Will we ever see a full-color HERO product?

**Yamo** · Feb 25th, '03, 03:20 AM

It does seem to be the industry standard these days...

**Monolith** · Feb 25th, '03, 05:21 AM

Just my own opinion here, but the only books which I would like to see in full color are "Enemies" or "Superhero" books. I think it adds a very strong feel to the game when you have full color pictures for the good and badguys in the game. When you look at the pictures of the Champion in the book they can seem flat and uninspiring, but when you see the full color pictures from the excellent desktop that Nato did the characters seem alive and vibrant.

As far as everything else though, I have no interest in paying high prices to see color pictures of characters fighting in parks or along skylines. For the windown dressing pictures in most books black and white is good enough for me.

**Yamo** · Feb 25th, '03, 05:33 AM

Well, I don't like superheroes (although I have bought every Champions book and will continue to do so simply to support the system) , but it just irks me to no end to see HERO look (not read, not play, just look) so darn...ghetto next to the competition. Especially when the competetion is garbage like d20.

**Monolith** · Feb 25th, '03, 05:56 AM

Originally posted by Yamo
Well, I don't like superheroes, but it just irks me to no end to see HERO look (not read, not play, just look) so darn...ghetto next to the competition. Especially when the competetion is garbage like d20.

One man's garbage is another man's gold.

I was not just discussing the Champions genre, though I seemed to have given that impression. When I say "Enemies" books I mean any book which is dedicated to giving us game stats for individuals (heroes or villains). This could be CKC, or MMM, Scourges of the Galaxy, or Predators.

There have always been companies that produce color over black and white and that is not going to change. Personally, except in the examples I listed above, I have no interest in paying for the "flash" of a book. That does not mean that DOJ's books cannot, or should not, become more flashy in their layout style, but I have no real interest in color.

**Yamo** · Feb 25th, '03, 06:01 AM

Besides, can more impulse buys from the "Ooh! Shiny!" crowd down at the FLGS really hurt?

**Monolith** · Feb 25th, '03, 06:52 AM

Originally posted by Yamo
Besides, can more impulse buys from the "Ooh! Shiny!" crowd down at the FLGS really hurt?

Curb appeal is always a plus, but I am already budgeting to buy $500.00 worth of Hero Games Goodness™ next year (not to mention material from Gold Rush Games and whomever else might want to license), and if I have to throw another $100.00 that direction just to get it all in color I might have to stop feeding my children once a week.

**nblade** · Feb 25th, '03, 07:09 AM

Originally posted by Yamo
Besides, can more impulse buys from the "Ooh! Shiny!" crowd down at the FLGS really hurt?

Actually Yes, the "Ooh! Shiny" crowd as you put it, are IMHO not the gamers you want to target anyway. They tend to be what I call flavor of the month gamers. These are the type of gamers which would not generally would buy more than one product of a company unless all the products from a company were of simiarly "shiny".

Well enough of that.

On the subject of color I'm sort of split. While it might be interesting to see some material in color, I don't think it adds that much to a games usefulness and contrary to many peoples' opinion, it is still more expensive to print in color. Actually going through my own game collection, the only books in it that have color are the few D20 books I own and a few games that have color inserts in them like old version of Star Wars from West End Games. Most everyone else tend to not try to spend the $$$ on "shiny". Hell if you take a look at what HERO plans to try to publish in 2004, 18 some odd books, I can not even try to think how they could publish that many if even one of those books had color in them. Likely they would either not publish that many or some material would likely be late. Neither option appeals to me.

Well that's just my insanity, everyone can safely ignore.

**Nato** · Feb 25th, '03, 07:09 AM

Originally posted by Yamo
Besides, can more impulse buys from the "Ooh! Shiny!" crowd down at the FLGS really hurt?

Have you seen the cover to Millennium City? Now that's eye candy!

**Monolith** · Feb 25th, '03, 07:15 AM

Originally posted by Nato
Have you seen the cover to Millennium City? Now that's eye candy!

I think you are the only one to have seen the cover for MC. Is there a link somewhere?

**mattingly** · Feb 25th, '03, 07:16 AM

What are the relative costs of publishing some color pages in the middle of an otherwise black and white book? There have been plenty of books that have 16 contiguous pages of color in a 128 (or whatever) page book. If a small color insert like that would only add $1 or $2 to the cover price of a book, compared to the $10 or more it would cost to print the whole book in color, it might be worth it. Just put all the color character art in the color page section, and you're good to go.

**Yamo** · Feb 25th, '03, 07:17 AM

Have you seen the cover to Millennium City? Now that's eye candy!

Nice covers are fine, but they're just a start. People actually pick up those suckers and flip through 'em. Colorful interior art is vital, too.

***Steve Long*** · Feb 25th, '03, 08:48 AM

It's highly unlikely you'll ever see a full-color Hero product, not unless there's some major economic change that makes color printing equal in cost to B&W printing, or that increases our revenue to many times what it is now. It's simply too expensive.

Nor do we have any plans for color inserts. Not only do they add little, if anything, to a book, but IMO they don't pay for themselves in terms of increased revenue. They're also more likely to cause binding problems.

**Nato** · Feb 25th, '03, 08:54 AM

Originally posted by Monolith
I think you are the only one to have seen the cover for MC. Is there a link somewhere?

Whoops, sorry. I think I looked at it once to because I need to draw a character fetured on it. Sorry. Thought it was posted here once but obviously it was not. *turns red*

**Blackout** · Feb 25th, '03, 09:34 AM

Originally posted by mattingly
What are the relative costs of publishing some color pages in the middle of an otherwise black and white book? There have been plenty of books that have 16 contiguous pages of color in a 128 (or whatever) page book. If a small color insert like that would only add $1 or $2 to the cover price of a book, compared to the $10 or more it would cost to print the whole book in color, it might be worth it. Just put all the color character art in the color page section, and you're good to go.

Color printing is crazily expensive. For every page of color, you need color seperations, and those add about $100 per page of color...

The actual cost of printing (paper and ink) doesn't go up terribly much, but that flat fee for color seps is a killer. Unless you know you're going to sell boatloads of copies (and I mean BOATloads), then it really isn't worth it.

(That may not be exactly the case today. It's been a few years since I looked into publishing anything in color (and that was comic books - though that shouldn't make any difference).)

Personally, I don't want to pay extra for color. It doesn't add enough to my enjoyment of a product to justify the increased expense.

**Nato** · Feb 25th, '03, 09:40 AM

My last real job was with a larg company in their design depatment. I dealt with a pre-press guy, the people who provide color separations for 4-color printing. And yes, the price you estimated for separations per page is about right, IIRC. So it is quite a large investment. Now, there is direct-to-press printing, and a lot of the old pre-press stuff is eliminated. It's still pretty pricey though.