Energy 92.7 was sold a little while back, and as of this past weekend, they are officially no more. I considered them to in many ways be the soundtrack of San Francisco, and I would often tune in over the internet.
I often wished radio stations in Calgary would be more like them. Now I can’t even point to them as an example.
This makes me unhappy.
Based on events over the past two weeks, I’ve spent more time than usual pondering the business of role-playing games (RPGs). In case you haven’t heard:
At present, I material for several different games, and I often consider buying RPG products in PDF form as an alternative to buying books. PDFs are great when I have problems tracking down paper copies of games (my FLGS doesn’t stock products from some of the smaller companies, unfortunately) or when I can’t justify the cost of a paper copy. PDFs are also useful for test-driving a new game or supplement, which may prompt me to start spending more money on paper copies.
I think that a business model that ignores the PDF marketplace is a mistake for any RPG company, especially smaller ones. Here’s why:
As an example of a company that has really embraced PDFs as a key part of their strategy, consider Paizo. Their Pathfinder Core rulebook is currently in beta form, and is a completely free PDF download (for now). Paizo expends a lot of effort creating and selling source materials for the Pathfinder system, and has a very interesting subscription model for their published scenarios. The best part of the model: If you subscribe to the paper publications, they give you a free copy of the PDF as well. So, you can download it and start reading it before your paper copy arrives in the mail. This is a fantastic idea; I wish more companies would provide free PDFs for people who purchase their books in paper form.
Paizo also strikes me as a company that is willing to almost give away the core system in hopes of getting you hooked and selling you lots of supplements. They produce fantastic source material, scenarios, maps, and other things for the system. While none of them are free, you can buy them a la carte, either in print or PDF.
It’s great for people like me who want to sample things – I can spend $10 on some PDF material before I decide whether it’s worth investing $50 in paper copies. Even if I hate what I buy, I’m only out $10 in the worst case, and if Paizo impresses me, they’ll get another $50 out of me as I buy a bunch more stuff.
Like it or not, gamers like me are demanding PDFs as an option today, and this trend will probably continue. As soon as I can buy an eBook reader for under $200 that works well, is easy on the eyes, and supports PDF, I will be buying one, and I’ll probably reduce my print RPG purchases even further. And I’m sure I’m not alone.
Suppose you’re out to buy a new car. You’re kinda partial to Japanese cars, and you’ve done a bit of research, and you’ve narrowed it down to two options:
Both cars fit your criteria. You just have to pick one. Here’s the $1,000,000 question: which of the following would pull more weight with you?
If you picked B, you’re a winner. Or rather, Toyota is the winner, since you’re busy driving your brand new Corolla.
Here’s the catch. Everybody knows this. Even slow, lumbering multinational corporations have figured this out by now. And so the marketing departments now have some new pages in their playbooks.
Recently, there have been a couple of news items that illustrate the emerging trend of using weblogs as marketing tools:
Going back to the original question, there are two key phrases in option B that are the focal points of the new marketing plays: trusted friend and unsolicited review. By creating alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, Sony was looking to trade on the unsolicited review bit. Rather than having a slick, professional, corporate marketing website that just oozed Sony, they tried to create the illusion of an average Joe who was in love with the portable gaming device. On the internet, people sometimes pay more attention to weblogs that appear to be impartial than they do to the manufacturer’s own site. They’re looking for the real dirt, not the corporate line.
Microsoft was trying for a double-whammy – trusted friends giving unsolicited reviews. There are many bloggers who are rather influential with the tech set, and by giving them free review laptops with no obligations whatsoever, Microsoft was hoping that the bloggers would nonetheless feel obligated to write some sort of positive review of Windows Vista. These influential bloggers could easily have a significant impact on the general internet buzz surrounding the launch of Vista.
This whole mess has caused me a moment’s reflection about things I’ve blogged about. Just the other day I was raving about Solio. In my case, I didn’t buy a Solio, but it was a Christmas gift. Furthermore, and I’m sure nobody at Better Energy Systems Ltd. has even noticed that my weblog even exists, let alone has a positive review of their product. I don’t feel any ethical qualms since I’m fairly sure that the person who gave me the gift had no idea I would even want to write about it on my weblog. And as a personal thing, that’s the way I intend to keep things – all of the stuff I write is my own opinion. It hasn’t been bought via bribes yet.
Though I’m not sure I agree with the position Joel Spolsky has taken on the issue. Even without him disclosing the fact that by reading his weblog I’m indirectly contributing to the “Joel gets a Hot Tub fund”, I already knew that. I don’t trust him any less (or any more) for disclosing that, and I still take everything he writes with a grain of salt (as I do with information source).
I suspect that if people generally had better critical reading skills, this whole new frontier of weblog marketing would be less of an issue; the issue would still exist, though, since many weblogs are being written more or less anonymously, and it can be tough to even discover who the source is, let alone evaluate their trustworthiness or authoritativeness. Surrogates like Google Pagerank are helpful as a guide for assigning trustworthiness, but as with everything, the hard work is still up to us humans. And luckily for the marketing companies, that probably won’t change anytime soon.
Jeremiah Wittevrongel lives in Calgary, Canada. Though he works as a software developer and loves what he does, this blog isn't about that. It's about the rest of his life, which tends to revolve around board gaming and cooking.
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