I have always bought a mix of books, but some books (especially location books) are just not interesting to me or my players, but with the new format, I am "forced" to buy a book which is mostly made up of information I don't need - to get a few pages of stuff I would like.
It reminds me far too much of a publisher wanting to milk their customers by putting a little stuff everyone wants into a book only some wants.
I am not in anyway speaking for Jason, CGL, or anyone who isn't me when I say this:That's exactly what my goal would be if I was selling gaming supplements.
It may sound horrible, but my primary goal as a businessman is to make a profit. Given what I understand to be the historical sales rankings of Shadowrun books, I'm either going to be selling a shitton of gear books (Pthbbbbbbt) or try to incorporate a bunch of material that can appeal to as many people as possible even if it is at the expense of depth.
Let's be clear: I could and would love to write all of
Spy Games as a 200-plus page book just on the field of espionage in Shadowrun, how it affects runners and similar mercenaries, and so forth. However, it would probably sell 100 copies. Maybe 200. That wouldn't even be enough to pay
me, let alone the editing/layout staff and the artists. I'm guessing that CGL saw that same breakdown and that's part of the reason why
War!,
Spy Games, and
Conspiracy Theories have this format.
I mean, look at
Fields of Fire. It inspired real-life mercenary friends of mine to get into civilian contracting. But it's like 3/5 gear, 1/5 rules, and 1/5 fluff. And that's a really, really well-written and awesome theme/alternative campaign book. It's just economics. Unless the location book is
Aztlan or the Seattle books, it's not worth it IMO to try and sell an entire location book (especially new locations). At best people are going to say, "Cool book." A lot of people are going to say, "Eh. Neat, but I'm sticking with Seattle/homebrew setting." And if the Internet is to be believed, most people will say it sucks for X, Y, and Z reasons ranging from "excessive self-awesoming" (London, Germany), too crazy (TT, TNO), too succinct (Shadows of ...), or too old (NAGNA, which has small briefs on nations and writeups of sprawls in each non-NAN state, exactly two of which have been covered in the last twenty years: San Fran in CFS, and Manhattan in an ebook), or just people bitching that it's not realistic for a game set 60+ years in a future with magic, dragons, and people willingly sticking plugs into their brains to surf the web. And God forbid you release that material as an ebook. Holy shit, you'd think that Adobe raped some peoples' parents to death for as much as those are criticized online.
Going back to
Spy Games, the location covered in that book will be Denver. Given that FanPro spent an entire Missions season (a year or so) in Denver, I figure they and CGL know better than anyone on Earth what the demand for material on Denver is.