[JBE] A New Year Has Begun

[dmccoy1693]

A New Year Has Begun.

With 2010 over and 2011 fresh and young, I bet you are wondering, "What can I expect from Jon Brazer Enterprises this year?" (or maybe you're not, I don't have any Psionic talent). Either way, you can find out what is going on with JBE this year and what you can look forward to from us.

Also, we're giving away the PDF of the Creatures of Distant Worlds Compendium for 20% off for the rest of the month. If you have been looking for animals or other fauna for your crew to encounter, now you can snatch up this book at a discount. You must use the discount code 12450 to take part in this deal. Get yours today.

 

[Treebore]

I figured your Pathfinder products were better money for you, but I am glad to see Traveller has earned enough for you to continue doing products for it. I am most eager to see how you bring Warp technology to Traveller.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Well, the Sabria Armored Cargo Transport was our first Warp ship released. It was more of a test product to see if there was a market. Its a good preview of what I would be doing with warp ships. Having said that, there's alot of changes that are going to be made that we're still in the process of working out the kinks on.

Energy Shields vs Armor is a good example. How expensive do we set the shields? The Star Wars video games had ships with almost as much armor plating as they did shields. If we price it so that 1 armor point of shields is roughly the same cost as 1 point of armor + its tonnage, we'll make them more of a trade off. However, Star Trek ships possess almost no armor plating and is almost all energy shields. In that situation, shields are cost effective enough to get rid of armor all together. There are a few other things like that that need ironed out.

But yea, on the whole, we're really pleased with the way Traveller is performing for us. And yea, Pathfinder does bring in the money, but Traveller holds its own as well.

 

[Dark Lord Skippy]

Well, using some cash I received during Christmas, I bought several books for Traveller including JBE's d66 Compendium. This book is stunningly useful.

3 days after getting it in the mail, it was already being used during my Saturday night game session to name an NPC and a local bar. Great stuff.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Well, using some cash I received during Christmas, I bought several books for Traveller including JBE's d66 Compendium. This book is stunningly useful.

3 days after getting it in the mail, it was already being used during my Saturday night game session to name an NPC and a local bar. Great stuff.

I'm really glad you like it.

 

[DigitalMage]

JBE's d66 Compendium. This book is stunningly useful.

I used my copy again pretty much straight away prepping for a LIving Traveller scenario (Rescue on Ruie) providing extra NPC names, tatoos and other characteristics etc.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Our first Career Pack goes live tomorrow. Check out the cover.

The Player Careers Pack 1 features the Software Engineer and the Raider.

 

[Blix]

Our first Career Pack goes live tomorrow. Check out the cover.

The Player Careers Pack 1 features the Software Engineer and the Raider.

Interesting. Why does this have the same cover art as Avalon Games' recently released "Infinite Futures" RPG?

http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/89803/infinite-futures-corebook
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=87183

In fact, they use it as trade dress on their other products too:
http://www.avalon-games.com/Avalon_Game_Company/Infinite_Futres.html

 

[dmccoy1693]

Simple. We both used the same stock art cover. It happens relatively frequently. Avalon can't claim it is their trade dress since they didn't come up with it. Talisman Studios did. We both happened to buy it. That's all.

I plan to use this cover for all the PDF Player Career Packs, but I'll get a custom cover for the Compendiumed version ... either later this year or sometime next year.

Edit: Infact, all their art is stock art. I used one of the ships on page 4 over a year ago in Fighters and Small Ships, as well as the cover I designed for the May issue of the Freelance Traveller.

But yea, that happens alot with stockart. Alot of publishers have the same pool of artwork so there's a considerable amount of repeat images.

 

[Blix]

That explains it then.

But do you not think that would lead to some brand confusion? Particularly if this is stock art that is available for others to use as well, and so we may see books published by even more publishers with the same cover art?

 

[dmccoy1693]

That explains it then.

But do you not think that would lead to some brand confusion? Particularly if this is stock art that is available for others to use as well, and so we may see books published by even more publishers with the same cover art?

That's a very good question. Short answer: Yes, but that is a risk I choose to take for the PDF series. The profit margins on PDFs are small. And when you move away from a major brand like the Pathfinder Compatibility License, profits get even smaller. One of the easier ways to offset that is to heavily rely on stock art. The downside of stockart is that the more people see it, the less sense of "awe" it inspires in the fans, as well as the potential confusion factor.

I mean, its easy to sell something in the RPG industry. But having those sales make a profit is a much more difficult matter. One of the most important ways to do so is to control costs. The old joke in the RPG industry is, "How do you make a small fortune in the RPG industry? Start off with a big fortune." The reason is is that most RPG companies are started by fans and not people looking to create a business. And they do not know how to control costs. Knowing how to control the cost of producing an RPG book is probably the easiest way to tell whether a company is going to be around in 3 years.

Sorry for the long explanation, but to get to my point: using a stockart cover is a way of keeping my costs down. Now, for the print compendium, I'm more than willing pay for a custom cover for that. Simply because the print book will sell more copies than the PDFs and it will be able to pay for its own costs much easier.

There will probably be some confusion, but with proper links and me making sure that everything is clearly labeled Traveller should help to minimize confusion.

 

[lastbesthope]

Our first Career Pack goes live tomorrow. Check out the cover.

The Player Careers Pack 1 features the Software Engineer and the Raider.

pdf or hardcopy???

LBH

 

[dmccoy1693]

PDF only series for the time being. If there is enough interest, I'll compendium the whole series up into a print book, but that'll be late-2011/early-2012-ish time frame.