The Gaming Den

They got boned for copyright infringement. They did some weird combination anime/game guides for a few shows, and apparently didn't have the rights for one of them, I think. They didn't have the financial ability to withstand the lawsuit, so they folded. At least, that's the story I heard. Been a l...

They also used to have professional software to print of mechs for games, that software hasn't received a major update in many years so now even the Demo team is printing sheets using free fan made software. That's not a jab at the quality of the free software, it's quite good, it's just that CGL i...

That's interesting, hope it works out well. We did that occasionally when I was there, but it wasn't the standard.

I hope you guys get to see and proof the layout drafts, too.

This mostly just suggests that whoever was managing you and Semerkhet was not doing their job. By the time the proofreaders are going over the laid-out PDFs, the authors are not consulted for every change (in my experience, they are rarely consulted at all -- only if they are needed to help solve a...

The Shadowrun dev process has always included a "development edit" ... during which, text is added (or removed, or rearranged, or ruined, or revitalized...) by the developer to tweak the text to their satisfaction. There are few RPG publishing situations I've seen where that doesn't happen...

I can't be damned to pull up my old files to see what if anything changed from my drafts of the GM Screen, but "jamming the screen full of info" was not my goal. Proximity of related information was a bigger goal.

Building GM screens is a bitch.

FrankTrollman wrote:Basically they are selling Runner's Toolkit, but instead of having a bunch of original material... it doesn't.

It looks like exactly the stuff that the Toolkit was always advertised as.

I'm not sure about the recent years, but grossing a million a year in the mid 2000s sounds bogus to me. They've always been a bit shy with releasing any sales number but I think I remember a 15,000 claim a few years back on a Battletech core rulebook, which would be about 700K in itself. Only if th...

The Shadowrun and BattleTech forums are run by completely different people, and last time I had any access, were on completely different servers.

Otakusensei wrote:How many staff members were normally put on that? Or is that time frame assuming community and freelancer support?

The latter.

Only 14 days for a proofreader (singular) to proof the entire document and then send it to the printers? I did some 'playtesting' on Running Wild and a couple of the Artifacts series that amounted to little more than proof-skimming, particularly with Running Wild which was very close to deadline wh...

Otakusensei wrote:Oh God, who told Dave to bring his rape-face to the interview?

Dave is a talented creator and a great person. I know there's been teh dramaz with him and TGD users in the past -- but he doesn't deserve to be treated like that, dude.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Jesus fucknuts, they're just now starting the open playtest?

They released the open playtest stuff in September. A good way to get the material out and available so the core fanbase can use it if they know that for some reason publication isn't immediate.

I would bet that this is nothing new, so if Topps wants to change the license holder, they still keep the back catalogue. Look at any Shadowrun book from FanPro through Catalyst: copyright is always applied to the property owner, not the publisher. The 2011 date in the book just means they intended...

sigma: While I obviously can't _prove_ to you that we didn't do that, we didn't do that. Or if others are the company did it (there are only 3 of us), they sure didn't tell me about it. :-) Between the low price of the EP PDFs and the Creative Commons licensing (and the quality of the book, of cours...

I was kind of digging Missions up until they ... C) Most importantly STOPPED being free . If you were signed up to the demo team and running the minimum number of games per year (I think it was 4, but I don't remember exactly) you got all the Missions free and you got them well in advance of their ...

Moving Missions back to Seattle was something I pushed heavily for. I thought it was daft that CGL had just published a big book all about Seattle and didn't have anything else on the schedule that could be used to forward plots inside the city that most people used. Meanwhile, Manhattan Missions wa...

Yes.

Oh, and one more thing: if fans think "I'd really like this ... but it will probably get pirated a lot, so I'm not even going to bother to tell the publisher that I want it" -- that does a lot less good than telling the publisher and letting _them_ consider the financial potential for it.

The point which I shouldn't have to make is that if of those 5000 people pirating 2% would have bought it, that's 100 sales piracy has cost you. And if you didn't release that PDF at all, that's zero sales, total. So, if you think you can only sell 400 copies, your mission is to figure out if you c...

You can't control or know how many people pirate your stuff. You can make pretty good estimates of how many people will buy a PDF, and then look at the numbers and decide if it will make money or not, or how to adjust the numbers to make money (less art, recycling art, charging more, etc.) Then you ...

500 sales earns you the same amount of money whether zero people or 5000 people pirated it.

200 pages can hold more than five adventures. If you're actually talking pages and not sides (just to clarify this because of the maths), Are you seriously suggesting that Wesley meant 200 pieces of paper and thus 400 pages? Shadowrun books have page numbers. They start on the second page with 2, a...

Tycho wrote:I looked at the back-covers form RW and CG and I still think the back-cover of Corp Guide does not fit with all the other SR books. The Format is just too different.

I knew I shouldn't have left the circuit-board off it ...

The Layout is horrible, sometimes about 1/3 of a page is just plain white. The Cover Art and Layout of the front- and backcover of Corp Guide just don't fit with the other books, because they used a BT scheme. Sounds like the loss of Adam is hitting them rather hard. I designed the Corporate Guide ...