Steve Jackson Games Changes Its PDF/Print Strategy a Bit

Earlier this year I mentioned Steve Jackson Games’ decision to release the core GURPS books as PDFs. They had been offering the supplements in both PDF and print version for awhile (and some supplements in PDF-only), but based on their experiment with that decided releasing the books as PDFs wouldn’t affect print sales (I assume that many people who are interested in RPGs, like myself, want both the printed and PDF versions of the core books).

Now, they’re taking the next step and releasing their next GURPS supplement as a PDF several weeks ahead of the printed version of the supplement,

Errata are the bane of a publisher’s existence. No matter how many editors and proofreaders go over a manuscript, words get misplaced or misspelled. And in game books, the potential to misstate a rule, or to switch two entries in a table, creates even more possible problems.

And when the book is over 270 pages long, with dozens of tables, the “possibility” of errata grows into “probability.”

Modern technology offers a solution: let the book out as a PDF a couple weeks before it is sent to print. The loyal fans will provide extra eyes to track down and stomp those annoying errors. Thus, we have released GURPS Thaumatology.

(No, we’re not the first publisher to do this. But as this is a first for us, we figured we should mention it.)

If you’re a retailer, and worried about the effect on sales, we understand. However, we have had both digital and print versions of our GURPS Fourth Edition line available during the last year, and all the evidence indicates that digital sales do not significantly affect print sales. Basically, customers who want PDF won’t be satisfied with print, and those who need pages in their hand aren’t happy with electrons. If we thought this would slow the sales of the print version, we wouldn’t do it. We believe this will result in a better book; that’s why we’re doing it.

This clearly seems to be another step in the march of the RPG-industry to a largely PDF-dominated world. There are two stores in my city that sell RPG-related materials. For the most part, they seem to have stopped stocking new RPGs that aren’t either Dungeons & Dragons or White Wolf related. And, as far as I can tell, the other stuff simply doesn’t sell. One of the stores has had the same set of GURPS core books on the shelf for at least 6 months now.

I know I’ve bought a ton of RPGs over the past couple years, but all of those were PDFs. PDF publishers might be smart to explore some sort of affiliate relationship with independent stores.

Of course much of the space that 10 years ago might have been devoted to RPGs has since been taken over by collectible card and miniature games which seem to do very well for retailers (as long as people continue to buy impulsively at the local game shop rather than in bulk on the Internet).