The 2021 GURPS PDF Challenge

 

Oh good, a thing I can blog about.  All the cool kids are doing it!

SJGames just unveiled their latest GURPS Kickstarter: the 2021 GURPS PDF Challenge. This looks to be a follow-up on the success of last year's PDF challenge.  If you're interested, you should definitely go support it!  Since people have been complaining about it on my discord, I thought I would offer my thoughts on it too.

Good Job!

I wanted to start with the things I liked about it, and I think they learned quite a few things from their last run, so I see some improvements here and I wanted to highlight those.  

First, they didn't reveal all the stretch goals up front.  While I see some people complaining about that, I think it's a step in the right direction.  If you say "Here are the 12 PDFs, you get one for $3, and maybe the rest!" then people will decide that they, perhaps, like the last PDF and feel that anything short of that is a failed kickstarter.  This approach makes the result more of a surprise and keeps us engaged. Those of us already invested will keep coming back to see what it is, and our activity makes it more likely to draw others in.  This isn't a flawless win, though, because we're still describing it as a PDF challenge, and so even if I have no idea what the 12th PDF is, 11 will feel unsatisfying.  The ideal kickstarter to me has each new stretch goal feel like a wild success, not a failure to live up to my high expectations.  I understand this is a balancing act (these are designed to make me go nuts and try to get everyone to throw money at SJGames), but I'm not sure this is yet the ideal approach.

The second thing they did right is trim down the amount of "cheap" PDFs you could buy and replace it with cool swag.  This is also a step in the right direction.  See, I have stopped purchasing GURPS products.  It's not that I don't want them! It's that I know a kickstarter like this will be coming up.  So I wait, and once it comes out, I support on a higher tier and get those PDFs that I wanted.  This time, they bamboozled me with a sale and that spare PDF (that they just up and toss onto this kickstarter, which makes it feel like a "trick." Like I suspected they would do it, and they did.  I wouldn't have handled that particular thing that way, but I'll talk more about that later), but I still have more than enough of a backlog built up to make the $30 tier worth my while.  $100 might not have been possible, but that's why I think it was smart to reduce it and offer other things to entice people to buy.  My concern before was GURPS would become entirely dependent on the Kickstarter boom/bust cycle, but this reduces their dependency on it to sell their little PDFs. It makes it less likely that I'll only buy them during a kickstarter.

To Improve!

I'm still flummoxed by some of their choices, though, so I thought I would voice my thoughts, in case they were interested.

All the Little Things

Why are we doing a challenge for twelve, 10-page PDFs?  I've read that their market research says people only want little PDFs and not big, chonky works.

I don't know about their research or previous results, but color me skeptical. Of course, I personally am much more interested in detailed, thorough works that are well-researched and people will buy even if they don't have GURPS, you know, like in the good ol' days.  That's what drew a lot of people to GURPS in the first place. I think I've used a single PDF since the 2020 PDF challenge, Tricked-Out Rides.  These aren't useful to me.

Worse than that, isn't this what the Pyramid challenge is? What's the functional difference between a small article and a small PDF for most use cases? Isn't the point of "get a grab bag of small articles that may or may not be helpful" the whole point of the Pyramid Kickstarter? Oh, sure, technically these PDFs have more word count, but not by much, and certainly not on the order that I'd like to see.

As for "nobody wants big works anymore," GURPS ain't the only thing I back on Kickstarter, and literally everything else I've seen run on Kickstarter is either a big, beautiful, wildly overpriced book, or a boxed set. My big complaint about most RPG kickstarters is that I can't walk away for them for less than $100 and I fret about RPG prices. Some examples:

• 7th Sea
• Hyper Light Drifter: the RPG (terrible project, by the way)
• Everway
• Trinity: Adventure

Just to name a few.  The gold standard seems to be "big, expensive, beautiful luxury product" not "here's a handful of PDFs." I don't think people even make handfuls of PDFs anymore, with the possible exception of Paizo, who has a subscription model.

This is not to say that I necessarily object to the $3 pricetag. I think that's a fantastic idea; it reminds me of Alterna Comics and their $1 (now $1.50) price tag for comics, which puts entertainment back in the hands of the everyman, as opposed to becoming the exclusive domain of rich hipsters of the Pacific Northwest. So good for that, but I think there's room for more expansive supplements.

I suspect the problem is that it's harder to get someone to produce (and edit) one volume of, say, 100 pages than it is to get 12 people to write 10-page supplements.  But what about 3 40-page supplements, or 4 30-page supplements? Instead of a $3 pricetag, go with a $5 or $10 pricetag, and you get one of your choice (that's the other issue: what if they don't), a larger, $20 price tag for the whole bunch, and you could even have an unlock model if you wanted. But this would be more substantial. It's higher risk, but it's higher reward and I think we'd find it more satisfying.

Made in America

Look, I get it.  Like I said, I back a lot of kickstarters, and I live in Europe.  Last time I backed Adventure, the price tag for shipping was $50. For one book. That's insane.  It doesn't cost my parents that much to ship me a giant box filled with lbs of clothes.  But I follow economic news and I see what's going on with the shipping container industry, the backlog, the prices and, oh god, the Ever Given. I found myself thinking "Hey, I probably got a good deal on that $50 shipping."  So I get where SJGames is coming from when they talked about the price of shipping internationally with kickstarters, and why they won't ship physical products to non-Americans anymore.  I get that, I'm not complaining about that.

But while we took a big step forward by offering more than just "a backlog of PDFs" as higher-level bennies, I think we took a big step back by shutting all non-Americans out of most of those higher level items.  There's no reason for me to pledge $100+ if I'm not in America.  And a lot of us aren't in America: I can hardly be the only super-fan in Europe, and I know for a fact that they have a super-fan in New Zealand, and they're famously popular in Brazil.  So GURPS has an international following, but this kickstarter treats them like an afterthought.

I'm not saying they should ship outside the US.  I'm saying they should figure out more interesting digital bennies.  Have exclusive and interesting items that you can ship to off-shore people; if those items must be digital to be affordable, then cultivate interesting digital options. The idea of Kromm's unique PDF as a "pre-order exclusive" is an interesting model. I'd be careful with it, as it may backfire regarding sentiment, but the idea is sound. I don't think they should have offered it for their sale, and then turned around and put it in the kickstarter.  If they were going to do that, they should have said upfront that it would be in the kickstarter too, or they should have waited till next year (the way pre-order exclusives tend to be time-limited anyway).

For that matter, if they really don't mind the kickstarter boom/bust model, if they don't mind me holding onto my pennies to buy from them only once or twice a year, why not stop producing generic PDFs and only do kickstarter PDFs? Why not make Realm Management, DF Monsters 5: Demons, etc as "pre-order exclusives," things you can only pick up from the kickstarter, and then release them on Warehouse 23 a year later? That would actually solve a lot of problems that you see above, at the risk of aggravating your more sedate buyers who don't like the fuss of a kickstarter and will buy each PDF, but eventually they won't notice that much of a difference once the catalog evens out (if you're producing 5 such PDFs a year, they're still buying 5 such PDFs a year, they're just a year behind those who energetically back the kickstarters).

Also, how difficult would it be to create "gold foil" versions of these PDFs? Like I notice they're getting more full color art. Why not release a higher-tier version of a larger PDF with full color, some developer notes and some commentary as a bonus in the back, and splash "Limited edition" and put some the buyer's name and the edition run as a number as a water-mark and let them feel special.  It wouldn't be that much more work than creating the PDF in the first place, and it could be a higher tier, or something that you get from the kickstarter and nowhere else. It also doesn't "gate the rules."

I would mention other bennies, like badges, titles, digital collectibles, but I'm not sure how many IT resources they have, and at some point, if you have that much IT savvy, you make more money just trading on that IT savvy, as opposed to making RPGs, so I'm not entirely sure what resources they can offer there, or how reasonable it would be for us to expect something like that.  Steam can pull that sort of thing off, but they're literally a computer-game company.

I Backed It

Those are my thoughts on the matter, at least all that I can remember at the moment.  I'll certainly follow it, and I could follow this model for Pyramid forever.  But I'm not sure I'll keep backing these little chicken-scratch PDFs. I want and need more thorough treatments of my RPG material, and other companies are doing that.  There's room for little PDFs, but you can't maintain an RPG line on scraps like that forever.  We need some big, beautiful books, and we need to support the international audience.  That said, I think SJgames is feeling their way through this. It worked last time, so why not try again? And they didn't just rest on their laurels, they're trying new things here, so I have hope that they'll keep trying new things and get it right in the long run.  So, I'll keep my eyes on it.