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S.J. posted:Also, and I can't stress this enough, creating a 'cheap' version and an 'expensive' version of your game seriously devalues one version or the other in the eyes of the majority of your customers because those products will not be a perfect mirror image of price vs quality. "You might as well get the [x] version because of [y]" S.J. posted:A game store isn't going to be able to stock the kind of really cheap stuff you'd see at blick's or walmart necessarily, but we put the other companies (considerably cheaper) products in the same area and keep a minimum of the GW stuff in stock for the few people who really want it. In any case, branded accessories are the place you really do get a lot of exploitative pricing. Items with art - like branded playmats - somewhat less so; the problem there tends to be that the actual artists often aren't getting a fair cut of ancillary usage.
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Jan 11, 2018 05:05
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S.J. posted:Also, and I can't stress this enough, creating a 'cheap' version and an 'expensive' version of your game seriously devalues one version or the other in the eyes of the majority of your customers because those products will not be a perfect mirror image of price vs quality. "You might as well get the [x] version because of [y]" Yeah, I kind of wanted to touch on this point as well but phoneposting at work means having to pick and choose what you talk about, so thanks for bringing it up.
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Jan 11, 2018 06:13
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Another point from the perspective of someone who sells games in stores: the RRP (recommend retail price) isn't anywhere near what the company is making. The store will normally buy the game from a distributor for ~50% RRP, and the distributor will buy it from the publisher at ~30% RRP. So pandemic legacy, say, costs £60 in shops. That means the publisher is getting £18/game, which has to cover manufacturing, R&D, marketing etc. Effectively, even if they dropped costs to the cheapest possible materials it'd probably only drop the retail price by £5 or so. Of course, selling direct to the customer cuts out the distribution costs, but that limits your customer base to an extent where manufacturing costs per unit are far higher.
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Jan 11, 2018 07:24
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Yeah, scale is a huge factor. I was having this discussion with my boss the other day, in fact. Target might order a single restock of Potion Explosion and order 70,000 units. That's about the same as a restock order for the four largest North American board game distributors combined.
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Jan 11, 2018 07:31
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MSRP for old board games has been harder to find than I expected, but I would be willing to bet that the retail price for games like Trivial Pursuit, RISK, and Monopoly from the 1960s-80s would be closer to $80 than $20 after factoring in inflation. I'll dig around more when I'm not phone posting to confirm.
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Jan 11, 2018 15:20
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You can find old pricing info through Sears catalogues which are hosted online. In 1986, LIFE was a $12 game, which is roughly $26 in 2018 dollars.
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Jan 11, 2018 16:13
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100% of the development costs of those old family games has been recouped decades ago, so the manufacturers are only paying for manufacturing cost, some tiny amount of marketing (if any), and a profit margin on them. And the manufacturing costs are also likely very very low, given the huge volume and the very simple components that most of those old family games have. They can afford to make 50 cents per box of RISK sold and still have that be a worthwhile product to keep making. As an aside, I think most game designers would love for their game to become so wildly popular that a counterfeiter would bother to make a knockoff copy. I mean obviously it sucks to be getting ripped off, but we are living in a crazy time of a ridiculous glut of boardgames available, and the ones getting ripped off in China are only going to be the top 0.1% most popular. Those are also, most likely, the games which have sold so many copies that the manufacturers have likely already recouped their development costs. I'm not saying I don't feel sorry for them, because getting ripped off sucks... but my suspicion is that nobody is being run out of business due to counterfeiting of their products, for exactly this factor. At least for now. This is a problem exclusive to the highly successful.
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Jan 11, 2018 17:24
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Leperflesh posted:100% of the development costs of those old family games has been recouped decades ago, so the manufacturers are only paying for manufacturing cost, some tiny amount of marketing (if any), and a profit margin on them. And the manufacturing costs are also likely very very low, given the huge volume and the very simple components that most of those old family games have. They can afford to make 50 cents per box of RISK sold and still have that be a worthwhile product to keep making. The second does happen, sure. However there's a very common phase where scammers and counterfeiters can do enormous damage to a game that's still paying off its development costs, and that often hits small developers when they're most vulnerable. Namely, that period where it goes from new to popular. Especially for smaller publishers or self-published games, often you'll start to get interest in the game that outpaces their ability to supply it. A counterfeiter who jumps in at that point, while a smaller or newer company is trying to up their production, can really screw those designers over.
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Jan 11, 2018 18:02
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That sounds like it *could* happen, maybe, but I don't know that we have any examples. I think most of the time counterfeiters are going to focus on games where they know they have an opportunity to sell at least hundreds if not thousands of copies, and that means games that have already sold at least tens of thousands of copies, yes? They're going to say "OK today we are gonna rip off a game, what game should we rip off" and look for the ones that have the right price point, very wide distribution, ongoing reliable robust sales, and no really difficult to copy components. You're never gonna bother with some new indie game when a major big seller is an option. Hence Pandemic Legacy or Catan, and not some game that has only grossed $100k on 2500 sales. I presume. I'm putting myself in the shoes of a counterfeiter and thinking about what makes sense.
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Jan 11, 2018 19:56
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Counterfeiter santa, please make new copies of the board games Dune and Die Macher. 
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Jan 11, 2018 20:00
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Chill la Chill posted:Counterfeiter santa, please make new copies of the board games Dune and Die Macher. There are already two “counterfeit” fan games of dune, right?
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Jan 11, 2018 20:05
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DalaranJ posted:There are already two “counterfeit” fan games of dune, right? There is an official one reskinned to be Twilight Imperium.
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Jan 11, 2018 20:09
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Lord_Hambrose posted:There is an official one reskinned to be Twilight Imperium. And the rules were reskinned to be crap.
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Jan 11, 2018 20:35
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admanb posted:And the rules were reskinned to be crap.
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Jan 12, 2018 00:55
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Some relatively mainstream recognition about actual-play podcasts, specifically The Adventure Zone: https://www.theringer.com/platform/...n-griffin-clint
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Jan 31, 2018 18:29
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On a semi-related note, here's an actor in the table-top space actually taking harassment seriously. http://oneshotpodcast.com/uncategorized/update-on-harassment-allegations/ D'Amato lays out the deficiencies in their response so far in that post, so I won't belabor them. But the fact that they're acknowledging them, and acknowledging them as deficiencies, is good. Even better is that they're actually working to create a real process to deal with the accusations. Back with the rpg.net and Matt McFarland debacle, I expressed my concerns about the relying on volunteers and circles of friends to police this stuff, and how it was really out of scope and needed some kind of professional or at least properly trained oversight. One Shot's solution looks workable and sensible, and I hope it pushes the industry as a whole to adopt similar standards. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 19:35
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Comrade Gorbash posted:One Shot's solution looks workable and sensible, and I hope it pushes the industry as a whole to adopt similar standards. That's frankly an amazing response. It does rely on the capabilities of a couple of consultants to conduct some kind of fair arbitration, which may not be a universally useful approach, but poo poo, they're fully recognizing their own inability to be impartial and they're spending money to work around that. Also that cab driver is a goddamn hero.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:19
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Back with the rpg.net and Matt Fraction debacle Do you mean Matt McFarland (sp?) or is there another debacle featuring a well-known Matt?
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Jan 31, 2018 20:24
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Leperflesh posted:Also that cab driver is a goddamn hero. Yeah, this really stood out to me.
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Jan 31, 2018 20:37
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potatocubed posted:Do you mean Matt McFarland (sp?) or is there another debacle featuring a well-known Matt?
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Jan 31, 2018 20:38
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Back with the rpg.net and Matt McFarland debacle, I expressed my concerns about the relying on volunteers and circles of friends to police this stuff, and how it was really out of scope and needed some kind of professional or at least properly trained oversight. One Shot's solution looks workable and sensible, and I hope it pushes the industry as a whole to adopt similar standards. How much do professionals or arbitrators charge? The company that hosts rpg.net (Skotos) isn't rich. As it is, I suspended Matt as soon as we learned about the situation. This went down on a Sunday night when I was at home taking a break from the 'net. I logged in, saw what was posted, and immediately suspended him and pulled his mod-status - and posted an explanation. I sent a PM to the site's owners within minutes, asking them how they wanted the situation handled. They talked to the victim - which took time due to time zones, schedules, etc - and they/we perma-banned Matt as a result. I am not saying we handled things perfectly, and I'm happy to take critique, but I think we did reasonably well under the circumstances. Cessna fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 20:56
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You’re a goddamn cessna and not a gulfstream. I bet your parents are absolutely ashamed of you.
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Jan 31, 2018 21:12
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I dunno, the Citation X is pretty slick. (And way bigger than anything I've flown.) Edit: Also, most of my time is in Pipers (Archers, Warriors) but I didn't want "Piper" as a user-name when I picked it. Cessna fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 21:14
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Cessna posted:How much do professionals or arbitrators charge? The company that hosts rpg.net (Skotos) isn't rich. It's one thing to hire a couple of humanities grad students who are probably grateful to work for a pittance and, presumably, thesis material. Real arbitration though means HR professionals and lawyers and a lot expensive things that are beyond the reach of a tiny industry running either on razor margins or no margins at all. Proper investigative work is going to cost even more.
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Jan 31, 2018 21:21
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Rhandhali posted:It's one thing to hire a couple of humanities grad students who are probably grateful to work for a pittance and, presumably, thesis material. Real arbitration though means HR professionals and lawyers and a lot expensive things that are beyond the reach of a tiny industry running either on razor margins or no margins at all. Proper investigative work is going to cost even more. About 1/3 of the rpg.net mods are lawyers as it is, and they do it for free. (Madness!)
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Jan 31, 2018 21:23
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Cessna posted:How much do professionals or arbitrators charge? The company that hosts rpg.net (Skotos) isn't rich. I do think the confusion about whether Matt had his mod status moved or if he voluntarily stepped down was a case of poor communication that should have been cleared up. It made it much harder to understand what was happening, and made the process harder to trust. And the waffling about whether he should be banned didn't reflect well on the decision process, though that was clearly happening at the site owner level. My larger critique of RPG.net regarding that incident is I still see no evidence of an internal policy about how to deal with this in the future - and that is a policy that should be separate from the forum rules but still available to users to review. That's not about what it's allowed to be posted or responded to - it's what RPG.net and its mods are going to do should another case like this arise. Who is going to communicate to the community in an official capacity? What responsibilities do other mods have during that time? Who is responsible for reviewing the situation and making the final decision? What status will the person in question be put into while the review is ongoing? Those sort of things need to spelled out clearly. They don't need to be exhaustive, though transparency is better in cases like this. Just knowing that the moderator would have their mod privileges suspended pending review by the site ownership would be a big step up
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Jan 31, 2018 21:39
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I do think the confusion about whether Matt had his mod status moved or if he voluntarily stepped down was a case of poor communication that should have been cleared up. It made it much harder to understand what was happening, and made the process harder to trust. I’ll be blunt, we were confused as well… From my perspective I logged in (for what I thought would be a brief check on the forum) and got a Private Message saying (paraphrase) “you’d better check out this thread.” As I was doing that things were being posted out in Tabletop Open and in the mod-only forum. I tried to catch up on what was going on – keep in mind we’re talking about things happening faster than I could refresh the screen and read – and in that time Matt posted something like “I’m stepping down” in the mod-forum. In the meantime I read the threads out front, realized the seriousness of what was going on, and went into the Admin control panel and pulled Matt’s Mod Status and suspended his account. The other mods logged in at the time can’t do this, there are only a few of us with the software-status that allows this. If I or one of the other Admins hadn’t logged in at 8:00 PM or so on a Sunday night it would have taken longer – and, hell, I had real-world stuff like “eat dinner and get the kids to bed because it's a school night” to deal with at the time. My wife got a bit ticked when I said, “I have to deal with this thing NOW,” and ended up spending a lot more time online that night, and I don’t blame her – I spend too much time on there as it is. To be frank, this is not something we’ve had to deal with so quickly before. Yes, we have asked Mods to step down or fired them, but this was always done after much discussion and deliberation. We try to let everyone on the Staff weigh in on big decisions like that – despite the authoritarian front we probably show to the public, we try very, very hard to make consensus decisions and don’t want any member of the Staff to be shut out because they’re in the wrong time-zone. Making fast, unilateral calls like that aren’t something we’ve done before – because, again, we want the Staff to all have their say. I hope we don’t have to go through anything like that again - I like making deliberate, considered decisions with everyone's input a lot better. Comrade Gorbash posted:And the waffling about whether he should be banned didn't reflect well on the decision process, though that was clearly happening at the site owner level. They wanted to be thorough and talk to the person making the allegation so as to hear them out. I think they did the right thing there, and then made the right decision when they perma-banned Matt. Comrade Gorbash posted:My larger critique of RPG.net regarding that incident is I still see no evidence of an internal policy about how to deal with this in the future - and that is a policy that should be separate from the forum rules but still available to users to review. That's not about what it's allowed to be posted or responded to - it's what RPG.net and its mods are going to do should another case like this arise. Who is going to communicate to the community in an official capacity? What responsibilities do other mods have during that time? Who is responsible for reviewing the situation and making the final decision? What status will the person in question be put into while the review is ongoing? Those sort of things need to spelled out clearly. They don't need to be exhaustive, though transparency is better in cases like this. Just knowing that the moderator would have their mod privileges suspended pending review by the site ownership would be a big step up We don't have an official policy posted because things are so situation-dependent. We want to maintain the flexibility to deal with things on a case-by-case basis and it is hard to rule on a hypothetical. (And the Site's owners could over-rule anything we do anyway.) I think, VERY broadly speaking, that we’d probably handle things similarly – immediately suspend the account, then have the site’s owner make the decision as to the final disposition of things. We’ve established this as precedent and it seems reasonable. We do take allegations VERY seriously. I think our actions in this situation prove this – we suspended Matt immediately, then perma-banned him. Cessna fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Jan 31, 2018 |
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Jan 31, 2018 22:14
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I think to some extent the anger at how RPGnet handled things is due to...well, the culture of RPGnet. Y'all can't pretend it isn't a place that lives and breathes tone policing pretty much constantly, and that influences how things are seen, even if it does not, in this case, actually influence how things were handled.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:34
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Any update about the CA Suleman timeline?
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Jan 31, 2018 22:39
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Mors Rattus posted:I think to some extent the anger at how RPGnet handled things is due to...well, the culture of RPGnet. Y'all can't pretend it isn't a place that lives and breathes tone policing pretty much constantly, and that influences how things are seen, even if it does not, in this case, actually influence how things were handled. Sure! Every forum has their own culture, and everyone won't like every forum.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:40
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Any update about the CA Suleman timeline? Day 1: Make up some bullshit about releasing a timeline that would exonerate them of blame. Day 47: Hope everyone forgot they protected a serial harasser.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:43
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Cessna posted:Sure! Every forum has their own culture, and everyone won't like every forum. I guess given you're a mod there you must actually like that forum, so it's probably unrealistic to ask you to just blanketly agree with a criticism like "the moderation at RPGnet is awful." That said, this statement basically is a dismissal of the criticism entirely, by claiming that RPGnet's awful moderation is just a matter of preference. "This is just how we do things" is a surefire way to ensure nothing changes and improvements are impossible to even consider. And around here, it's always gonna get called out as such.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:48
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Cessna posted:We don't have an official policy posted because things are so situation-dependent. We want to maintain the flexibility to deal with things on a case-by-case basis and it is hard to rule on a hypothetical. (And the Site's owners could over-rule anything we do anyway.) Yes, you suspended Matt immediately - but no one understood you had done that. There was no way to know what to expect, and much more importantly, no way to know who was going to communicate what was being done, or where official communication would come from. If something like this happens again, who is going to communicate what actions are being taken? Who is going to make the final decision? Who is going to communicate that final decision? Let's say the final decision is made by the site owners, and they want to take it on a case by case basis. Okay, fine. But who forwards the information to them? If a mod sees something like that in a post, what are they supposed to do? What responsibilities do they have? Are they required to forward that to the site owners? Do they also alert other mods? Do they also suspend the mod powers of the person in question, or do is that done by someone else? What do they post to the that thread so that there is communication that action is being taken? Do they lock the thread? Do they elicit further information then and there, or do they direct people to the site owners, or do they say that the site owners will be in contact once they are alerted? You say you want to have the time to make a deliberate decision. The time to do that is now, to think about what happens now and have policies in place so it's not a five alarm clusterfuck if it happens again. Again, I'm not talking about deciding repercussions now. I'm talking about the very basic, nuts and bolts, "What do we do?" aspect. The policy can be really simple. Write up a short script that says site owners are being contacted and will take appropriate action after reviewing the situation, and that future communication will come directly from them. The mod drops that in the thread and immediately reaches out to site ownership and they take it from there. At the very least that prevents confusion and fear. It's not as transparent as I would recommend it be, but it's better than nothing. The chances of an RPG.net mod having an accusation of harassment (and worst) levied against them and the site having to take action is 100% because it's already happened. There are lessons to be learned from how it went down so that if something like it happens again, things aren't as confused and rushed feeling. Handling it in the same ad-hoc manner not only ensures it will be just as confused and confusing, but runs the risk of someone even acting in good faith making the situation much worse. What if another mod, seeing the same post, had jumped in to try and get more information in between the time the post was made and you responded? What if they'd immediately locked the thread to make sure no one deleted that information before it was captured? Yes, you handled it pretty well given the circumstances. You also got incredibly lucky that it didn't go even more sideways. Relying on that luck to hold in the future is a very risky proposition.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:50
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I think my main problem with BHM and RPG.net is that he got to play Moderator in the Beast Kickstarter thread where everyone was telling him that the book was hella rapey, and he got to tell people not to talk about how rapey his book was.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:53
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Leperflesh posted:I guess given you're a mod there you must actually like that forum, so it's probably unrealistic to ask you to just blanketly agree with a criticism like "the moderation at RPGnet is awful." That said, this statement basically is a dismissal of the criticism entirely, by claiming that RPGnet's awful moderation is just a matter of preference. "This is just how we do things" is a surefire way to ensure nothing changes and improvements are impossible to even consider. I don't think it's awful, but I wouldn't, would I? I WILL acknowledge that we make mistakes. We also know that we won't please everyone - that's not meant as a dismissal, it's an acknowledgement of reality. I'm getting called out here for tone policing - but over on rpg.net, I'm getting PMs from Users for not tone policing enough. I try to balance things as best I can and learn from my mistakes, and that's all I realistically can do.
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Jan 31, 2018 22:55
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Yes, you handled it pretty well given the circumstances. You also got incredibly lucky that it didn't go even more sideways. Relying on that luck to hold in the future is a very risky proposition. That's a fair critique. Are you a member over there? I'm not trying to call you out or anything, I promise. But if you are, start a thread in the Trouble Tickets forum. (This goes for anyone reading this, not just you.) We'll take a shot at working up something. "All allegations of sexual harassment will be handled by the Site's owner, who will have final say over these matters. Any communications regarding these things will be handled by them." That's off the top of my head, and I can't dictate policy, especially not on here - but maybe we can work something out over there, with input from other users and staff.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:00
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Cessna posted:I'm getting called out here for tone policing - but over on rpg.net, I'm getting PMs from Users for not tone policing enough. I try to balance things as best I can and learn from my mistakes, and that's all I realistically can do. There is always a middle position between two positions, and always a more extreme position beyond each of them. This does not in any way imply that the middle position is good or correct. Consider: one guy thinks all black people should be murdered, while another guy thinks all black people should simply be deported to africa. Moderator decides to maintain balance by arguing for a middle position, and someone complains that this just isn't harsh enough! That's an absurd example (but not really, all of those opinions genuinely exist) but that's to prove the point: just because you have people to either side of your position arguing that you should change it has no bearing whatsoever on whether your position is correct. Tone policing is awful in part because it's always arbitrary. RPGnet attempts to codify it with increasingly absurdly long rules statements that nevertheless fail completely because ultimately tone is just about "does this sound harsh to my ear" and that's different from one person to another.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:02
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Leperflesh posted:There is always a middle position between two positions, and always a more extreme position beyond each of them. This does not in any way imply that the middle position is good or correct. I don't disagree with any of this. But, that said, my job is to try to keep our users happy. I - we - try to make decisions based on this. We try to take what our users want into account as much as possible. We try to do the right thing and learn from our mistakes. We try to figure out what the community wants done, but we also try to use common sense and experience to keep from having "tyranny of the majority." And even then, we're bound to piss a lot of people off. I'm really not being dismissive when I say "some forums work for some people, others don't." I know with 100% certainty that rpg.net is just not what everyone is looking for. That's okay. Leperflesh posted:Tone policing is awful in part because it's always arbitrary. RPGnet attempts to codify it with increasingly absurdly long rules statements that nevertheless fail completely because ultimately tone is just about "does this sound harsh to my ear" and that's different from one person to another. Yes. Look, I'm sorry, but I don't think I can say much here. I'm an admin over there, but I can't make unilateral decisions to overturn how things go or re-write the rules or eliminate them. The fact is that yes, I think our rules are a bloated train-wreck, an accumulation resulting from how things have been handled over the course of the fifteen years I have been a mod and the years the forum existed before that. There's a saying in the military, "our SOP is written in blood." That is, every one of those silly, arbitrary rules is there because someone did something and things went badly. That's why we have so many silly things built up - because, yes, someone DID post "hey, Tangency, I'm bleeding profusely, should I get help" so we had to say "please don't ask for medical advice" in the rules. I'd like to change things, believe me, but every attempt ends up with things going even worse.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:13
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FWIW, this hobby is like catnip to certain pedant assholes. If you explicitly make rules encouraging them to socially engage in a positive way, they'll rules lawyer and min/max their poo poo to optimize how much of a jerk they can be without crossing any stated rules. It's an "I'm not touching you!" scenario, and you can either 1) endlessly amend the no-touching rule or 2) hand out probations until the not-touchers modify their behavior or gently caress off. Something Awful tends more towards 2, and I think we have probably the best TG forum on the internet as a result.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:14
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That doesn't even sound remotely accurate, though? Something Awful practically makes being full of jerks a selling point.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:17
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