New licencing deal

[JmOz]

Does anyone know when this will be up? I am VERY curious about it...

[mattingly]

As a current licensor, I just got an email detailing it an hour or so ago, so I assume it will go out for the general public very soon.

[mayapuppies]

As a current licensor, I just got an email detailing it an hour or so ago, so I assume it will go out for the general public very soon.

Ditto.

[Chris Goodwin]

I too am very curious about it.

[mattingly]

I haven't read through it in detail yet, but from my skim it looks very attractive.

[mallet]

Any date yet for when this will be put online for people to read?

[rjcurrie]

See Jason's latest update on the main page. The single book and multiple book licenses are available for review in the Free Stuff section of the web site.

[Lord Mhoram]

I read the license.

I think it is fantastic and should encourage people to put out more Hero books, which is always a good thing.

[Crimson-Hawk]

I haven't read through it in detail yet, but from my skim it looks very attractive.

I daresay it looks almost TOO attractive. I've read over both sample contracts over and over again. Unless I'm missing something, Hero Games doesn't get ANYTHING out of the licenses except:

• The possibility that the publisher MIGHT want to sell their book via the Hero Games online store, in which case Hero Games gets a slight commission for the sale.
• The possibility that more third-party products MIGHT entice people to purchase more first-party products like the core rulebooks and genre books.

It would seem to me that there should be some sort of up-front licensing fee, but I don't see it anywhere in the contract.

[Jason S.Walters]

You are correct Dale: our goal is to sell more copies of the core books and further build the Hero community, not to try to track dozens of different quarterly royalty payments or charge up-front licensing fees to guys working off their kitchen tables. We also decided against requiring publishers to sell through the Hero Store (though we believe that most of them will). We have done our best to craft an attractive, straightforward license that still gives us a measure of control, yet frees up 3rd party publishers to make use of the Hero System in their products.

Publishing is a tough business. Publishing roleplaying games is an even tougher one, with extremely narrow profit margins. We don’t want to limit avenues of revenue for outside publishers, or try to narrow their already slim margins even further - hence this new license.

Hero’s great strength is its fan base. We want that fan base to be happy and robust, and believe that this new license is a way to help accomplish that. Because without you guys there simply isn’t anything to license.

[Derek Hiemforth]

I daresay it looks almost TOO attractive. I've read over both sample contracts over and over again. Unless I'm missing something, Hero Games doesn't get ANYTHING out of the licenses except:

• The possibility that the publisher MIGHT want to sell their book via the Hero Games online store, in which case Hero Games gets a slight commission for the sale.
• The possibility that more third-party products MIGHT entice people to purchase more first-party products like the core rulebooks and genre books.

It would seem to me that there should be some sort of up-front licensing fee, but I don't see it anywhere in the contract.

Obviously, Jason can explain his own reasoning if he wants to, but my take would be:

1. The third-party publishers almost certainly would want to sell the product through the Online Store (if they didn't, it would be considerably harder to reach the Hero Games fan base).

2. The percentage DOJ gets from such sales through the Online Store isn't really "slight;" it's probably about the same as a royalty would be (if my uneducated guess is correct).

3. (And most importantly, by my take on it) By having third-parties do the support books, it lets DOJ concentrate their resources on providing just the core books. That may seem counter-intuitive at first, but let's look at it for a second, from the perspective of, say, a book detailing a Star Hero setting...

CAVEAT: The specific numbers used for illustration below are completely made up, with no connection to reality except by sheer dumb luck if any happen to be correct. But the concepts should hold true.

Let's say there are 20,000 people who play or buy HERO System games often enough to be considered potential customers for the HERO System Core Library books at this point. (That guesstimate is based on the number of members on this site. Of course, many players don't frequent these boards, but many who've registered here never post, or never play, or don't play anymore, etc. Since the exact number doesn't matter that much for the purposes of this exercise, that should be close enough.)

Of those, let's say half of them only use the HERO System for Champions, and would only be potential customers for Champions books. That leaves 10,000. Of those, let's say half might play Star Hero. That leaves 5000. Of those, let's say half might be interested in any published setting book. That's 2500. And let's say half of those would only buy the setting they liked best (players), another quarter would buy only two settings (readers), and the remaining quarter would buy all available settings (collectors). That's 1250 only buying one setting, 625 buying two settings, and 625 buying all the settings. Let's say there are 4 Star Hero settings available. Assuming gamer interest is divided equally among them, that's 1250 purchases per setting.

We're already down to barely 5% of the total HERO System player audience being potentially interested in our book, and that's without even touching the whole issue of whether a given book is seen as having appeal to only GMs or also to player-only gamers...

Now, I'm not saying any of this to discourage anyone from making the narrower-focus books... I'm saying that a smaller publisher can do it and make it worthwhile, while for DOJ it may just be more advantageous to focus on books aimed at the segment of the fan base with 10,000-20,000 people, instead of the segment with 2500-5000, even if that means doing fewer of those "broad-appeal" books. It's better for the company to make one book that sells 8,000 copies, than eight books that each sell 1,000...

But that doesn't mean the eight books selling 1000 copies are losing money or something, necessarily. So letting smaller publishers take those on, while DOJ focuses on the big one, makes perfect sense. Plus, nine publishers might be able to make nine books, for a combined total of 16,000 sales, all at the same time, while a single publisher might have to do them one-by-one...

[Dreamstreamer]

I'm excited about it! After a quick read I get the impression that it would be ideal for those who have already created content for another game and wish to tap the Hero Games audience.

[Crimson-Hawk]

Hey, Jason and Derek, thanks for the quick replies!

Yeah, in a bass-ackwards way, the goal of my post was to figure out if there was an up-front fee or not. I wasn't sure if such a licensing fee would even need to be discussed in the contract or not. Plus I did not take into account Hero Games' undeterred faith and gratitude towards its fan base.

Now I'm understanding that "might be too attractive" is in this case a good thing. Looks like I need to get back to work on a little something-something.

[Lord Mhoram]

Hero’s great strength is its fan base. We want that fan base to be happy and robust, and believe that this new license is a way to help accomplish that. Because without you guys there simply isn’t anything to license.

Pretty much what I thought. People selling Hero books are generally going to want to list in the store, so you get a little from it, and it gives them the best exposure to the Hero community.

And thinking of the Dark times of Cybergames it was Fandom that kept the interest going, and having such die hard fans be there for with 5th launched. As the current situation of the company is, I think, temporary - having a free license will help keep fandom strong - which serves the fans by having more material as well as keeping interest in the system high (with books coming out it can't be seen as a "dead" system) which makes the triumphant return of Hero Games that we all want to see more likely.

As for why free it good - look at what the OGL did to the entire RPG industry when 3rd D&D came out - RPGs were fairly big busines then - something that DOJ rode getting 5th out the door and starting out so strongly (I suspect).

[Derek Hiemforth]

As for why free it good - look at what the OGL did to the entire RPG industry when 3rd D&D came out - RPGs were fairly big busines then - something that DOJ rode getting 5th out the door and starting out so strongly (I suspect).

But I'm also glad they're doing it as a royalty-free license, rather than some kind of OGL setup. Because once that's done, they can't really put the genie back in the bottle if things don't turn out as expected.