With the first release in the Feng Shui subscription program coming later the month, here's my thoughts on the program so far:
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Running a successful Kickstarter is both expensive and time-consuming. Their advantage, of course, is that they can make a big splash and get a lot of people excited about a game. Kickstarters will definitely continue to be a part of the Atlas business plan, but they aren't a cure-all. And they can end up being a net loss if you're not careful.
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The goal of our committed preorder subscription plan is basically the opposite: Success, for us, is not defined in terms of a huge influx of one-time capital. Instead, our goal is to build a community of subscribers large enough that we can put projects into development with confidence: If we know that our development and production costs will be covered by the subscription program, then we can launch new projects with complete confidence. The more subscribers we get -- the more people willing to say, "Yes! I want more of this game! -- the larger and more ambitious those projects can get.
And this is working! At the moment, I have seven different Feng Shui projects in various stages of development. A year ago that would have been unthinkable for us. We would have needed to wait for the first project to go on sale and then very carefully analyzed the sales numbers before committing to the next one. (A process which -- due to development time, printing time, and shipping time -- makes it virtually impossible to publish more than one book for an RPG per year. And it takes just one miss (I picked the wrong topic, we launched the book just as a global pandemic started, etc.) to basically torpedo the whole line.
So this is good for subscribers -- the big fans who want everything for a game -- but it's good for any fan: Maybe you don't want everything. But the more stuff we produce, the more likely it is that you'll find what you want. And that's good for the game!
- I've seen some theories that these subscriptions would enable Atlas to start churning out shovelware: Ha! Ha! We have your commitment to buy, so I can just publish any ol' crap and cash in!
My sense is that it's really the exact opposite: Sure, I could rip you off once. But only once, right? Then you'd cancel your subscription. And once I have the # of subscribers I need to continue producing Feng Shui or Ars Magica or Unknown Armies books, the last thing I'd want to do (from either a creative, business, or ethical POV) is jeopardize it!
I run a Patreon for my independent work over at the Alexandrian. And I am hyper-aware that if I don't product high quality material for the site, my subscribers can vanish in the blink of an eye. The more subscribers I get, the more I actually feel that pressure.
- Does this mean we'll be doing a subscription program for Ars Magica? That remains uncertain. We need to see how the first couple of releases for the Feng Shui Dragon subscriptions go, and maybe tweak a few things before launching additional subscription lines.
But what I can say is that Ars Magica 5th Edition seems like pretty much the perfect candidate for a subscription program: The core problem with producing more books for the line boils down to uncertainty about whether we can sell the # of copies required to pay for the books to be made. With 40 books already extant, there's a real problem with saturation -- for the fans (how many books do they need?), for the distributors (how many ArM titles do we want in our warehouses?), and for the stores (how much shelf space can we give to ArM?).
A subscription program would basically answer that question definitively: Either there ARE enough fans interested in new books to support new material. Or there isn't. And we'd be able to know that with surety before pulling the trigger.