Some Interesting 4ed OGL News

[kalmarjan]

I saw this bit from a Mongoose press quote that similarly covered what you were referencing Jason, though their cost recovery projects are about 10x what you figured. So, I guess that's our game industry economics lesson for today.

You see, this is where it shows that I am better in the kitchen managing costs as opposed to trying to manage the cost of publishing. Heck, if I had to pay a royalty for every dish that I put out, that would significantly up the costs. Meaning, if I wanted to run a healthy 30% cost from revenue with a conservative 10% royalty (If I ran it at the aforementioned 40% cost, it would be my shirt. LOL) I would be looking at having to sell the book for a lot higher... more into close to the 100 000$ range in sales.

Mind you, the formula for food costing probably does not translate well into the cost of producing a published item.

All in all, it would seem to be too much of a chance for me anyway. It seems that WOTC is banking on their system to really crack the bank. It could be so, OTOH, there are still a lot of people who painfully remember the "upgrade" to 3.5.

It would make more sense to me to wait and see what the system was all about before I blindly dropped 5000$ on a unseen teaser product. Call me conservative, but I would not purchase produce from a supplier that I did not know. Certainly would not make a contract for big bucks (well, 5000$ is about a third of what I spend a week, but let's not go there. LOL) without first having something hard and fast to make a decision on.

Time will tell I guess.

Sandeman

[Griogre]

*shrug* It's just numbers. What you think your sales are going to be. It's not *that* big a shot in the dark, many of the bigger companies know what their sales on new books are. They know what they sold in the Transition to 3.5. The D&D market is bigger now, a bit. Whoever does the CFO function will make the call at each company. Its really all about expected volume. Teaming reduces the risk. There are also marketing considerations on the early jump.

[richvalle]

Hmm, not quite: with FG I can build a ruleset to use with the host and client, pass it to my friends and have it do what I want. Doesn't sound the same as DDI to me.

Stuart

Ahh, I just meant in terms of what adding Feats to a character sheet would do for you. Not FG vs DDI as a products.

rv

[Illrigger]

The mongoose post is interesting, but they are only speaking to distribution AFTER GenCon. Gencon (actually any con, but GenCon is like every other con with 500x the people) is a unique marketting environment. Alomost none of the things mentioned in that article apply. The largest aspect is that there's no retail discount; you're selling directly, and you're selling at full cover price. The only costs you incur are the printer, shipping, booth, and personnel fees. Thing is, a company like Mongoose is already going to be PAYING those fees, because they'll already be planning a presence at GenCon anyway. So that's all moot.

The ONLY risk here is whether 4e will be a big enough hit at GenCon that they can sell the 3000 or so books they need to break the fee overhead. I've never been a vendor there, so I don't know if that's probable or not. If they can pull it off, though, then everything they make in the remaining portion of the year is gravy. If they can make products that generate a good buzz, and 4e takes off, then it could be a very good year for a company.

[ShaneB]

Well to be honest I dont think you will find that core of FG will change much if at all with 4e. From what I have read to date the new SRD will be a reference guide to the core rulebooks. Which means that the representation of this within FG will be as a name, probably a brief description (with a format dictated by the SRD) and a book/page/table/paragraph number to show where the full details are. So the character sheet will mostly stay the same.

What wont be possible is the actual RULES behind said reference wont be able to be stored within FG, hence auto calculation of modifiers, etc probably wont be able to be done.

What is more interesting is WOTC have yet to disclose what the 'OGL' rules are. Which are completely separate to the SRD. These two items are NOT interchangable. I wonder what rules they will dictate in the OGL around electronic versions of copyrighted material. Ie if publisher X wants to get in bed with the DDI they can release an electronic version of their classes, but what if they just want to enable free access to their material, or in the case of a Digital Adventures who ONLY release electronic copies, and in fact want to be able to develop game extensions that are ONLY released as FG rulesets will WOTC/Hasbro wave the cease and desist at them??

I think that THAT is a bigger issue when it comes to 3rd party developers of material... atm Mongoose, Green Ronin, et al must be crapping themselves over the potential catastrophe that is 4e, so I can guarantee that they will be forking over the $5k to see what the OGL will actually mean for the viability of their business, and if it is no longer viable will be either yelling and screaming to Hasbro/WOTC to fix it, or to jump to True20 (which is now OGL)