Question for the Game Designers on the Flist...

[chadu]

(Especially the Adventure game -- read RPGs, wargames, board games, etc. -- designers.)

What, to you, is the definition of an "evergreen" product?

Also, what metrics do you use to determine that?

Comments

[drivingblind]

Evergreen to me is less about a product's sales and more about its perpetual availability: doesn't go out of print.

[chadu]

But a certain level of sales is required to keep a product in print, I think.

I suspect all this is tangled up together; I'm trying to untangle the threads.

[drivingblind]

Depends on whether you consider PDF to be an evergreen strategy. Or an outfit like Lulu, where you don't print a copy until the funds are already supplied.

[chadu]

Now those two points (PDF only and POD) are worthy of debate/discussion!

My take: I don't know!

That's why I'm talking about it (to find out what I think, informed by other people's think).

;)

[sirvalence]

That depends. Would Amber Diceless RPG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game) count as evergreen? People still play it, even though there were only two products ever printed (in 1991 and 1993) and it's been out of print ever since.

It seems that any definition you get will be pretty arbitrary. Perhaps we could better answer your question if we better knew what you were trying to accomplish by asking it.

[chadu]

I'm not sure Amber's evergreen, because it's not directly available -- you have to go hunting for it, usually in secondary markets.

I'm cool with arbitrary definitions -- I'm looking for various people's takes on the term "evergreen."

[drivingblind]

You can still get it in PDF. :)

[chadu]

So, Amber being evergreen is now a dependency on whether PDF availability counts as being in print.

[chadu]

Intriguing.

Hmmm. What's the default choice for superhero games?

If there is one, it's not a monolithic "ketchup" or "Coke" one -- I suspect for certain niches, the default is a regional one. (Regional in the meatspace AND cyberspace senses.)

[highmoonmedia]

I'd say Champions and/or Mutants & Masterminds.

[chadu]

Oooh: another "region" here -- gamer demographic (i.e., age).

Anecdata: For me and my HS friends, the go-to superhero game was almost always Advanced MSH. In college, that shifted to HERO briefly, then GURPS.

[highmoonmedia]

To me, it denotes a product that continues to sell consistently beyond the 3-to-6-month period where most products post their best sales numbers then drop off. But even that is not really valid anymore. PDF has extended the life of a lot of products well beyond the 1-year mark and I wouldn't consider them evergreen, just long-lasting. There's something to the equation about the game being able to continually generate not just sales, but also enthusiasm and fans. D&D, Cthulhu, SotC, DitV - these are evergreen titles, to name a few.

Not sure that helped.

[chadu]

Sure, it helped.

Curious what you count as "consistent" sales past the 90-180 day window. One or two copies sold? Five to seven?

Agreed with you on PDFs strecthing the window.

Another interesting thing is to figure out the point at which one would let a Print+PDF product fall out of physical print, but the PDFs remaining available.

[highmoonmedia]

Thanks for forcing me to think of this.

What is consistent? I guess it depends on the publisher. For Highmoon Games, consistent might mean 5 copies a month (as opposed to the trickle-in of a sale here, then another in 2 weeks, then 1 month, etc.). For a company the size of Evil Hat, perhaps it is 20-30 copies (what's the sales pattern for SotC still now? I think that defines it). For WotC, it'd be a couple hundred, I would think. Can we say a 5-10% of initial month sales numbers fully realizing that no such study or comparison has actually ever been done?

But like I said, there's another element to the "evergreen" adjective that to me, and especially when I was working sales in a hobby/gaming shop, denoted enthusiasm generation, and that is a lot harder to quantify.

[drivingblind]

http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/tag/sales+numbers

SOTC can sell a couple hundred copies (mixed format: some PDF, some print, much of that print into the retail channel) every quarter, according to trending.

Evergreens

[dtwatts]

I think it also carries at least a connotation of publisher intent. The Hero core rules we consider evergreen, and while individual supplements are hoped to carry their own weight success-wise, the hope is that they sustain and drive players back to the "root" book of our publishing tree, which will then in turn get them to notice and appreciate the other "branches" that have grown from it. 5th Ed sold consistently and profitably for eight years, and we intend for 6th to do the same.

Re: Evergreens

[chadu]

Oooh, interesting.

I was looking at this from the outside-in, but you're making me think inside-out.

Spiffy!