You've hit a very huge flaw in the P&P gaming business and I've never understood why it hasn't been corrected.FrankTrollman wrote:How could they?
Diamond Shipping is the sole distributor for the comic book industry and it does track sales of individual titles to retailers. It's actually publicly available information. I don't know if its sister company, Alliance Game Distributors, does the same thing for the gaming products it distributes. If it does, the info isn't available to anyone outside the manufacturing side. My point is that if a rinky-dink industry like mainstream comics can track how many units are being sent to retailers, it can be done for games. Which would allow, not only the public, but the actual license holder, to know how much product is floating around out there without having to rely on the word of a licensee. Why it's not, I have no clue.
As to why would they? It seems like corrupt practices in the gaming industry are such a common occurrence that if I were a license holder I'd want to make damn sure my money was coming in. But that could very well be my paranoid, non-trusting POV.
I'm certainly not doubting any of the facts you've posted, Frank. There was already plenty of shady shit going on at CGL before you broke the "co-mingling of funds" news. People who I really enjoyed working with quit due to idiotic decisions on the business side months ago and that pissed me off. It's only now that gamers' precious Shadowrun line is in jeopardy of disappearing indefinitely that anyone is sitting up and taking notice.
Wouldn't a strict and staggered schedule take care of that?FrankTrollman wrote:The fact is that you want something to sell every month or two. You don't want five things to print all at once half a year from now.
That's definitely a problem but it seems to stem from a mindset of "you write everything, it goes to print, then we pay you." Which I think is pretty bogus. In an ideal world, projects and assignments would be based on solid proposals which would foster real competition in the writers' pool and weed out the garbage. The writer whose proposal was selected could then receive a contractually based advance and payment at certain monthly stages of book production (first draft, revised draft, release, royalties, etc).FrankTrollman wrote:The other thing of course is that the writers would rather get a paycheck every month than a bigger paycheck twice a year. They have like, rent and shit. If you're paying 5 cents a word (and you should be), that 150k book is going to be worth $7,500(before royalties, which you should also be providing). That's really not very much, but the important thing is that if you're asking your writer to hold out for half a year before they see it, there is a very good chance that they'll have to bail on the project before it's done - and then everyone gets nothing. Much better to dangle $1,500 each in front of five different writers for the month and get things done.
No. Definitely not. But with SR and any other game that's hit the 15-year mark, you're not reinventing the wheel as a creator. With SR you're tweaking rules, streamlining rules, getting rid of bad rules, or adding some cool new ones based upon those that were created by Tom Dowd and company. It's not like the engine is completely unrecognizable from edition to edition even if there are some serious differences. And when it comes to source and setting books, 3/4ths of the material is already in existence from earlier editions. Writers take what they think is the best material, rewrite it in their own words, expand on some ideas, shrink others, and perhaps add a few new concepts. I like Seattle 2072 but it really is just Seattle Sourcebook with a fresh coat of paint. All the heavy lifting had already been done for that piece, at least in terms of writing. Except for Africa (okay, Lagos in Feral Cities was new), the world of SR has been pretty well charted. A space book might sell well and writers can always revisit old haunts like London or expand upon locales that were only briefly touched on in the Shadows of... books. But I can't see the license holder permitting (or players tolerating) a major change to the fictional world's status quo.FrankTrollman wrote:But remember: Synibarr has one author and took like 12 years to write, that's not really a valid direction either.
The only completely from scratch stuff that comes along are campaign books or canned adventures, but even then they're often sequels to earlier works or pull their source materials from unpublished drafts, like Ghost Cartels pulling from SoLA.
I do vehemently agree with your notion of a B Team consisting of part-timers creating secondary material, even if they're PDF-only adventures. The only way to maintain an engaged audience is to consistently produce material.
