tumblr soon now. This is a note to myself: do that.

Have I mentioned I’ve been busy? As I mentioned, I’ve been busy. I have not been working on the expansion books for SPLINTER as much as I should have been. I haven’t been promoting EtG online at all. I certainly haven’t been taking good care of my health, kicking back, or relaxing. But when I haven’t been struggling with my worsening Galactic Civilizations II and Dwarf Fortress addictions or Christmas-binging on Halo 4, Hitman: Absolution, Far Cry 3 and company…

Well, for starters, I worked as one of the developers on a little game you might have heard of called Shadowrun 5th Edition for much of last year. Of course, the life cycle of Fourth Edition isn’t up yet, so last year I also worked on some plot books, some adventure books, a supplement about Street Samurai, and a HUGE upcoming plot book that I don’t even think I’m technically allowed to talk about (it’s gonna be BIG, and is the largest explosion of a corner of the Sixth World I’ve been greenlit to detonate yet). And now I’m currently working on the first, introductory adventure of Fifth Edition. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I am writing the introductory adventure for Fifth Edition Shadowrun. All by myself. I am the guy. I wanted to be the guy, and now I’m the guy. It’s awesome…it’s also very scary. Being the guy is scary. My eloquence reigns supreme.

But for every hour I’ve put into Shadowrun, I’ve put another hour into End Transmission. I’ve got a whole new IP/title/game/game line getting ready to launch, along with multiple expansion packs set to go live within a month or two of launch. It’s called The Singularity System, a highly customizable and streamlined toolkit for science fiction roleplaying with a focus on kickass vehicle and starship combat. You can read my overly enthusiastic ramblings about it here.

I think that’s everything. I did it. Even though everything about my nature is anti-blogian. Sure it’s a rambling mess with all of the structural nicety of an exploded corpse but I blogged. Can I have a cookie now?

Phantasm(2010) Launch Imminent

My cinematic grindhouse horror RPG, Phantasm(2010), the old ghetto-booty version of which can be found here, will be launching in a beautiful full color PDF version as the launch of the Cinema6 System!

Look for it on DriveThru RPG from End Transmission Games next Saturday, December 8th! FOR FREE! For really!

-DTO Out

I Am Genni Conner

 

GenCon 2012 Report

Teh Shadowruns:
Went from running ~24 hours of Shadowrun: Missions at 2011 GenCon to running ~0 hours of it at 2012 GenCon. Unsurprisingly, this year’s GenCon was moderately less stressful. I even got to actually play some Shadowrun (unheard of!) with Mikaela, an official Mission, the Missions tournament (very unofficially), and even a couple hours of the Scramble (Shadowrun LARP!), which I wish I could have played more of. All very fun. Actually playing Shadowrun, with lots of people who know how to play Shadowrun, is awesome. And the sheer amount of hype and buzz and general talking up SR was getting all around the con was amazing. Markedly more people talking about SR, flipping through SR core books, and wearing Shadowrun merch. I blame Jordan Weisman, and Shadowrun Returns.

And my very first ever game of Eclipse Phase, at noon on Sunday, was a great capstone to the con, and a bunch of fun.

S P L I N T E R:
Next year, I want different time slots and more advertising g’darnit! 3PM-9PM Friday and Saturday was inconvenient for various reasons. Friday was a complete no show (our first ever!), nobody showed up, and we couldn’t get into the Press room, and we couldn’t get into the Indie Games On Demand room on zero notice and run there, it was too tightly structured for that. So the day was kind of a total loss for End Transmission.

I did get to meet Rob Trimarco and Jay Stratton of Pantheon Press, which was pretty cool, and swapped them a copy of Splinter for a copy of Fortune’s Fool and a campaign book. They seemed like really nice guys, although I myself was a bit flusterated at the time. Did I mention Mikaela and I did the entire con with a brutal, unshakable of the flu. (And probably infected dozens if not hundreds of unsuspecting gamers. Sorry guys!)

Saturday I actually got like people who wanted to play the game, which was pretty cool! Four players, plus Mik who filled in, for a very satisfying demo. All of the players really dug the game, and it was a very satisfying experience. Unfortunately, I had to duck out early to attend an important Shadowrun meeting. Gah! Wearing two hats, Indie Creator Publisher/Shadowrun Freelancer was a surprisingly difficult balancing act during the con. It’s something I’ll have to pay more attention to in future years.

On Sunday at the dealer’s room, I bought a copy of Eclipse Phase, but ran out of patience/courage before I approached personal hero/total badass Adam Jury to have him sign my SR4A rulebook and rap with him about the industry. But I did get to stop by the (shared) Machine Age booth to talk with fellow Shadowrun writer and indie game designer David A. Hill, albeit much more briefly than I would have liked. I traded him Splinter for a copy of Maschine Zeit and a copy of Farewell to Fear. It’s not money (sigh) but I’d have bought Maschine Zeit anyway, so yeah.

While the business of getting there was a nightmare best not related, all in all actually attending the con was quite fun, reasonably (but not wildly) successful, and unsurprisingly exhausting. As expected, our potential sales don’t remotely justify our expenses, but hopefully we’re beginning to get the word out about Splinter.

In coming posts I’ll hopefully tell you about the other games we’re working on releasing in the next year or so. For now, SLEEP! Or something like it.

-DTO 

P.S. This blog, which was initially designed for talking about the projects of mine that fell through the cracks between Systems Malfunction and Shadowrun, is kind of in a very hazy area right now, purpose wise, since those projects are now being actively published and promoted by End Transmission Games (that’s me!). I guess in the future this blog will be used more for random musings on game design, rather than/in between mirroring the content from the ET games website.