Three Years in the Middle of All This

Malhavoc Press celebrated its three-year anniversary on Tuesday. It reminds me that, from time to time, I like to look back and see how things have been.

Honestly? They've been really good.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that with the release of Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed, last year was our best year yet. I suspect that it's probably one of the best-selling non-Wizards of the Coast d20/OGL products of all time, and one of the best-selling game products of any kind last year. Sales of The Diamond Throne and now Legacy of the Dragons suggest that Arcana Unearthed sales weren't just a flash in the pan, but that a lot of people are enjoying Arcana Unearthed campaigns. That makes us really happy. We make games meant to be played (which you would think would be an obvious goal of any game producer, but in fact it's not always).

There's a lot of gloom-and-doom talk in the game industry right now, especially from d20 publishers. The whole d20 "industry" is evolving. While I'm not among the doomsayers, I'm also not among those who are going to try to look you in the (virtual) eye and tell you that nothing's changed, that things are better than ever. I certainly see the changes happening and probably more of them on the horizon.

After talking to d20 publishers, distributors, and retailers, it seems that sales are down, and that while they have been trending down for the industry as a whole, things got really bad for the industry at the last half of last year. Sales of our products are down a bit, if you don't count Arcana Unearthed's related titles, but not to the degree I hear others talk about. (And for that, I'm thankful—I know I have only you to thank.)

I think that the dip Malhavoc's seen in our d20 titles may be our own fault. With the release of Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed and its followup books, we may not have promoted our regular d20 products enough. We were stretched pretty thin. I think the addition of Mike Mearls to Malhavoc's designer ranks will help that a lot. In fact, it already has.

The Aftermath of 3.5
But there are other factors to consider. Wizards of the Coast's release of D&D v.3.5 upset the applecart, to say the least, although that's hardly surprising. With essentially a new edition of the rules to relearn, no one was interested in buying new support material in addition to those books.* Further, the players' expectations regarding the level of changes to the game weren't managed well -- common wisdom held that suddenly 3.0 products (D&D or d20) were now useless. In effect, Wizards hit the reset button on the d20 industry (and their own product lines) and everyone's backlist sales basically went away.

Few were ready for the reset. Oh, Wizards was forward-thinking enough to reveal the 3.5 rules to most d20 publishers ahead of time so we could come out with 3.5-compatible products. That was great of them, but the flood of "3.5 compatible" blurbs on products probably only fostered the idea that non-3.5 products were of no use to anyone. This, I believe, is a serious misconception. While it's a fair bit of effort to sit down and convert a product in its entirety from 3.0 to 3.5, it's almost effortless to use a 3.0 product in a 3.5 game. It's one thing to search through an entire product and change "subdual" to "nonlethal," for example, and quite another to just remember they're synonyms in your head as you read the rules. It's complicated to note all the spell changes from edition to edition, but an NPC wizard's list of spells in an adventure remains just as useable as it once was.)

Malhavoc Press had some success in doing conversions of a few of our 3.0 products to 3.5, but frankly, that's not a trap I want to fall into. Malhavoc is all about new and innovative ideas, not rehashing old stuff.

Moreover, no one, including myself (except in hindsight), realized that since the whole thing was starting over, customer's needs would be different after 3.5 than they were before. Version 3.5 turned everyone into newbies again, in a way. It caused people to restart their campaigns. But it wasn't just that simple. Gamers wanted 3.5-compatible stuff but were prejudiced based on their 3.0-compatible purchases. Since the industry pumped out a lot of adventures at the beginning (and so few of them were good), most customers still weren't all that interested in adventures. Customers didn't want just another book about dwarves, since they'd seen so many 3.0 dwarf books, but they weren't interested in anything 3.0 either.

So the industry mutated again. Like the endless heaps of adventures before them, gone were the books of prestige classes and feats based on class or race (or some other derivation). Now everyone's realizing that the marketplace hasn't just changed, it's matured. I'll get to that at the end of the column.

Bubbles and Gluts (And Too-Low Barriers)
We still hear about the "d20 bubble bursting" or the "d20 glut" all the time. I believe in neither.

I still don't think d20 publishers compete with each other as much as they feed off one another. To put it another way, I don't think the publishers producing good, quality material are competing against one another. I think they compete mainly with all the low-quality crap, as a whole. Worse, they compete with the idea that d20 products are all crappy, fueled by the low-quality crap that's out there.

The idea that there's a product glut that's hurting everyone doesn't make sense. If everyone out there were producing great stuff that people really needed and wanted, customers would still be buying it. Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed proved to me that there's still a large audience out there for d20/OGL products. If publishers are seeing their sales plummet, I think they should look toward the books they are producing in the context of the marketplace and the needs of the customers, not blame the number of publishers or the publishing field's low barrier of entry.

Let's dwell on that low barrier of entry concept for a moment. There are good, solid publishers out there complaining that there's nothing keeping Joe Gamer from producing his own game product. With just a computer, some cheap software, a pal who can draw, and a couple thousand bucks to pay for printing, anyone can put out a roleplaying game product. And that product sits on the shelf right next to a product by an established, well-known publisher. The nerve!

I don't buy it. Oh, I know it happens. I just don't believe it to be a problem. Let's look at it realistically. In today's marketplace, Joe Gamer's book isn't picked up by very many distributors and it's not sold by many game stores. It's not in bookstores. Sure, it adds to the "good lord, there's a lot of d20 stuff out there" feeling, but let's be honest -- what's one more on that heaping pile? Most distributors (startup wannabe publishers take note!) aren't accepting d20 products from new publishers. At all. Most game stores have limited themselves to a handful of publishers who have already proven themselves. There's your barrier to entry.

Joe Gamer's book isn't a threat to any existing publisher. If on the off chance it does sell well and Joe makes a name for himself, then it was probably a product that filled a niche no one else was filling. What's more, if it is actually good, fills a need, and sells well, then all of d20 benefits. Let me overstress a point I firmly believe: Good d20 products are good for the industry. If someone buys a good d20 product, they're that much more likely to go back to the store next week and buy another.

PDF: More Than Just Three Random Letters Thrown Together
As you know, Malhavoc Press is a part of two markets -- both print and electronic publishing. Obviously, when I talk about game stores and whatnot, I'm talking about printed books. So what's up with PDF publishing?

We've seen good things in electronic sales. Our best selling PDF products are our oldest ones. I suppose you could look at that and say that things sold better in the past. But when you look closer, you'll see that's not the case. PDFs aren't like print books. They stay "in print" forever, and no one ever runs out of stock. It's always right there "on the shelf."

When we track first-day sales, first-week sales, and first-month sales for each title, we see that a strong-selling recent PDF (like Legacy of the Dragons) sells in its first week what a strong seller sold two years ago. But, with a few exceptions (mainly adventures), PDFs continue to sell each month.

Much to my surprise, we're still selling new copies of The Book of Eldritch Might every day. Thus, we've found that our older PDF products outsell our newer ones because they've had more time in the race. Each new title still performs well. As a business, our PDF sales have only increased with each month, but again, we can attribute that to the evergreen nature of PDFs and our growing catalog of titles.

The electronic market and the print market, we've found, to be two entirely different arenas. Plenty of people want a "real" book rather than a PDF, but plenty of others like the versatility of an electronic book. Electronic products don't cannibalize the sales of print products, and print products don't stamp out electronic sales. Two different formats for two different audiences.

The Whole New Ballgame
I mentioned before that the industry is maturing. Gone are the days when anyone, regardless of talent, could put together a few prestige classes and feats, or an adventure, slap the d20 logo on it, and make money. Gamers are too savvy for that now -- or worse, they were scared away from d20 products forever due to bad purchases. Gamers want good, thoughtful, well-designed stuff. For too long, publishers have relied on the very existence of a product to sell that product. Today, gamers have a lot of products to choose from. They need a reason to look into, remember, and eventually buy a specific title.

In response, we're seeing publishers come out with some interesting stuff**: Campaign settings, rules variants and subsystems, and rich source material. Publishers are paying real money to get real artists to illustrate their products, and they're putting real effort into cartography, layout, organization, and editing. The industry has a long way to go, but there's every reason to believe the trend will continue. There's certainly no reason for customers to spend their limited budgets on low-quality products or to try to excuse publishers for skimping on the art or the editing.

As customers, I encourage us all to be discriminating shoppers. The best way to ensure quality product is to buy quality product. Support the folks doing good work, and let the people doing less than stellar material quietly close up shop. Don't lump d20 publishers together if you end up buying a poor product, and try not to let yourself lump types of products together ("all adventures suck"). Pay attention not to types of products but to publishers and -- even better -- authors you find that you like.

If you really want to contribute to the health of the d20 industry, get your friends who are afraid to try d20 products, or who were burned by crappy d20 products in the past, to try something you recommend, from a publisher you know you can trust.

But whatever. Overall, I have nothing but optimism for the future of Malhavoc and the d20 industry. We've got some exciting stuff on the horizon, like our first fiction anthology, Children of the Rune, and our big Planescape® reunion book, Beyond Countless Doorways. And there's even more cool stuff beyond the horizon.

It's been three really good, really fun years. I can't wait to see what the future has in store.

 

* I call this the Rules Absorption Rule. Don't release a new game system and then immediately follow it up with a lot of additional or optional rulebooks. In a perfect world, for example, Wizards of the Coast would never have released Sword and Fist and its ilk so quickly after the release of 3rd Edition. The audience, as a whole, didn't need those books yet -- there were months of playing sessions' worth of new material to get familiar with in the core books alone. We should have only released adventures and source material in those first months. I attempted to obey the Rules Absorption Rule with the release of Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed. We didn't come out with any rules-heavy support material immediately, nor did I allow any of our publishing partners to do so. I stand by the decision.

** For example, there's still a very viable but small marketplace for adventures right now, and I think Necromancer Games does a good job of filling that need. I think Fantasy Flight Games puts out some interesting products, particularly some of their later hardcovers. Likewise, Sword & Sorcery does some intriguing things -- for example, I was very surprised by the ultra-coolness of Relics and Rituals: Excalibur. I pay attention to what Green Ronin is doing, without a doubt. Almost every one of their products is worth a look. Book of Fiends, for example, was amazing.