A Look at Eclipse Phase and DriveThruRPG’s "Metal List"

Most gamers are interested in numbers. Most business people are interested in numbers. So the numbers behind a gaming business ... well, they're fascinating. Not just for the sake of them, but for the story they tell, and the questions they prompt: Why did this work? Why didn't that work? Why did these two similar books sell very differently?

Over our years of publishing Eclipse Phase, we've tried a few experiments, changed tactics in response to feedback and numbers, followed our gut more than a couple times, and most importantly: made a bunch of great stuff that people have fun with at the gaming table.

OneBookShelf has sales accolades, the so-called "Metal List." They're one of the only public-facing ways in the game industry to gauge sales of one project against another. There's a couple important things to remember about the metal list:

  • First, the metal list is calculated individually for each storefront -- a sale on DriveThruRPG only counts for their metal list, a sale on RPGNow only on their metal list, even though on the back-end those sales numbers are combined. This is the same for their Top 100 / Top 15 charts!
  • Second, anytime you give out a complimentary copy, it does not count towards the metal list. This includes copies given away as a result of Kickstarter campaigns and also copies fulfilled by OneBookShelf that are sold via Bundle of Holding.
  • Third, the metal list doesn't take into account the age of a title: selling Platinum-level numbers in three months looks the same on the list as selling the same numbers in three years. Firewall is Platinum after only 11 months; the most recent release at that level for us. Our most recently-released Gold title is Million Year Echo.

Firewall

What do those things mean for our standings on the metal list? The first doesn't have much impact: for most of our electronic titles, 90% of the OneBookShelf sales happen on the DriveThruRPG storefront. That number is normally higher for new titles, and then gradually drifts downward during the long tail, but still stays above 80%. We specifically link to DriveThruCards for card projects and DriveThruFiction for fiction.

The second has had more impact on some recent titles, due to the number of copies that were sold as part of the Transhuman Kickstarter. We still got compensated for these copies (although parsing exactly what each of those titles earned via the Kickstarter is tricky!), but OneBookShelf didn't, even though we used their system to send out complimentary copies (In the long term, OBS still benefits from this because it helps them gain new customers and retain old ones.)

Also regarding the second, Bundle of Holding sales pay the publisher directly and are fulfilled by OneBookShelf, but OneBookShelf is also paid a fulfillment percentage. We ran Eclipse Phase Bundles of Holding in June and December 2014, putting over a thousand copies of the books offered in people's hands. Well over a year later, people are still redeeming those bundles!

There's one other factor that has influenced some of our titles. For a couple of our early releases, Sunward and Gatecrashing, we distributed to full book as part of a Hack Pack sale. This divided the actual book's sales into two SKUs: the standalone PDF and the Hack Pack. This had a dual impact on our standings on the Metal List and the Top 100 chart: Sunward and Gatecrashing have depressed rankings, and their respective Hack Packs have higher rankings than other Hack Packs!

Below is a list of our Platinum/Gold/Electrum-level sellers. The titles in the lists are not in any particular order. What trends do you see? My answers are after the list!

Eclipse Phase Platinum Level Sellers
Title Print POD Type Note
Eclipse Phase Core Rulebook 4th Core
Rimward 1st Sourcebook (Large)
Panopticon OOP Y Sourcebook (Large)
Firewall 1st Sourcebook (Large)
NPC File 1 Y Sourcebook (Small)
The Stars Our Destination Y Sourcebook (Small)

Sunward

Eclipse Phase Gold Level Sellers
Title Print POD Type Note
Transhuman 1st Core Transhuman Kickstarter
Morph Recognition Guide 1st Core Transhuman KS Stretch Goal
Sunward 3rd Sourcebook (Large) Previously bundled with Hack Pack
Gatecrashing 2nd Sourcebook (Large) Previously bundled with Hack Pack
Zone Stalkers Y Sourcebook (Small) Transhuman KS Stretch Goal
Continuity Adventure
Bump in the Night Adventure
Ego Hunter Adventure
Glory OOP Adventure Previously bundled with GM Screen

Eclipse Phase Electrum Level Sellers
Title Print POD Type Note
Transhumanity's Fate Core Transhuman KS Stretch Goal
The Devotees Y Adventure Transhuman KS Stretch Goal
Million Year Echo Y Adventure Transhuman KS Stretch Goal
After the Fall Fiction
An Infinite Horizon Fiction
Sunward Hack Pack Hack Pack Previously bundled with PDF
Gatecrashing Hack Pack Hack Pack Previously bundled with PDF
Panopticon Hack Pack Hack Pack
Firewall Hack Pack Hack Pack
Scott Fox - Morph (Fury) Music
Scott Fox - Firewall Music
Scott Fox - Blight (Exsurgent Virus) Music

(Also numerous Copper and Silver sellers, not listed here for brevity!)

Musings on the Numbers

  • Adventures don't break into Platinum, as they're gamemaster-focused, and also only sell to a subset of GMs. But they reliably hit Gold, with the exception of Kickstarter-impacted ones.
  • Accessories (Hack Packs, Scott Fox's soundtrack music, etc.) tied to a release sell proportionally to that release, not proportionally to other products in that category. For example, the three Scott Fox tracks that are Electrum were all linked to Firewall, which is Platinum. The two Scott Fox tracks that are Silver are linked to Million Year Echo, which is Electrum.
  • Fiction underperforms on the metal lists, due to sharing sales with DriveThruFiction and Amazon.
  • Attempts at appealing more to tablet users (such as producing landscape-oriented PDFs) didn't seem to have a major impact on sales.
  • Releasing print on demand versions of PDFs that aren't brand new has never resulted in a particularly large number of sales (less than 10% to total sales), which is why some PDFs that have sold well haven't been upgraded to POD status. That will eventually change as all our PDF-only titles become PDF & POD.
  • When the print on demand version is released at the same time as the PDF, print on demand sales rise to about 20% of total sales.

Musings on the Future

  • We expect POD sales to rise as more of our titles become available in that format, as people bulk-buy to save on shipping costs.
  • Sales numbers don't tell the whole story. Over time, discounts and other promotions tend to drive down the average per-unit gross (not including the impact that free copies have); but sales and promotions are important for catching the attention of new customers.

Feedback

Have something to say? Discuss it on our forums!

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Random Thoughts
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Eclipse Phase Modifier Cards and Morph Recognition Cards: Free PDFs!

Last year we rolled out two card-based projects: the Eclipse Phase Modifier Cards and Eclipse Phase Morph Recognition Cards. We're now making them available as free and Creative Commons BY-NC-SA PDFs, so you can download and print them yourself, as well as modify them to suit your own needs at the game table! The print on demand versions are still available, of course!

Eclipse Phase Modifier Cards

The Eclipse Phase Modifier Cards are a 53-card set designed to make your Eclipse Phase games play faster at the table! The Modifier Cards start with Aptitude Modifiers, and move on to cards for Mesh, Morph Acclimation, Wound, and Trauma modifiers. Plus cards for tracking Speed, and blank cards you can customize at the table!

You can read more about using the Eclipse Phase Modifier Cards and our new Morphless character sheet.

MC

Eclipse Phase Morph Recognition Cards

Morph Recognition Cards are 114 playing-card-sized cards, containing every morph listed in the Morph Recognition Guide. With art on one side and stats on the other, Morph Recognition Cards can be used as a quick-reference at the game table, to randomly assign morphs to NPCs, and also as a randomizer (100 of the cards are numbered 1-100!)

MRC

Modifier and Morph Recognition Cards Bundle!

The fastest way to get all the cards in both print and PDF is the Morph + Modifier Cards bundle!

Eclipse Phase: After the Fall Pre-Orders Open!

We've opened up print pre-orders for our Eclipse Phase anthology, After the Fall! If everything goes as planned, it will ship to you in late April 2016!

In a world of transhuman survival and horror, technology allows the re-shaping of bodies and minds, but also creates opportunities for oppression and puts the capability for mass destruction in the hands of everyone. Other threats lurk in the devastated habitats of the Fall, dangers both familiar and alien.

After the Fall is the first anthology from Posthuman Studios, set in the world of Eclipse Phase, their award-winning roleplaying game. The anthology will be a mix of old and new fiction, including stories by Eclipse Phase favorites—Nathaniel Dean, Jack Graham, Steve Mohan, and Rob Boyle and Davidson Cole. New fiction will feature science fiction rising stars Ken Liu, Madeline Ashby, Fran Wilde, Karin Lowachee, Wesley Schneider, and Andrew Penn Romine.

After the Fall is $19.99, and the pre-order period will close on April 22nd!

A Word on Shipping & Supporting Us

Shipping books outside of the United States is becoming more and more expensive, and we can't absorb the costs of it on direct sales.

If you're outside of the USA and can't afford to pre-order based on the shipping costs: we hear you. After the Fall will be available in your local stores; please send them a link to the sell sheet and let them know that you want a copy!

The other thing you can do to help us out is review After the Fall (once you've had a chance to read it, of course!) on sites like DriveThruRPG, Goodreads, Amazon.

We'd never ask you to say anything you didn't believe in, but 15 minutes of your time to write and post an honest review would be a great help to us as we dive into the world of fiction!

Category: 
Releases

Transhumanity’s Fate Developer Notes

The Eclipse Phase/Fate Core conversion guide, Transhumanity's Fate, went live on DrivethruRPG last week, and the print edition is now off to press. Since the release, there's been a lot of interest in what kind of Fate build Ryan Macklin and I are dropping with this book. The short answer is: minimalist. The primary goal of THF was to present the rich and complex Eclipse Phase universe in a way that's playable for groups who don't want a ton of crunch along with that complexity.

This wasn't easy. Core Eclipse Phase uses a lot of subsystems to simulate, in depth, things like hacking, psi, and bodyhopping. The core game is a treat for both min/maxers who want the coolest gun and problem solvers who want their character to have a gadget for every occasion. All of this interacts with the biggest point of complexity in the game: your character's current body or bodies and their myriad potential upgrades.

Going beyond mechanics, Eclipse Phase isn't an obvious fit with Fate from a thematic standpoint. The core game is often run as an investigative game, and it contains strong elements of horror—both genres to which Fate doesn't always lend itself.

Finally, Eclipse Phase is a massively detailed setting. The core game is designed to let you simulate literally anything in that setting. A good Fate build, however, is fine-tuned to create particular kinds of fiction by focusing on a few aspects of the world. So we had to make some tough choices about what to focus on and what to leave out.

We chose to make the game about Firewall, the organization of anti-x-riskers who are the focus of a default EP campaign. Further, we decided to focus on the high-octane technothriller aspect of the game (what Ryan likes to call, “Jason Bourne in an octomorph”). We wanted hacking to be fast and cinematic, zero G gun battles to be tactically nuanced but not rules-insane, and the body horror of changing morphs to be a thing in the world but not a dominating one.

This focus and simplicity is supported first by character creation. Transhumanity's Fate avoids Extras, represents both gear and bodily augmentation as stunts or sub-aspects, and treats the myriad bodies your character can hop into as simple containers for those aspects and stunts. The myriad gadgets of core Eclipse Phase, where not represented by stunts, are reflected by your character's skills. If you're an ace with Hardware skill (which re-skins Fate Core's Craft), we don't worry about whether you have just the right bobbin to bypass the security on an airlock.

Where we needed subsystems, we avoided creating new concepts and wherever possible built off existing Fate Core concepts. Most hacking is handled using the rules for Contests, negative effects from horror or changing bodies are aspects that hang around for a while, getting help from your social networks is just the equivalent of a Fate Core Contacts roll, and so forth.

All that said, we include a lot of advice for adjudicating the unusual situations that can come up in the Eclipse Phase world in as Fate-like a way as possible. The rules for conflicts provide guidance for handling things like explosions, getting blown out an airlock, heavy weapons and armor, attacking the mind of an AGI in meshspace (or its physical server in realspace!), and handling both digital and biological strains of the fearsome exsurgent virus as Fate fractals. All of this is achieved while adding as little weight as possible to the Fate Core conflict system. Similarly, the rules provide Fate Core solutions for non-combat tasks like nanofabrication, rewriting someone's brain with psychosurgery, or perceiving the world when your body is a space habitat.

A common refrain from Fate fans, especially regarding Fate sci-fi builds, is that they often add a lot of weight to Fate Core to capture what characters do in the setting. We've listened to our fans who wanted a simple entrée to the EP world, so we've really avoided any type of bloat. Your players may be floored by the way a transhuman setting changes what they think they know about being RPG heroes on a mission, but if we've done our job right, it won't be because of the rules.

Finally, Transhumanity's Fate is built to support both campaign play and short games. It'll play easily as a monster-of-the-week one-shot, but the wide array of antagonists and character development options offer a lot of depth for longer games. In particular, it can be fun to see how a given character works in different bodies over multiple story arcs.

I hope this post answers a few questions about what we've done with the design, and that it gets you excited to try Transhumanity's Fate with your own group.

Your mind is software: create an advantage with it.
Your body is a shell: invoke it.
Death is a disease: take a moderate consequence for it.
Extinction is approaching: overcome it!

Got thoughts or unanswered questions? We've got a forum thread started about this post here.

Transhumanity’s Fate is Here!

Transhumanity's Fate is now available on DriveThruRPG for only $9.99!

Transhumanity's Fate is a 144-page full-color rulebook that brings technothriller espionage and horror in the world of Eclipse Phase to the Fate Core system.

Join Firewall, and defend transhumanity in the aftermath of near annihilation by artificial intelligence.

Transhumanity's Fate is authored by Ryan Macklin and Jack Graham, and is available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

The print version of Transhumanity's Fate will be available this summer.

Transhumanity's Fate Dedication

The Posthumans dedicate this book to Jef Smith, our companion of many days & nights around the table.

Jef was a tireless organizer in Chicago's science-fiction/fantasy fandom, including the Think Galactic reading group and the spin-off convention, Think Galacticon. In 2015, he co-published the Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology with PM Press.

We will miss Jef's encouragement, wit, and bottomless generosity. The person who lives large in the lives of their friends is not soon forgotten.

A portion of profits from Transhumanity's Fate will be donated to Jef's family.

Gen Con Gamemasters!

We're looking for new volunteers to run Eclipse Phase games (of both the regular and Fate flavors) at Gen Con in Indianapolis this summer. We pay our GMs with cash and some complimentary materials. If you're interested in spending some time running Eclipse Phase for us, please email info@posthumanstudios.com!

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Releases
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fate