So far,
Kobold Quarterly has proven it self to be the new Dragon Magazine, while
Pathfinder
has proven itself to be the Dungeon Magazine of the time. With all this goodness going on, I still worry if
Kobold Quarterly will be able to keep up the production quality that so many are used to if it goes from quarterly to a monthly product. The quarterly nature of
Kobold Quarterly directly affects the amount of cash flow the magazine can make and as a long term goal making it a monthly book only seem logical. Plus you have other project like
Paizo Fans United Wayfinder that could grow stronger and stronger focusing on harness the power of
crowdsourcing to go from a small twice a year book to a very good six times a year. Better yet will something else disrupt the concept of print magazines with some new device or system? Only time will tell. Talk to you later...
An observation from the brick and mortar perspective: both are avoiding game stores to some degree. Paizo tries very hard to get their customers to buy direct (not that different from Dungeon/Dragon), including discounts for subscribers. Most of our customers subscribe to their adventure paths while picking up the occasional Pathfinder supplement from us. It's almost not viable to carry them after the initial release. Kobold Quarterly doesn't go through the mainstream distributors at all, so only the most dedicated game stores carry it through other means, usually specialty regional distributors.
ReplyDeleteBoth are freakin' excellent, I think, which makes it especially frustrating for store owners that want to be involved with them. RPGs are moving away from us, rather than the other way around. It's more economics than ideology and I fear it will go the war games route over time. Also, you didn't mention Level Up, a 4E focused magazine by Goodman Games. It sells equally as well for us as Kobold Quarterly.
Even though I have no love of Goodman Games at this time, I did think the concept of cheap magazine and slightly expensive PDF of Level Up was a good idea to get retailers on board with the magazine. RPGs are moving away form retail, especially small third party publisher like me. Selling direct is SO MUCH BETTER then selling retail. I think retail really needs to team up with a company like RPGNow and built affiliate PDF online stores where you can sell PDFs to your customers of games you can not get in store or in print. It may not bring in a lot of money, it will bring in money where you really don't have to do anything but have a link on your website.
ReplyDeleteOr the retailer needs to bypass the distributer and buy direct from the source, why can't you just send an email to Open Design an request and make an arrangement?
ReplyDeleteMy model works on a direct participation of my customers, and direct but there is still a huge number of gamers out there who like FLGS and support FLGS that I would lie to reach.
We will see how the preorder model works with The Book of Monster Templates.
@BlackDiamond, I thought that both Alliance and IPR carried KQ. I can see your point with IPR being more indie, but is Alliance really not the major mainstream distributor?
ReplyDelete