Forum > Order of the Iron Crown
When do i pull my sword??
MikeG:
ok i have a pretty popular game store here in Fresno CA they host quarterly RPG meetups, have an annual mini con and cosponsored Fresno's first con. the problem i have is convincing them i am serious. I can demo game systems. However the only way to get them on board is if ICE products are available for sale at the store. How shall i proceed? :'(
Wolfhound:
Note, that I'm not a member of the ICE staff (only a freelance writer and play-tester for them), so my comments here are not official or coming from them directly.
This has been an issue for quite some time, as the original ICE management was hurt by a poorly managed and underhanded distributor; which via some financial issues caused a change in management. However the changed management, did not manage things very well at all and made a lot of very poor decisions with one of them being only carrying things via online orders directly from them, which pretty much meant that their sales fell off a cliff and they didn't do anything productive to try to fix those issues. Which in-turn resulted in another change in management, with the new management being much better, but struggling to fix the problems created by the previous horrible management team.
This issue of stores not being able to get a hold of products has been a major hurtle for them, but it is also a common problem for several other game companies that now distribute through their new supplier (RPGNow.com (and its family of other web sites) which started out only doing electronic (usually pdf) versions of games, but which expanded into doing "print on demand" for actual physical books). This supplier has been talking for a while now about a couple of possible solutions to this problem as listed below:
One is to allow physical ("brick and mortar" stores) to get set up with them (RPGNow.com) with an electronic storefront from which people can order the books directly from the printer/supplier, but for which the actual gaming store gets a small cut of the profits (for sending the customers to RPGNow.com) and RPGNow.com would do the same Print on Demand printing to supply copies as they are ordered. There are a couple of minor flaws with this potential option though as I suspect that the profit with this model is probably very small due to the fact that RPGNow.com does most of the work and the physical store owners only have to direct people in that direction). The other issue with this method is that there are no actual physical copies of the books in the store for people to pick up and look through to see if it is something that they would like to buy (although if you were to do demo's that would help to alleviate that issue at least partially), and since a very large number of the small-press RPG's in the past have been a "spur of the moment" purchase because someone picked something up that they thought looked cool its chances of being a good and profitable model for the physical store is small. This method I know has been tested to a small degree with a few physical retailers, but not sure how successful it has been.
The other option that RPGNow.com has been talking about for even longer (but last I've heard they still haven't started to try this yet, and I first heard about it about 3 years ago) is to still do the print on demand system as above but doing larger print runs for retailers who order modest quantities of a particular book (and if they combined several of these orders from different retailers and did a singe larger print run it would save costs) at a reduced price via this method, then RPGNow.com could ship them boxes for their order at a reduced price, so that the retailers could then list them for the same price as ordering them online via the print-on-demand method that is already being used for the physical books. Which in my opinion is the way to go, but not sure why RPGNow.com has not yet implemented this method, but hopefully they will in the near future.
But again, I'm only speaking from talks that I've had with RPGNow.com customer service and others, so not sure what the status of such a system are or where RPGNow.com is in the process of trying to get one of them set up. But I do know that the new ICE management is trying to pursue one of these types of methods as they realize the value of having a presence on the shelf of local gaming stores. And this may not be the "official" plan of ICE, as I have not talked about it with anyone from ICE in a while about it.
markc:
For Official Inquiries you should contact John Seal whose info is John @ ironcrown (no spaces).
But what Wholfhound has posted above is what I have heard in the past and I have not heard anything new, but I am a volunteer only.
MDC
Cory Magel:
I'll never buy into a game system that I can't look into first. This, essentially, means I need a copy to read though and decide if I like it or someone who is familiar with it to show it to me or full on demo it.
So... two thoughts...
FIRST...
If it's an electronic copy (and we'll say for arguments sake I am ignorant to the idea of or have no respect for the work put into it - which is a large group) why would I then go buy the book? I've already got an electronic copy.
SECOND...
The store needs to realize that getting people interested in the game system could help proactively make it worth their time to then order hard copies of the book to have on the shelf... and therefore only good can come from you demo'ing the game in their store so long as they are willing to support the product if people like/want it. The problem also then becomes, do they think it's taking possible sales away from game systems they already sell and possibly make more profit on?
I like to think my perspective is pretty balanced. I've done freelance RPG work, I've worked for WotC, I've worked with gaming stores, and I've been a fan/customer of RPG's most my life... so I see it from all the angles. The most current "ICE" is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It pretty much comes down to: You need to have money to market, you must market to sell product, you need to sell product to get money.
John @ ICE:
Hi Folks:
Believe me when I tell you we talk about this EVERY year. We WANT to do it, but there are a number of hurdles. Here are the facts:
1) Firstly, ICE has limited staff. Its not that capital is a problem - we have access to that, its that it takes a lot of time (and that means more employees and that's even MORE cash needed) to actually manage a retailer/distributor/print run process.
2) RISK - And the risk of losses are far greater. You may print 10,000 books, but unless you sell about 6,000, you don't break even. All your profit is in the LAST 4,000 books, the hardest to sell. And given the state of bricks and mortar, this is a high risk. So the risk/return trade off appears to be a poor one.
3) Print on demand is VERY efficient. ZERO risk to us and to RPGNow. The negative is that people cant feel and see the product in a shop. But the mitigant to that is people are increasingly becoming comfortable with buying online where they cant see and feel it in advance.
4) RPGNow have talked about having a B&M program. But I think they are full of it. Why would they do it? they have no desire or interest to support a competing format of sales. They will talk about it, but never do it. We have talked about retailers purchasing at RPG Now where we make no profit such that RPGNow gets its print costs/margin covered, and the retailer can make something (and thereby go around the distributor system. The numbers just about work, though the retailer would not make the standard "50%" margin (they would make a little less), and we would make nothing. We then said, "Well maybe putting books in shops is "marketing" that would "cost us nothing". You know, a way to build brand presence...But then it does cost something as I pointed out in #1 above, more time. Not as much as #1, but more and then it does cost something to actually put books in shops.
And I think that's where it all breaks down for us. When you read the above, you start to realize that its a weak proposition. We just sorta lose momentum on the idea :-\
Now, that being said, when unified RM comes out, we are considering print runs and a push...as a one off which we consider "marketing". If it gets decent support in B&M, we could see support product print runs...maybe. This makes sense because this is a big project and deserves big support.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page