My only thoughts on this is 'times change'.
Back when TNE was being published there was a greater sense of the consumer
expecting when they paid for something or a book it was 'complete'.
Your points about payroll, the wear and tear on employees to make deadlines
are spot on. I been in this place several times in my own career.
Today the situation for consumers is much different I think. If for no
other reason than for the advent of video game patches.
Consumers are much more tolerant because they have been trained to be by
the industry to be. This doesn't mean they will tolerate
it indefinitely but there are bounds of reason now for content creators to
fix issues they can't fit in to the publishing cycles for their genres.
On Sun, Jun 10, 2012 at 2:09 AM, <> wrote:
> **
>
>
> Okay, it should be obvious that I've been spending a lot of time lately
> revisiting my past on-line.
>
> One of the comments I have seen repeatedly is the old meme, "GDW had a
> reputation for lots of errata."
>
> Now, I don't know if it's really true that GDW had any more or any less
> errata than the average game company, but certainly I know I've heard that
> remark before. It may just be one of those remarks that gets parroted over
> and over like Marc's remark about TNE being the most
> controversial version of Traveller (a minefield that I may venture into
> another day), or maybe it is said about EVERY game company--"SPI had a
> reputation for lots of errata," "TSR had a reputation for lots of
> errata"--but let's assume for a moment that it is true that GDW did have
> more errata than most.
>
> The first thing, which I was very much aware of at the time, is that you
> have to admit that there is errata. There were cases where folks would
> simply not publish errata, because as soon as you publish an errata sheet,
> people jump up and go, "Ha! Errata!" So publishing errata makes you look
> bad. So there is the issue that you first have to admit to errata, which
> makes you look bad. My position was that having errata, but not wanting to
> go to the embarrassment of admitting to it, is worse than admitting to it.
> The point is to keep faith with your players, which means that if you find
> a problem, you must report it, even if that means you have to admit to
> screwing up. I know that GDW when I was there went above and beyond in
> admitting to errata, which certainly made us look like we had a lot,
> because we were proactive in publishing a lot, and we would even publish
> clarifications of things that were not exactly wrong, but could have been
> explained better. And Loren always correctly pointed out that it was not an
> "Errata Sheet," as "errata" is the errors, not the corrections. Actually it
> was a "Corrigenda Sheet."
>
> The second, and this is the thing that I've been thinking about lately, is
> that I would imagine that errata is more likely when you are a small
> company that must publish to survive. If we didn't have new product
> shipping, we didn't get income. And if we missed deadlines, that is money
> that we would never get back. This was because of the comic/game
> distribution system, which ran on pre-solicitations where they would send
> out monthly catalogs for upcoming products, and local stores would sign up
> for a set number of things to be released on that date. If they came out on
> that date, the distributors would buy the planned amount. But if they
> slipped, the distributors would not save that money for when it eventually
> came out, they would spend it on something else. And when the product did
> finally come out later, it would be competing with something else, so you
> would never get the same numbers as if you got it out on time. At our
> weekly production meetings, Frank would always say one of two
> diametrically-opposed things:
>
> 1. "They'll never remember if it was on time or not, they'll just remember
> if it was good."
> 2. "They'll never remember if it was good or not, they'll just remember if
> it was on time."
>
> The ironic thing is that both were true: 1 was true of the end users, the
> gamers, and 2 was true of the distributors, and you had to try very hard to
> not damage your on-time reputation with the distributors, because if you
> had a reputation for not being on time, they wouldn't bother to order as
> much from you, as they didn't think they'd get it anyway. But if you
> damaged your reputation with the players, your products would get a bad
> name and no end-users would want them.
>
> So, back to getting stuff out. If we didn't get stuff out on time, and on
> a regular basis, once a week, once every two weeks, we didn't get income to
> make payroll, and towards the end this was very obvious, as we started
> slipping payroll. So, if it is true that a smaller company is more
> dependent on that weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly shipment of new products to
> cover its bottom line, it is under more pressure to get stuff out and could
> generate more errata. But, did we ever ship anything out the door knowing
> that it was broken, or not good enough? Never. I remember standing out on
> the back porch in tears one time because we weren't going to be able to
> send the Brilliant Lances book to the printer because there were some
> broken ships in it, and I was going to have to work all weekend and cancel
> a long-awaited, "really, I mean it this time," two-day trip with my wife,
> AGAIN. (Susan Schug saved my soul, and renegotiated with the printer.) But
> the requirement to get stuff out could have truncated the QA process, not
> allowing enough time to catch everything that could have otherwise been
> caught.
>
> So maybe we did have more errata than companies that did have a bigger
> bankroll, like a West End. I don't know. But I think about these things.
>
> Anyway, I'm going to bed. I'll talk to you all tomorrow. Unless you're
> tired of my introspection, then I'll stop. Seriously, any of you who ever
> thought, "why doesn't that Dave Nilsen guy talk to us?" have got to be
> thinking now, "be careful what you ask for."
>
>
>
--
If the world was fair then every bad thing that has ever happened to you
would have been deserved.