Fonte: la newsletter settimanale di DriveThrouRPG
10 Years: From Idea to Industry
By Monte Cook
It started on my living room floor. That's where I sat, surrounded by a bunch of papers and things where I'd drawn up a plan. I sat with Sue, my wife, and my friend Bruce. I asked them, "If I price it at just 5 dollars, do you think maybe 50 people would buy it?"
Bruce said yes.
"100 people?"
He nodded, but seemed less sure. I was worried.
The year was 2001. We were talking about a short product that I had an idea for, called The Book of Eldritch Might. (I was a fan of the word "eldritch" being a fan of Dr. Strange from way back.) We were so leery not because of the product itself, however, but because of its format and delivery system. This would be an electronic-only product. A downloadable file. A pdf. I'd only heard that acronym a few times before, back at Wizards of the Coast.
Most don't remember this, but Wizards had tried to sell electronic products back in 2000. One was a Dark Matter supplement, The Final Church, released as a pdf for sale, and the other a Star*Drive product, The Externals, created as a hybrid pdf/html product. The revenue and interest generated was negligible for Wizards of the Coast, and the whole idea was scrapped. (It was because of these early failures that Wizards of the Coast only reluctantly entered into the electronic market, and only very, very late.) But I had heard through the grapevine that the pdf products had sold at least a thousand downloads. More importantly, I saw a bit later that Wizards of the Coast was having wild success with free (pdf) downloadable products, particularly adventures. Miguel Duran's Burning Plague adventure, for example This was an important development because, had hundreds of thousands of downloads. It was likely the most accessed 3rd edition adventure ever. T his meant that the 3rd Edition D&D audience was very accustomed to using pdf products. I was intrigued.
In April of 2001, I left Wizards of the Coast. I intended to work freelance while trying to figure out a way to get my own material published. This idea of a downloadable product was still in my head. I could write it, Sue could edit it, my friend JD could provide some artwork, but how would I actually sell and deliver it?
And most importantly, would anyone buy it?
Well first things first. One night soon after I was on my own, I stayed up all night, scouring the Internet. I looked for someone else doing what I wanted to do. I found very little. A company named 0one Games was selling an adventure, S. John Ross was producing a handful of downloadable game products, and that was about it. None of them used a payment or delivery method that I liked or thought I could use. (And a fact that would become important later, they were all different.)
Eventually, I found a company online that hosted downloadable patches for software and a few other kinds of small electronic products. They weren't selling anything like what I was considering, so their main storefront did me no good. I'd have to point to the product's sales page entirely on my own.
So I had the means to sell and deliver it. But would anyone buy it? Would anyone ever even find out about it? I worried that people would find the format unweildy. And I worried that people would not know or understand Malhavoc Press (the name of my new little company).
As a test, after the launch of montecook.com, we immediately hosted a free pdf, a 4-page presentation of an alternate ranger class. I was excited when it flew off the virtual shelf. It was also interesting that when I realized that I had made an error in the product, it was easy to change it and simply make a new, error-free version available. (The last time I checked, the alternate ranger had been downloaded almost 200,000 times.)
But what I still didn't know was, would anyone actually find such a thing worth spending money on?
The Book of Eldritch Might
My fears were put to rest the day The Book of Eldritch Might released: May 27th, 2001. Those 100 copies I wondered if I would sell over the life of the product? We sold more than that in the first hour. In fact, in the first day, we sold 1,000 copies. And, as a little bit of trivia, our very first customer was a guy by the name of Eric Noah, who founded what would eventually become ENWorld. That site would become crucial to our ability to get the word out about our new products.
The day after its release, two different print publishers contacted me interested in putting The Book of Eldritch Might into print. I made a deal with the one that contacted me first, Sword and Sorcery, a newly created imprint of White Wolf Publishing.
It quickly became obvious that pdfs were a viable format for releasing products. Many, many people emailed me to tell me that they didn't like it, that they wanted print books, that it was awful having to print the thing out, and so on. But the sales figures showed that there were plenty of people who did like it and were happy with it.
The next few days and weeks were a blur. Malhavoc Press became my primary professional concern, and not too long thereafter we would realize that we could afford to have Sue quit her job so that she could work full time on Malhavoc as well.
Meanwhile, others began assembling and pdf rpg products as well. Small companies like RPGObjects, Anubium, Bard's Productions, Thunderhead Games, and many more began to produce RPG pdfs, while others already in the market producing print products jumped in with pdfs as well, like Mongoose, Mystic Eye, and Bastion Press, to name just a few. But everyone was having to reinvent the wheel on how to host, sell, and deliver these things. Just as important, there was no centralized hub for pdfs. Customers didn't know where to go to look for new releases. We longed for a pdf store where all our "books" could be on a "shelf" together.
RPGNow
It was just later that same year that James Mathe created RPGNow, a storefront for gaming pdf products. I must admit, I was skeptical at first. I didn't know James, and I wasn't sure that RPGNow would last. I also didn't know if Malhavoc's support of RPGNow would help them more than the reverse, for we were certainly selling a lot of products on our own, and experiencing a lot of web traffic. And I may have been right about that latter fact, at least right then, but soon RPGNow became a go-to destination for rpg products in electronic form.
Eventually, RPGNow would even make a deal with Wizards of the Coast to sell products from older editions of D&D or other out of print materials. Soon "RPGNow" became synonymous with "gaming pdfs." Making it onto one of their top 10 lists was often considered to be a sign that a company or an author had truly arrived.
Experiments with the Form
As the electronic format grew, we saw a lot of experimentation the form. Screen-friendly layouts (usually landscape oriented) and printer-friendly versions of books (low on art and graphics so as not to burn through your ink cartridge) became popular. Bookmarks became essential, as did the option to be able to copy/paste from the document.
A question arose amid all of this. Did pdfs need to feel like the rpg books that came before them--with a cover, a back cover, art throughout, and so forth? Or was it its own medium. One of the pioneers in creating pdfs that were not anything like books, Phil Reed of Ronin Arts, created a great many very short, very utilitarian, very inexpensive pdf products. This sort of product, often offering a small number of feats or magic items, a single new class or monster, and so on, became a model that many publishers adopted and was very successful. Most of the stime, these products were 99 cents or a dollar. Before this, the standard price for a pdf had been 5 dollars. I always found this amusing because I'm pretty sure that's because The Book of Eldritch Might had been 5 dollars. But of course, I had no idea how to price that originally, and just went with the cheapest price my vendor at the time would accept.
Other explorations of what pdfs could do took a very different path. Some publishers, like SkeletonKey Games and Fiery Dragon, released terrain tiles and counters. This was innovative because these high-quality artistic products could be printed out over and over again--very useful to players and GMs (and, I suppose, to printer ink manufacturers).
Meanwhile, Back at Malhavoc Press
Throughout the next few years, we published a number of smaller products, both in print and pdf. I was struggling with a number of conventional retailers, who claimed that making things available electronically would ensure that the product would never sell in print. Others condescendingly claimed that now that I had a deal in place to publish in print, I should give up this silly little pdf publishing. Sales figures on both sides proved them all wrong. There was a market for both versions of each product we produced, making it a very exciting time for us. With the OGL, the number of new publishers entering both sides of the market, the whole industry was a vibrant place.
For our part, we did less to innovate the presentation of pdfs, instead focusing on larger and more deluxe products. In 2003, Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed was our largest pdf at 256 pages, but was soon undone by the even more deluxe, full-color Arcana Evolved in 2005, at 432 pages. We worried that these products would be too large to be desirable as electronic files, or that their deluxe nature would make people want a print version only, but again our worries were unfounded. Features like cut/paste, bookmarks and in particular the searchability of electronic books made them extremely useful in using large books.
Rise of the Ebook
Soon the pdf industry fueled such a busy marketplace that other vendors appeared to create new places for customers to find product. In 2005, DriveThruRPG (and its associated sites like DriveThruComics, DriveThruFantasy, and so on) appeared. DriveThru's interesting take on the pdf phenomenon was to encourage existing print publishers to make their existing books, including (and perhaps especially) older, out of print material available to gamers. I can tell you that the most compelling reason for a publisher to do this is that it means that nothing ever goes out of stock or out of print. One of the most frustrating things, from a publisher's point of view, is when a customer wants to buy their product but can't because it's not on the right st ore shelf at the right time. With pdfs, the product is always on the shelf all the time. That's fantastic.
White Wolf Publishing, Game Designer's Workshop, FASA, Chaosium, and other long-time fan favorites made their products into pdfs through DriveThru. To entice leery publishers, DriveThru implemented piracy-protection features into their products, but these proved to be very unpopular with customers and eventually such measures were removed.
Steve Wieck of DriveThru even managed to convince Wizards of the Coast to sell new products in pdf form. (I played a very small role in those negotiations as well.) Eventually, however, the company would decide to stop selling those pdfs. DriveThru quickly became the market leader in pdf sales, and eventually, that site and RPGNow would merge into a single company, OneBookShelf.
In the non-game world, the latter years of the decade saw a revolution in traditional publishing, and the emergence of the ebook as a viable format for regular fiction and nonfiction became undeniable. Ebook readers like Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook, and related apps on smart phones and iPads made ebooks accessible to everyone. They made them easy and even fun to use. The general public discovered what many gamers had known for a few years--that electronic books offer advantages in storage and usability that traditional books cannot. While many find that there is a certain kind of satisfaction in holding and reading a print book (and there's nothing wrong with that--I have a large library of them myself), e-readers and tablets make ebooks almost as nice to read. Some people prefer them.
Today
In 2005, we at Malhavoc Press launched our most ambitious product ever: Ptolus, Monte Cook's City by the Spire. This huge, ultra-deluxe product was a single tome, but by that point we knew the value of electronic books and included a CD-Rom with each print edition that contained support products, additional material, and some of the same material found in the book itself so that it could be printed out as needed. We eventually released Ptolus as a number of individual pdfs divided up by topic, but due to customer demand (and the fact that the print book sold out rather quickly) we also made the entire book available as a single pdf for those that wanted it.
After Ptolus, the number of products from Malhavoc Press slowed considerably, but we have produced a few things such as The Books of Experimental Might. I do enjoy keeping my hand in rpg design even as I work on other kinds of writing.
The advent of 4th Edition D&D and its more restrictive license meant that the number of publishers producing support for the game shrank, although many continued to use the OGL to create pdfs compatible with 3rd edition as well as Paizo Publishing's Pathfinder game. Now, pdf publishers continue to make more and more interesting products available each day, which if compared to how things were just 10 years ago is quite astonishing itself.
And looking to the future, we see that the whole marketplace has come full circle. With the advent of print on demand publishing, or POD, products that were pdfs can be delivered to customers as high quality print books. Which means that not only are pdfs always "on the shelf," but print books can be on the "virtual" shelf all the time as well. At Malhavoc, we're excited and proud to have Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved, the Complete Book of Eldrtich Might, and other products available once again as print books thanks to POD. Soon, we'll be able to even add Ptolus to that list, which is very exciting.
In 2001, I tried very hard to spread the word that electronic publishing was the wave of the future. While I was scoffed at numerous times, I stuck with that opinion. And now I'm proud to say that the future I envisioned is here. I will admit, however, that if you would have found me that night I scoured the Internet looking for a way to sell my first pdf, and told me that 10 years later people would refer to the rpg pdf industry, or that the marketplace would be able to sustain many different gaming pdf storefronts, with dozens of new products available each week, even I would have likely doubted you. It's been an interesting 10 years, to say the least. I'm happy and proud to have been a part of it.
Here's to another 10 years for Malhavoc Press, gaming ebooks, and gaming in general. As I said all those years ago: "Go PDF!"
This is a rather awesome piece about the history of the PDF and gaming, and I want to personally thank Monte for writing this for us as we celebrate Malhavoc's 10th Anniversary... which is also the anniversary of the PDF as a viable medium for sharing game products.
~ SPF (05-19-2011)
