Last night while browsing an RPG PDF store, I came across a product that filled a niche so small I never would have thought of it on my own.
The PDF market’s low barrier to entry makes it possible to create micro-niche products like this, and there are quite a few of them out there. But how micro is too micro, especially when it comes to products for GMs?
For instance, how often would you need a kobold name generator?* Once? A genre-appropriate general name generator I could see being useful, but . . . kobolds?
As a GM, what’s your appetite for micro-niche products? And where do you draw the line?
* To the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any kobold name generators out there. Edit: And naturally, that would be incorrect.
That is just a bit too “nitchy” for me. I perfer working with the more mainstream round peg stuff and trying to fit it into the square peghole that I desire.
While I think it’s possible to go overboard, I also like the idea that I can go out and pick up EXACTLY the product I need and probably at a reasonable price. The low cost of entry into RPG publishing is enabling a lot of people to put out a wide variety of products.
Now, that said, I have never bought any “niche” products. I don’t particularly like PDF-only products and I find a lot of the work out there is really sub-par. But I guess that’s an industry problem, nothing to do with niche products in particular.
I draw the line at a dollar. If it’s exactly the product I want, even for one session of use, I’ll throw a buck at it. Anymore than 1 dollar and the product has to be broad enough that I can convince myself I’ll use it more generally.
The line will draw itself to some extent, but honestly, I say Kudos to the guy who did this thing. The question to ask is รขโฌลAre there 100 people in the world who might find this useful?รขโฌย How many D&D games are there? How many figure Kobolds prominently? Kobolds (at least under 3.0) were actually a better racial choice than any of the based ones, and at an ECL of 0, It meant that thereรขโฌโขs a disproportionate number of Kobold Sorcererรขโฌโขs out there. Heck, even outside of D&D, how many people dig รขโฌลKobolds Ate My Babyรขโฌย enough that this might come in handy?
More, those 100 people donรขโฌโขt need to come in all at once. Itรขโฌโขs a PDF so itรขโฌโขs reasonably evergreen, with the only limiter being how hard it is to find.
I donรขโฌโขt find it hard to think that 100 people might pick something like this over the course of, say, 5 years. Is that a lot of sales? No. But will it turn a profit for the guy who did this? Almost certainly. For something like this, I canรขโฌโขt imagine the cost of production, even accounting for time, being too high.
And hell, this is probably something the guy had already done for his own use. Not only does that mean the time cost is already sunk, but it also means he has a clear sense of how it could be used.
Now, there are obviously other factors. Some people donรขโฌโขt like PDFs (I think theyรขโฌโขre especially nice for stuff like this, which are effectively supplemental GM notes). The price point is going to be a huge deal – it needs to be low enough to be an impulse or curiosity buy, and that datapoint is one that is, I think, still in flux – there’s no good distro model for, say, dollar store pricing yet, and that might be exactly appropriate for somehting like this. But all in all, consider the cost to the guy writing it, and odds are good he will see _some_ sort of gain, so I say, viva la Kobolds.
Of course, I dig all this long tail stuff, and go off about why you should be writing little freak things like this here.
-Rob D.
I find Niche fun for one shots and other things. Something like a kobold name generator might prompt me to do a kobold campaign and then that will be fun, for about 3 sessions maybe. Like a Ninja Burger game, incredibly fun for a few games or a pallete cleanser and then I want something that is a little more broad that can satisfy some “serious” gaming.
I guess thinks that small for niche products fit the need for a little bit, so like Jeff says price has GOT to be minimal, otherwise I won’t even bite. I also don’t really like PDF only products.
I also agree with what xcorvis said about the quality of PDF only products lacking in some aspects. Someone can just throw out their ideaas a PDF and bear no mind to the quality of what they’re putting out. It’s just the nature of the beast. It’s expanding roleplaying and making some really great things, but there is a lot of stuff to wade through to get to those.
I had similar thoughts when I visited RPG Now Edge. For me, it seems a product is worth making if someone will look for it.
If your product is too narrow, no one will know to look for it, though even that might get circumvented if people encounter you in a random browse.
Besides, we all know that you’ll find a perfect product only after you’ve done the work yourself. ๐
For super-niche products like that, I probably wouldn’t want to pay. If it were freely distributed, I might pick it up and use it. If it has a broader applicability – say a name generator for all races, and I could select kobold as an option – then maybe I’d shell out some cash for it.
In general, I tend to buy things that are broader in scope. Otherwise I invest my own time in creating something with a narrower focus.
The only problem I have with niche products really is that there’s just such an overwhelming amount of stuff out on the internet that it’s easy to wind up buying way more stuff than you would ever hope to use these days.
But I see no problem with trying to sell just about anything. If it’s interesting to one person, there’s probably at least a few people out there who would also be interested in it.
And with the internet, PDFs can be pretty cheap to publish (of course there are expenses to hosting the PDF and collecting the money, so you still need to think about a “business plan,” though the cost is low enough, you don’t need a lot of justification).
Frank
I’m of the opinion that anything worth doing is worth doing well. If something is too niche, it breaks that model. Or rather it often happens that something too niche wasn’t really worth doing, and thus wasn’t done well. I wouldn’t want to pawn a lot of my highly niche, custom stuff off on anyone, since if you got it free in its current format, you’d feel like you paid too much. ๐
OTOH, there is no accounting for what the dedicated fan will produce. If 100 rabid fans produce some niche product, chances are I’ll find at least one or two interesting.
While playing “Kobolds ate my baby” you need a kobold name generator several times per player per session.
No market is too niche if YOU’RE the niche.
Tis’ kinda funny because I *have* a Kobold Name Generator for Kobolds ate my baby. ๐
Well, we appear to have come full circle. From fake niche product used to make an example, to lots of interesting answers to the original question (where’s the line?), to the fake product being an actual product (albeit a free one), to a niche where it fits in perfectly. I love it. ๐
So, maikeru, how much for the kobold name generator? ๐
Crazy Jerome: you say no one would be interested in your custom stuff. But the market in fact does show that people are interested in custom stuff. Look at the popularity of campaign settings.
Now it may be true that currently, since your stuff is only intended for you, that the quality of editing and production values would make it unappealing to the end user.
On the other hand, I actually prefer Judge’s Guild’s “First Fantasy Campaign” to the recent Goodman Games “Blackmoor.” The former has pretty poor editing and production quality (except for the map, which is a typical Judges Guild wilderness map, which I still use as a standard to compare all other wilderness map products to, the only production quality I would consider it lacking is color, and I definitely fondly remember coloring my Wilderlands maps with colored pencils – and how much the attention to the detail present in the maps required to do the coloring made me actually look at the maps).
Now you might argue that the Blackmoor and Greyhawk settings have more value than your own custom setting, but in the end, the setting is valuable to me because it’s playable for me, and has the qualities I want.
Oh, another example of something that would seem very niche, and had pretty poor editing and production qualities. My favorite game, Cold Iron, is basically someone’s collection of house rules. And it isn’t even a complete system. But it happens to meet my needs, so I invested in it (of course it came with a nice price tag – free – but had Mark Christiansen asked for $10 or $20 for the text files I got [not from him originally], I suspect I would have paid).
The hardest part about niche products is finding your way to the products that will actually be useful to you. Of course that’s true of non-niche products also. I’ve got tons of D20 books that are almost totally useless to me. And my collection is so large, players are unlikely to ever browse them (beyond the Arcana Evolved supplements – and even then, we barely made use of them) looking for stuff to use for their characters.
Of course these days of the web make it a lot easier to find stuff. I can find may way to lots of fan content for the various campaign settings I use (Blackmoor, Glorantha, Tekumel) with Google searches, and following links from people’s web pages (though in reality, I don’t use a lot of that material – though I am running a scenario from a Glorantha product that I would never have found except through the web, and just reading people’s writeups on the settings helps me create my own vision of the setting).
Frank
“So, maikeru, how much for the kobold name generator? ;)”
FREE! I’ll even throw in the source for anyone that asks. ๐
Back to the topic. I don’t think there is such a thing as beening to small a product. I have actually considered makeing a few. The poblem is that people make these and have dilusions of grandure and it never gets filled. I think if some one makes a product targeted to *very* specific people and puts a price tag at about $2.00 and doesn’t expect to sell maybe a dozen or less then there is nothing wrong with it. I have a pretty sick mind and sometimes there is stuff I hunt for and never find. ๐
You never know when you’ll need it.
For instance, I used to think a kobold name generator was silly. Then I ssaw the ad on roleplaymarket.com:
“Four kobold characters wanted.”
And I was sent scrambling for my copy of Races of the Dragon, trying to find something, anything on kobold names. (Which there isn’t.)
T
Frank: “Now it may be true that currently, since your stuff is only intended for you, that the quality of editing and production values would make it unappealing to the end user.”
Bingo! Not to say I couldn’t take some piece or two and clean it up, to support a niche–but then comes the question of *which* piece? I’ve got enough raw material to do a couple of hundred, short, niche PDFs of the size that a lot of people sell for $1.00. Since I bothered to write the stuff myself, I’m presumably a good representative of the potential audience. I look at it and think, “If this was cleaned up, I still wouldn’t pay a buck for it, but it’s not worth the effort to cleanup for free.”
To the larger question, I think this is why I rarely find a niche product that I like. The cost/benefit analysis for the guy doing the product is seldom going to produce something worth the money.
Maybe I’m strange that way, but if something is in an itty, bitty niche, I’d often rather have my crappy, slapped together set of notes that I spent an hour on than a more polished product put out by someone else. It’s not merely finding or paying for the polish; it’s that the thing I do myself is likely to be more useful to me in the game.
OTOH, I haven’t ever tried polishing something and putting it out there (beyond some old Hero variants in a fanzine). So perhaps I don’t know what I’m talking about. I have provided a few not-so-cleaned-up pieces to people by email on request.
Maybe that is what the niche market really needs: Instead of guessing which product to clean up, you’d list an index of all the niche products you had some raw material for. The first 5 or 10 people that asked for it, you’d give them the raw notes for free, and ask for feedback. If enough people expressed interest in a particular product, you’d already have feedback and know that it might actually appeal more broadly than you first considered. ๐
Yea, the hard part is finding the niche products. In the old days, we had the amateur press association (APA) zines for exchanging stuff. These days, we have various types of web sites (for example, I know at least one person has found their way to my website where I have some Cold Iron stuff posted). Forums, newsgroups, blogs, and mailing lists are all nice places to share.
As to polishing stuff up: if it has much long term use at all for me, I like to have a nicely formatted MS Word document, especially if I am going to share it with my players at all. So the material gets into a useable state without any consideration of getting paid for it.
Something to consider: RPGs as a whole are a niche product. We have a hobby because a few folks in the Midwest decided to have a printer produce a few hundred copies of their rules. And then other folks decided while D&D was a neat an interesting game, they had a better idea. And soon the shelves were full of more RPG games, campaign settings, adventure modules, magazines, and rules supplements than you could ever hope to buy all of, let alone use.
And I guess what it comes down to is that each individual has to decided if it’s worth the effort to polish their material, and possibly find a way to offer it for sale, or optionally, just post it for free downloading, or more restrictively, just offer photocopies to a few friends.
I myself have never made too much of an effort to publish anything. Back in the 80s, I did publish a couple things in the Wild Hunt APA. The thing I would most like to publish, Cold Iron, isn’t actually mine to publish (though I do have some Cold Iron stuff on my website, I have at times considered moving it to my campaign Yahoo group so that it is not widely available – on the other hand Mark Christiansen seems totally disinclined to publish it, or really care how far it gets distributed – his only real concern back in college was that since what was being shared around was NOT produced by him, it had errors (or flat out rule changes) and he didn’t want people trying to quote it in his game).
Of course, I suppose I do have some stuff that could be of interest to others. I’ve converted (mostly on the fly) various D&D (and a few non-D&D) modules (also campaign settings) to Cold Iron, RuneQuest, and Arcana Unearthed/Evolved. Often those notes are pretty incomplete, and except for much of the AU/AE stuff, were only ever chicken scratchings on paper. I have a lot of stuff that might be of interest, except for serious copyright issues. I’ve got a variety of documents for both AU/AE and RuneQuest that collect various Q&A, houserules, options borrowed from splatbooks, etc. I’m sure these would be of interest to people, but totally unethical for me to distribute (ok, some of the AU/AE stuff might be capable of being polished into something distributable under either the OGL or D20 licenses).
Your idea of listing stuff you have available, and sharing it for free on request until enough interest is generated to be worth polishing up for something saleable is probably a great way to go about (and actually potentially the way I would distribute Troll Slayer which is my working name for a Cold Iron inspired game that I hold the copyright for).
Frank