Of course, if sales really start tanking and people keep on complaining, CGL could maintain the license and just stop making Shadowrun books.
”Stop whining and resume buying the bad books, consumer, or there might not be any more bad books to buy!”
For avoidance of doubt, I use “bad” here both subjectively (“I don’t like 6e”) and objectively (“6e is sloppily edited and has numerous serious inconsistencies and mathematical incoherencies even after a full year of errata.”)
Well, that's the other piece of it. I'm sure you know there's people who stopped buying new books after 3e and after 4eA. It appears like there's significantly less people buying books after 5e as well.
There's folks playing 1e, 2e, and 3e games without any worries about all of this, or without wanting any new books.
One thing to note for FastJack's point- getting 200 sales across 2 books will net you less profit than 200 sales across 1 book. Take TS: Valencia, for instance. It has a price of 2.99, so it's grossed between 149.50 and 299.00. After DTRPG's cut, that's about $105 - $210 dollars. To break even, they had to spend that amount or less on production. The cover alone is likely in the $50 range, assuming they did it cheap and didn't reuse old assets. I bought it For Science, and this is the breakdown on wordcount and art assets:
* 21 pages total
* Layout is likely reused from old work, but they still had to pay someone to put it together
* One writer, one editor, and three production staff credited
* Factchecking/playtesting are also credited, but they likely did it for free
* Ignoring the records sheets at the back, total comes out to about 7.5k words. Standard rate in the industry is 0.03 per word for writing, which comes out to $225. The bare minimum I've heard is 0.005 (half a cent) per word, so that would be $37.50.
* For art: 1 cover art, 1 half-page art (Reused later with a grid overlay), 3 quarter-page cartoony art, 2 quarter page grayscale art. My best guestimate is $50, $35, $10 x 3, and $15 x 2 for a total of $145.
* The 3 records sheets in the back were credited to two people
I don't have a good reference for what the editor would be paid (Likely half a cent per word? They might be salaried), or the layout artist. Either way, you're looking at a base cost of $182.50 - $370.00, plus whatever they paid the layout artist and editor. Less if they reused art or didn't pay the artists.
In any case, if the rest of the TS line has similar base costs, I'd characterize anything that's still at copper 6 months later as being lost profit. Silver is closer to breaking even, but that's still between $210 and $525, and might not have been worth the time put into it.
Battletech is certainly putting out more material, but I don't think it has the same ROI as its SR products, even the ones not selling as well.
There is a lot more you are forgetting, and are making some wild assumptions.
The first one is the cost of Artwork.
The price you pay has a great deal to do with who did the work, what the art entails (detail, original format)....
To give give you an idea. Ethan Van Scriver is a well known artist. As such he was paid $20,000 for 13 live pen "sketches" used in Jordan Peterson's book "12 simple rules".
So, a little over $1500 per piece.
OTOH, several DC artists have let slip over the last little while that DC page rate was roughly $21 for each FULL page... (Again, dependent on the artist. If your name isn't Wade, Jimenez, or Reis, or on that tier, you are not making money).
The company have an Office? If so, how big? (for an Idea, Cdn Commerical rates are $33/sqFt). Warehouse space?
And then there is Utilities.. advertisement... Taxes..
And sadly, Battletech is the bread and butter for CGL... one just has to look out there in media.
Do 2 Youtube searches... Shadowrun. And Battletech. which one gives you more returns.
*Do the shadowrun one just for the fake TV and movie Ads! some of them are amazing!!!
Battletech has 7+ comper games associated to it, including one that was released i the last year, and an FTP online game that has thousands of active global players... (not HUGE, but not bad)
Shadowrun's has had... 5? 4?
Yeah, I'm guessing that I was overestimating the art. My numbers were based on what I've seen on fiverr from more "amateur" artists. The $21 rate is lower than what I expected for comics, but keep in mind that they have a different person do sketches, line art, and coloring. $20-30 for a full page sketch sounds about right for fiverr, too.
That's also why I differentiated between "cartoony" stuff and "grayscale," since the grayscale looked higher quality.
It's also possible that they're stiffing artists, too.
I'm not speaking so much to royalties from games, etc, just the profit that they're making from what CGL publishes. It would be irresponsible to speculate on royalties, since the rates are going to vary a lot, as will the profits per game.
I also don't want to talk about upkeep costs: it's true that CGL needs to make a certain amount total per month or per year for salaries and office upkeep. However, this isn't tied to the success of any individual book, it's tied to the overall profits of all books.
Let's say they stiffed the artists, and that they paid the writer the bare minimum. Let's call it $100 total cost, including editing and layout. This is a very low estimate, to be honest, I don't even think it's realistic that they're paying 0.005 cents per word.
They've published 7 TS books, let's say it's $700 total cost, assuming that each one of those books is comparable in size. 5 are silver, and the 2 newest ones are copper. We know from the calculations of SR books that these books will go up a tier or two after their release, so let's just say that at the end of the fiscal year, all 7 will be silver, with 100 - 250 sales each, or 700 - 1750 sales total. After accounting for dtrpg's take, that's between $765 and $2960 net profit.
Is that enough ROI for 7 20-page books? Who knows!
Compare this to krime katalog: At electrum, that's between 250 - 500 sales- you might anticipate it going up a tier, but I'm not sure if that'll happen before the fiscal year is over. Similar to the TS books, it's digital only, so we're only missing sales on CGL's site. Krime Katalog has a 9.99 price point, so that's between $2,500 and $5,000 gross profit.
Krime Katalog is about 15k words, and 13 half-pages of art. If we go with .03 cents per word, the writing cost $450. If we say it was .005 cents per word, then the writing cost $75 (If that's the case, holy shit, since that writing was worth a lot more than that). The cover was reused from the half-pages, and the art all looks to be decent quality. My best guess is somewhere in the $20-40 range, but if Reaver's right it could be closer to $10-20. The "high estimate" of cost would be $520, and the "low estimate" is $130. So the cost of the book is between $205 and $970, with maybe another $50-100 for layout and editing.
After DTRPG's take, the net profit is $1545 to $3295 with the low-cost estimate, and $780 to $2530 with the high-cost estimate.
Is that enough ROI for 1 40-page book? Again, who knows! But I do know that my high-cost estimate for this book is about the same range as the low-cost estimate for all 7 of the TS books.