Is Kickstarter the Future of GURPS?

"The part that annoys me is that, given how successful this Kickstarter has been, they're probably going to use the same model for future projects." --A Patron

I promise, I'll get back to Psi-Wars soon. I've build quite a back-log of mostly-finished material, and I took next week off.  Just permit me more armchair-publisher analysis, as I enjoy it.

So when I first started talking about my excitement for this, I saw some pushback, some disgruntled complaining, and I think the comment above captures the fear of these Kickstarter-dissidents.  So I thought I'd talk about my thoughts as to whether or not we'll be seeing more of this sort of campaign and why.  Note that I'm not a publisher, I don't have any contacts in the market (I mean, sometimes Douglas Cole talks to me, but hell, he'll probably talk to you too), all I know is what I read from actual publishers, publicly available material that you can read too, and how I see the market moving, and I can only speculate as to why.  So that's all this is: me speculating.

Yeah, I think this sort of project is the future of GURPS.  If you don't like Kickstarter, you don't need to worry about it, though, other than the fact that you're going to get blasted with hype about twice a year, as that's the point of doing it this way.

Okay, so let's go back in time.  It's the 90s.  All the girls either wear grunge or look like Jennifer Anniston.  Starbucks isn't a thing yet.  Your FLGS is still up. You step in, the bell rings, the lady or the neckbeard behind the counter smiles at you, or glares at you like you interrupted his private meditation, whatever.  It smells of acryllic paints and old books.  Why are you here? To get your preorder.

Back in ye olde days,  we had the three tier model (comics still have it, but I predict COVID and the collapse of Diamond has probably killed it; it's certainly killed Diamond's monopoly on comic distribution). The publisher would write a book, get art, toss it all together, decide how many to print (1,000? 5,000? 10,000? 50,000?) and then send the results to the distributor, who would shop it around to stores, like your FLGS.  But there's a catch here, because the tax man will come for your inventory.  If you print 50,000 copies and send off 5,000 to the distributor, and you're sitting on 45,000 and you give them a price of $20, then you have $9,000,000 worth of inventory that you're sitting on.  It interests the tax man not at all that you didn't even sell the full 5,000 and those most of those books, perhaps even all of them, are worthless. You still have to pay taxes on them.  So, it's better to only print what you know will sell, and pulp any excesses (Yeah, that's terrible; I think it's a horrible law).

So, publishers have been looking for forever for a way to gauge how much interest there actually is.  So you announce your product in advance, perhaps at a convention. You see what the responses are. You have, perhaps, some prototypes to show off. Is your booth flooded? Or is there no interest?  But you can also work closely with retailers, or your distributor will, and get a sense of how many copies each shop thinks it can sell.  And one way to do that, after announcing it, is to suggest that shops could try to ask people if they want them to order them a copy in advance, to pre-order it.

We don't live in that era anymore.  You can't pulp PDFs, and if the tax man comes by and asks how many copies you have, you can say "Well, technically one." He can't even tax PODs that way.  So we've managed to escape the tyranny of the tax man here: we can effectively have an infinite number of copies of our product and pulp none of them, because we don't have to pay for what is not yet real.  We only pay at the moment of transaction (which, frankly, is how it should have always been). BUT the pre-order cycle did something else, something emergent: it drove sales.

By going to the convention and hawking your wares, by talking up your game, by getting stores to talk it up, people knew about it and decided for themselves if it interested them.  And the truth is, most of this stuff interests us.  There's more out there that we like than we can afford, so we only buy what we're focused on.  Pre-order hype focuses our attention and gets us to buy what we might have missed. You don't need pre-orders to know how many PODs or PDFs "to print," but you still need it to drive sales.

This is how the industry works today.  The whole industry.  It's driven by cycles of Kickstarter boom and bust, and the long tail of its PDF distribution.

For example, I follow quite a few other RPGs: 7th Sea, Exalted, etc.  I only began to re-explore Exalted again rather recently, and you can just buy their PDFs or PODs on DTRPG, which is also true of 7th Sea.  And yet every book larger than a couple of pages is kickstarted.  Every one of them.  Now, ostensibly this is for printing, but given that you can buy PODs, this just isn't strictly necessary. What it does do is drive audience interest.  If there's an Exalted campaign, people go "OMG! Exalted is back?  Oh, it's the (splat)! I love the (splat)! I'll go fund for the ultra deluxe version, or eh, I'll just at least back it and track it."  They know it's alive.

Here's the problem with GURPS: GURPS has been alive for a long, long time, but I swear to you, outside of the SJGames forums and the Discord, most of the rest of the RPG world thought it was dead.  There was a lot of surprise about GURPS "coming back" in the form of Dungeon Fantasy.  They thought it was a new edition.  They thought it had been dead for a good 10 years.  The DFRPG was the first they had heard of it again for a long time.  Why? Because the rest of the market is on kickstarter, and GURPS is not.

Now GURPS is.

So here's what I predict, given the likely success of this project, for GURPS moving forward: I think we'll see more of a drive for this sort of kickstarter-hostage model.  I think we might also see some big GURPS books go on kickstarter too (frankly, Vehicles should be kickstarted.  I know SJGames is afraid of it, they think Vehicles is the most despised book they ever created, but it's also the most remembered book, a sort of exposure and market presence you can't pay for, and while the RPG market is pushing towards simpler and more streamlined, there's a counter-push for bigger and more complex.   Yes, it's got a more niche appeal, but marketed right as an aggressively complex work, SJGames can be both cheeky and appeal very strongly to the sort of people they appealed to in the first place).  But I think whatever comes out of these will end up on Warehouse 23 anyway.  They always do.  I highly doubt that if the Kickstarter fails to unlock Megadungeons that it'll never see the light of day: it exists. You'll just have to buy it on Warehouse 23 like all the rest of the peasants, instead of getting it "for free" with the glorious $3.

The point of these kickstarters are the hype and the campaign.  It's marketing.  They need to grab your attention to get you to buy them. If you're here, reading this, you probably already know GURPS, you don't need marketing.  I didn't.  But if GURPS is going to survive, it needs to grow.  You can't just introduce people to it in your FLGS because it doesn't exist anymore. With COVID, you can't even demo it at conventions.  You have to appear to be alive and vibrant and you have to get it in front of people, and you do that with a kickstarter.

Just go look at the numbers!  There's a level for getting the 12-ish PDFs and the basic set.  Just, explicitly, the basic set.  As of this writing, it has 44 backers.  That's forty four people who didn't own GURPS and now will, because of this kickstarter.  And I've seen comments asking if you can buy the basic set with the $99 level. So how many GURPS noobs are actually buying in at other levels?  The last I checked before the kickstarter launched it had ~500 followers.  It has 1500 backers now.  That means there were 500 die-hard "we check the Illuminator or the Facebook group and knew about this already" fans, the sort that would dutifully go to your shop and buy your new PDF when you mentioned it on those places.  This has three times as many backers, and isn't even done yet.  Kickstarter has vastly more reach than Warehouse 23 does.  So, yes, this will be the future of SJGames, I think.  Just like it's the future of just about every other RPG company, and increasingly indie comics and indie computer games.

"Oh no, I don't like that, I don't want to be involved in that." I think you're safe.  Like I said, I can't imagine they won't put these up for sale on Warehouse 23 when all is said and done.  And if you're doing it twice a year, that's 24 PDFs a year, which is more PDFs than we got from SJGames during the better years during the heyday of Warehouse 23 (back when it was e23. Oh, those were the days).  Of course, you're better off buying them via this $3 deal, because $6 for all the PDFs SJGames produces in a year is a steal and it helps people out, which means your wallet is better off following the boom and bust of Kickstarter, and I can see where that puts one in a bind, because if you just ignore the hoopla, you miss out on savings. I can't help you there.  I can understand the frustration.  The best I can suggest is drop $3 on the project and then go dark for the next couple of weeks, collect whatever pops out, and then buy the ones you actually wanted, if they didn't get kickstarted.  If you find that the ones you want regularly aren't getting reached (like if all you want is Megadungeons and it doesn't drop, and that seems to keep happening) then you can safely ignore the kickstarters.