The Story of BattleTech: What's wrong with it?

[Username17]

Then where is all the money coming from?

It's not very much money.

There are two flagship products and several secondary products. Even while Eclipse Phase and Cthulhutech were in-house, total sales were between one and two million dollars a year. That doesn't count as "all the money" for a long list of products being sold all over the world.

All together they were coming out with around a dozen products a year in the 30 dollar range. Average sales are therefore in the 3-5k range. That's small. For globally delivered sales, that's incredibly small.

-Username17

[Clutch9800]

We may be from different planets but total sales of between one and two million a year is a pretty successful small business.

Clutch

[Username17]

We may be from different planets but total sales of between one and two million a year is a pretty successful small business.

Clutch

Total sales don't mean anything to whether a business is successful or not. Total sales minus costs is what actually matters. A million dollars in sales would not keep a franchise restaurant in business, because the costs are high. A million dollars in sales would keep a private consultant in a fancy house with a Mercedes full of cheerleaders because costs are low.

Each book has a break even point and if it sells more than that, it makes a profit. And if it sells less than that, it does not. A Catalyst book tends to be about 120,000 words, and writing costs about $4,200 for the whole thing. There is also editing, layout, art, advertising, administration, and of course: the owner siphoning money out to maintain his lifestyle. And that's just the production costs to make what is essentially a very fancy .pdf, before we get to shipping and especially printing that have a per-book cost.

The point we're running with here is that a million dollars for one book is a lot more than a million dollars for twelve books, because for the pile of a dozen you're paying production costs 12 times (and also ordering smaller print runs, which may get you worse bulk discounts on printing and shipping).

Of course, it's kind of moot if you simply don't intend to pay your writers or artists or editors or graphic designers, or printers their full contracted wages. You can probably santa sack a fair amount of cash on a million dollars of sales if you do that. But make no mistake, if you were actually paying your production staff, you' be paying over ten grand per book just to create the printing proofs - for a dozen books that is over $120k out of your million before you've printed or shipped a single thing.

And that's not even counting that last year their books were licensed, which means that they were supposed to turn over some fraction of the sales to other companies. No, if this particular small business is only selling a million to two million dollars, it's not doing particularly well.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Robotech was pretty popular while the series was on the air, but it used Palladium as a base, so... Palladium hasn't seemed to pick up licenses since the 80's.

Why are we talking about sales and IMR again?

-Crissa

[Clutch9800]

Why are we talking about sales and IMR again?

Because people insist that BattleTech is dying. I say that while it isn't near what it once was, that could be said about pen-n-paper gaming in general.

The profit margin on a garden variety BattleTech book is about 4 dollars a copy. Give or take.

Clutch

[setmonster]

Why are we talking about sales and IMR again?

Because people insist that BattleTech is dying. I say that while it isn't near what it once was, that could be said about pen-n-paper gaming in general.

The profit margin on a garden variety BattleTech book is about 4 dollars a copy. Give or take.

Clutch

But BattleTech is dying. You can't even buy an intro/starter box set from Catalyst because they can't afford to produce one (and won't be able to until at least 2011). Ergo, new players are virtually unable to get into the game. And if BT can't get new players, surely the game is dying?

[magnuskn]

Why are we talking about sales and IMR again?

Because people insist that BattleTech is dying. I say that while it isn't near what it once was, that could be said about pen-n-paper gaming in general.

The profit margin on a garden variety BattleTech book is about 4 dollars a copy. Give or take.

Clutch

But BattleTech is dying. You can't even buy an intro/starter box set from Catalyst because they can't afford to produce one (and won't be able to until at least 2011). Ergo, new players are virtually unable to get into the game. And if BT can't get new players, surely the game is dying?

What's more, the player base is dying. New players show up seldomly and the much of the older playerbase is getting... well, older. Interests change, families are founded. It isn't very attractive for young players to find an existing playerbase of mostly slowly fattening 30-50 year olds.

[Juton]

I definitely agree that Battletech is nowhere close to where it was in the 90s. But that's true for most TT games. Battletech really needs something new and fresh out there, it's been about 10 years since Battletech started up under new management (Wizkids and FanPro) but there are still a lot of stores that thinks the line is dead so when they have it they need to market it like mad. They should jump ahead 50 years, wipe the slate as clean as they can and put out a box set with the popular mechs from the games. They probably won't do that however.

[Stahlseele]

Because they are still not allowed to use the Unseen Mechs.
The designs that are most resembling Macross-Mecha . .
Because Harmony Gold is STILL raising a Major Stink, whenever something like that is even MENTIONED . .
I still say, if they manage to make a good new mechwarrior computer game, then there will be an influx of new blood for Battletech . . for better or worse . .
hopefully by then, the Unseen can be re-seen again.
And hopefully, they can be used in the new Mechwarrior too.
That would be a nice upwind for Battletech.
A new Mechwarrior with the Unseen Mechs in it that then gets more people interested in Battletech and then being able to produce sets with Unseen Miniatures!
Heck, make them Plastic-Minis, i don't care. I just want them back.
Perfect would be to make Mechs akin to the old Transformers Toys, but that would be too expensive and too big for the battlefield too . .

[Ganbare Gincun]

Because they are still not allowed to use the Unseen Mechs.
The designs that are most resembling Macross-Mecha . .
Because Harmony Gold is STILL raising a Major Stink, whenever something like that is even MENTIONED

Seeing as how FASA stole the intellectual property of Tatsunoko Productions (which was properly licensed to Harmony Gold), yeah, I can see why they got bent out of shape over the whole thing.

[Ganbare Gincun]

Could you provide us with an example? I know there was a Robotech RPG floating around for a few years, but it never really took off in my area. Other than that I've never seen another mecha universe adapted to the north american RPG market.

By "a few years" you mean fifteen for the original run, and a new edition which is still currently in print right? Old World of Darkness had a roughly similar run in length of time.

Robotech is one of the few good products that Palladium Games released; most of the gamers in my area snapped up these books ASAP and ran either post-Macross campaigns or Mospedea-era campaigns. And I've rarely seen a Rifts game without at least one Robotech mech running around shooting up the place.

[adamjury]

But IWM is still in business too, and they make money almost exclusively through BattleMech miniatures.

LOL. IWM's prime business right now is making minis for _other_ companies -- not ones they sell themselves.

[adamjury]

Because they are still not allowed to use the Unseen Mechs.
The designs that are most resembling Macross-Mecha . .
Because Harmony Gold is STILL raising a Major Stink, whenever something like that is even MENTIONED . .

Because they have awesome legal grounds to do so.

hopefully by then, the Unseen can be re-seen again.

Not happening.

[magnuskn]

Because they are still not allowed to use the Unseen Mechs.
The designs that are most resembling Macross-Mecha . .
Because Harmony Gold is STILL raising a Major Stink, whenever something like that is even MENTIONED

Seeing as how FASA stole the intellectual property of Tatsunoko Productions (which was properly licensed to Harmony Gold), yeah, I can see why they got bent out of shape over the whole thing.

Harmony Gold can suck dicks. Those assholes have made it impossible for any Macross series to be properly released outside of Japan, including the new and excellent Macross Frontier.

[Clutch9800]

DP9 put out another Mecha game called Jovian Chronicles. I never looked at it, was it any good?

Clutch

[mlangsdorf]

It's a bit of mess, as there's a tension between the Gundamesque elements of the setting and the hard, gritty, movement vectors and fuel points elements. The background is decent, though a bit nonsensical in places.

Mechanically, exo-armor vs space fighters combats are a bit bland, and large ships are too complicated. The simplified Lightning Strike rules are better, and make the trade-offs between the exo-armors (not as fast, but more maneuverable) and fighters (slow turns, but can attack at max speed) more obvious and interesting.

It's no worse than Battletech on the silliness scale, but never took off with the public.

[Crissa]

They should never have printed that stupid tech book stealing the Macross mechs. They could have totally used their own art and had it look the same and Harmony Gold would have never had a case.

-Crissa

[Stahlseele]

Those were the best received by many though . .
And i STILL like the original look much better than that new fangled project phoenix stuff . .

[Juton]

They should never have printed that stupid tech book stealing the Macross mechs. They could have totally used their own art and had it look the same and Harmony Gold would have never had a case.

-Crissa

The Macross mechs are widely considered, at least by the people I talk to to be the best looking mecha in Battletech. Without them it's debatable if Battletech would have ever gotten off the ground.

[Crissa]

That's hardly a ringing endorsement for theft.

-Crissa

[Stahlseele]

Back then, as far as i understood, it was not really theft . .
It only got to be theft, when Harmony Gold got the rights to ALL OF MACROSS in America and decided it did not like Battletech using them.
Of course, what with legalese and these matters being so convoluted, i have never ever even been sure if i had gotten that one right . .

[adamjury]

The legal papers that made Catalyst pull back from their "We're bringing back the unseen!" stance last year are very solid.

[Stahlseele]

As i said, i ain't no good with the legal mumbo jumbo.
That's how i understood it.

[Crissa]

The thing is, you can (and they have) totally done art that Harmony can't touch. Most of the names and the weapon positions are vaguely arbitrary, so I don't see why they don't.

Other than the history of theft. Btw, you can still see the unseen? in various video games.

-Crissa

[shau]

While the original Mechs might have come from those universes, they were smart enough not to saddle them with the lame assed storylines those universes had. I honestly can't even watch that crap, because the sight of Mecha doing acrobatics and flying and other stupid shit makes me throw up in my mouth.

I can't believe people still get hung up on the non-realistic mecha thing. Mecha are always unrealistic. Nobody in real life is ever going to say "Hey, let's make a tank that moves around on chicken legs." Hell, if anything shit like Gurren Lagann and Getter are more realistic than Battletech because it explicitly states that the robots break every law of physics somehow. Gundam has all kinds of weird phelbonium in the setting in an attempt to explain how a gundam is even possible and how it could ever be considered a practical weapon.