John--
"Consumers are much more tolerant because they have been trained to be by
the industry to be. "
That is an excellent point, and crystallizes thoughts that have been
wandering around in my mind. At a certain point games that attempt to be
all things to all people all the time obviously can't do it 100% right away
(ever, actually), but several years of learning this themselves have made
the audience realize that this is an art of the possible that is always
advancing. As a guy who's been doing software development since I left GDW,
I see that every day, but didn't necessarily connect it back to the
evolution of RPGs, but I think you're spot-on.
Thank you very much for that insight.
Dave
On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:17:52 -0700, John Potter <>
wrote:
> 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."