Shannon said:
>One more time: the sales of RQ were not adequate for a profitable game
>line. Period. End of sentence.
I agree. RQ is dead. RQ3 got off to a bad start, and never really recovered. Long long ago, we good folk at Reaching Moon Megacorp analysed the reasons why and made a number of cogent suggestions to ressurect the failing line (see "RuinedQuest?" in Tales #5). These were cheerfully and comprehensively ignored by everyone involved at the time.
>Ask MOB what his royalty statements for
>Sun County looked like some time.
Any money I earned from Sun County arrived long ago, though until recently Avalon Hill continued to send me annual royalty statements which indicated sales for that year. But with one caveat (see below), I was happy with what I was paid for my work, Avalon Hill always paid promptly and on time, and (once Ken arrived on the scene) were generally professional and businesslike about such things. Hmm, if only all game companies were like this...
>Foreign sales help a little but not
>a lot because they usually involve a flat licensing fee and thus you
>can't just add that priting on to the original one; to be successful a
>game needs to be able to sell enough of its native/original print run,
>which for us is predominantly sales to the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.
My only gripe is that I didn't see a dime/kroner/yen/franc/zloty from any of the foreign language editions of Sun County, which I believe sold more copies than the original US printing. The flat fee Oriflam and the others paid AH seemed to be ridiculously small.
Where some residual bitterness *does* lie is in the fact that I did stand to make good money from "Soldiers of the Red Moon", but this was contingent on Avalon Hill producing the new edition of RuneQuest. As we know, there was the makings of a perfectly acceptable system in the works, but this was scuppered by various circumstances and individuals with agendas of their own, and the brief flowering of the mid-1990s RQ Renaissance went with it.
Ironically, given that AH has recently gone to the wall (and it's unlikely RQ4 would have changed this) Chaosium would probably have had an opportunity to produce their own Hero Wars-style product **about now** anyway! Just think of the various products we all could have enjoyed in the mean time though...
Cheers,
MOB PS See also my article "Vale RQ" in Questlines II.
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