Re: Wow, harsh poll on Cybergames

["Robert J. Hansen" <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

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> Well said.  Given this, and the ease at which one can
> take already written material and create a PDF (I do
> it all the time), I don't see Cybergames committing
> even five minutes to Millennium's End.

At great risk of waxing philosophically off-topic...

... does anyone have any idea what Cybergames' business plan, re: 
Millennium's End, is?

The unarguable fact: ebooks simply *do* *not* *sell*.  They never have, 
and whether or not they ever will is a highly speculative thing.  Oh, 
sure, there are doc formats for handhelds and a couple of fringe companies 
that are doing epublishing, but that's not at all relevant.

What is relevant: gaming books don't make a profit unless people see them 
on the shelves and in the trade mags.  With ebooks, you don't get any 
shelf presence at Forbidden Planet and, without a physical product to sell 
people, how do you advertise in magazines?  "Hi, come to Cybergames.com 
and pay $20 to download the rules!"

I've never paid $20 for a rulebook, sight unseen.  I always flip through 
the pages, checking out the artwork and the print quality and whether or 
not whoever assembled the book seems to have a clue about layout.  Without 
a tangible physical product, you lose all the buyers--like me--who insist 
on seeing before buying.

The alternative is to make the core rules available as a free download to 
spur interest, and then try and make money selling esourcebooks from the 
site--get people hooked on the system, and then start charging dinero.

But Cybergames, for whatever reason, just isn't quite getting this.  Which 
is really disheartening--because it suggests, very strongly, that 
Cybergames management (or whoever's in charge of acquisitions) *didn't do 
their homework* on the Millennium's End property.

In the absence of a reasonable business plan for turning Millennium's End 
into a profitable piece of intellectual property, Mil's End will 
absolutely fail to be profitable--and then Cybergames will either be 
looking for someone else to foist it off on, or else decide to write it 
off altogether as a failed business venture.

No matter how you look at it, it seems like the light at the end of the 
tunnel (Cybergames' acquisition after years of neglect by Charles) turned 
out to be not very much light at all--the tunnel's still just as dark, and 
we still don't know how long it is.

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