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.