Gaming Ballistic started as a blog in late 2012, and then became a company in its own right in October 2016, as the company formally launched its first product, Dungeon Grappling.

2020 marks the fourth full year of the company’s operation. It still has but one person doing all of the administrative work: me. During 2018, Gaming Ballistic existed as a vehicle to deliver Douglas’ game ideas; that changed in 2019 and 2020, as all of the projects delivered were written by other people.

Gaming Ballistic is a producer of games and entertainment.

2019 Recap and Goals for 2020

In 2019, Gaming Ballistic posted its first-ever profit, with just under $20,000 in profit registered on $110-120,000 in revenue. This represented a 3x increase from the prior year. The goals for 2020 as stated in my recap from last year were:

• Finish the Nordlond Sagas books and get them off to the printer and fulfilled. Try and hold “late” to less than three months.
• Take a short break and recover my sanity. A few weeks or a month, during which I will start working out again, and begin a face-to-face gaming circle so that I can blog and rediscover my creative spark.
• Explore not-Kickstarter for crowdfunding (see below)
• Launch “More Perilous Journeys” and see it done. Five more books for TFT, plus counters and Decks of Destiny style cards. I feel like I know more about this one, and can do a bunch of pre-work that will save stress up front.
• I have permission and the intent to make the Nordlondr Ovinabokin . . . the Nordlond Enemies Book. This will be huge. Likely 200-300 monsters and 250-300 pages. Hardback. All-in for art and awesome. But it’s going to take some serious funding.
• Break the 600-backer threshold; I need that to really do the kind of work I want to do, and also take more steps to making Gaming Ballistic truly self-sustaining.
• I need to consider moving my eCommerce platform away from WooCommerce and on to something else. I don’t know what.
• I will look hard into migrating from Adobe to Affinity Publisher and Photo in 2020. I was putting that off until a few features crept into Affinity Publisher…but then to put together Forest’s End I found ways of doing what I was waiting for by other means. That’ll save me real money, which might be better spent on an eCommerce suite that is less painful.

How did I do?

2020 Executive Summary

There’s no getting around it, and it’s been repeated nigh unto death: 2020 was hard. But as much as one might wish to blame problems on the global pandemic…I have to accept that many of the issues this year were not directly pandemic related.

• Gaming Ballistic’s revenue declined by sixty percent going from 2019 to 2020
• Only one project actually launched during 2020. The bulk of the time was spent finishing and shipping Nordlond Sagas, and then dealing with issues with the TFT campaign that followed
• Gaming Ballistic posted a $15,000 loss for 2019
• I shipped four new Dungeon Fantasy RPG books and produced five or six new books for TFT
• The queue was largely untouched, forcing a lot of things to be pushed into 2021
• The last two projects, Nordlond Sagas and Moer Perilous Journeys, were late. Very late. Inexcusably late. More on that below
• I lost my Day Job in early June, and was formally separated from the company for which I worked for 20 years in August. I finished my basement during first half of the year, doing little else during the summer, and eventually decided to try and make Gaming Ballistic my real job. This is going to be a heavy lift.

Project Outlook

Gaming Ballistic, makes games. Roleplaying games, to be precise. Making and selling RPGs is why GB exists.

There were very few of what can be considered “high points” this year. It was a rough year, made rougher by other circumstances.

The Dungeon Fantasy RPG

The Nordlond Sagas campaign launched in 2019 and started off with a gigantic problem. I had used the wrong pricing algorithm for the books. It was less successful than I’d hoped as well, with backer counts falling from Nordvorn’s 600 down to 420 during the campaign. Finally, the manuscripts for the large adventures, targeted at 48-60 pages, came in long, and then grew even longer when I looked and found key information required for the GM to run the adventures within the Nordlond Setting needed to be added. Basically, each manuscript grew by 1.5-2× and I’d under-priced them. By a lot. The kickstarter really should have brought in about 50% more revenue. That would have made 2019 look about $13,000 better.

But note: it would have made 2019 look better. It would not have helped at all manage expenses in 2020. Basically, I got caught. I threw money hand over fist at editing and expanding the manuscripts, as well as just spending and spending on art. How much? Well, 2019 saw, in the same time period I was working Nordlond Sagas, around $14,000 in expenses, and the ONLY DFRPG expenses, pretty much, in 2020 were from Nordlond Sagas, and that was another $24,500. $10,000 for printing and shipping the four books, and another $11,000 in artwork alone. So Nordond Sagas brought in $28,500 (which should have been about $41,000) and cost me $38,500 to make.

Lessons learned from this were many, but it took me some repeats in the TFT More Perilous Journeys project to learn them.

• Get the freakin’ pricing right
• Don’t price the books until the manuscripts are in hand, with the work done
• Don’t announce the books until the manuscripts are in hand, with the work done
• Don’t launch the Kickstarter until the manuscripts are in hand, edited, and all that’s left is the art
• Throwing money at a project doesn’t really speed things up
• I might need to reconsider even my adjusted pricing on the DFRPG materials; color books are very expensive to print and ship
• Using a third party fulfillment service for the USA did not work out. I got dinged for a few things that I didn’t factor into fulfillment costs, the most egregious of which was an extra $1-2 per package for “custom boxes” that I didn’t figure into my pricing. That was painful.

Overall, when books grow to 2x the size of what you think they are, go figure, they’re expensive to make. My choice – and I stand by it, frankly – to make luscious, sewn-binding softcovers in full color for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG is an expensive way to make books. Black and white perfect-bound would be cheaper. But I really want my GURPS stuff to look as good as the DFRPG Boxed Set.

The other thing that has to be said here is that, for whatever reason, backers did not really show up for this one as I hoped. I’d hoped that my backer counts would increase from the 600 we got on Nordvorn, but instead fell by almost 25%. Had we got closer to 600 folks, well…that would have added another $13,000 to the total, most of that profit. Good pricing and better turnout would have made 100% of the costs worthwhile.

The project lost money. About $10,000 worth overall. And it was worse for 2020 because all of the revenue (such as it was) was in 2019…but the majority of the costs were in 2020. And the amount of time it took to actually finish the books (printing didn’t finalize until the end of April) and then finalize fulfillment (shipping didn’t complete until freakin’ early June) put me six months behind schedule in terms of working new material.

I was also exhausted mentally. Pandemic, home improvement, my “real” job simply sucked…anyway. It’s behind me.

But you know what? These are beautiful books. The play reports I’m getting from those using them are simply fantastic. They synergize really, really well with Hall of Judgment and Citadel at Nordvorn. I’m proud of the work that went into them. Had I not lost my job during Summer 2020, I’d have shrugged and said “over the last two years, I broke even making books overall (true), maybe made a few thousand dollars (also true).

But I did lose my job, so I have a business to run. That led me to…

The Fantasy Trip

I was looking forward to my second foray into the TFT space. I had already laid plans on what I was going to do, more or less. Three sequels to Crown of Eternity and Curse of the Pirate King were already planned by the author team. David and I had discussed follow-ons to his earlier projects.

We did change things up, though. I approached David early and asked if he could give me two solo adventures instead of a few GM’d adventures. His Vampire Hunter Belladonna was very well received. Suffice it to say that the manuscripts he eventually turned in, which would become Dragon Hunt! and Dark Lord’s Doom, were simply fantastic. Both files were distributed to backers in November in final form. This was about a month later than anticipated.

The other three books – especially Catacombs and Sunken Library – ran into issues with presentation style. I’m not going to recap them. I worked with the author team and on my own hook to turn them into something that met my vision. And now I know what that vision needs to look like and will communicate that to future authors. But it took forever to do and was the very opposite of fun. It was an energy-sucking slog.

I had really anticipated delivering all the PDFs in August. Instead, they started to go out in November, and only saw all five files in backers’ hands in January of 2021. Fulfillment will be complete by the end of Feburary.

During the creation of the last three volumes of the Jok Sevantes Campaign, I started to find myself repeatedly saying “Thou Shalt Not Assign the GM Homework,” which is adventure-writing advice I shall stick to until the end of time. I won’t expand upon it here, but it gave me the seed of an idea for what would become the Character Collections series. I wrote Character Collection 1 in two days, maybe three, over Thanksgiving break, distributing a bonus free 8-page PDF on November 30.

Oh, money?

Profitable. The TFT line in general (almost all of it due to More Perilous Journeys) brought in over $36,000 in revenue – almost 80% of all my revenue in 2020! – and in 2020 had only accounted for maybe $15,500 in costs. That did not include printing and shipping and final artwork, though, which mostly happened in early 2021. Even so, I don’t think that will be too different than about $10,000 or so…meaning that the overall project was not just profitable, but comfortably so.

What was different?

• I didn’t panic. I remained disciplined about spending through the entire project, even when things were bad
• It’s black and white. Full stop, that’s about half the cost in art, and printing is at least 65% more expensive. If I have to go offset, it’s even bigger.
• I did a lot of the fixit work myself, but offloaded when I needed to. I brought David and Emily in at critical junctures, for example

The problem with More Perilous Journeys was basically time. I had announced all the products, the kickstarter dates, the page counts too early, and when things ran into issues, I was committed. I could not in good conscience substitute something else on the schedule. I had to do them, I had to do them in the order I set them up, and that was that.

Overall, though, there’s no question: TFT is a fantastic product line for me, and in both cases, demand was as strong or stronger than for the DFRPG. Sales of TFT products are reasonably strong on both Warehouse 23 and my own Website as well.

Conventions

The convention scene was limited to digital FnordCons in 2020. They were fun. Since there was no travel, no setup, and no anything, they represent the most profitable (we’re talking a few hundred bucks here) conventions I’ve done. That’s not saying a lot, but  it helped bring the “Marketing” expenses down by a bit.

Shields and Weapons

Who has the time? These were always chancy sellers. You really need to want a mostly historical Viking-style round shield to want to drop $500 on these, and given the work that goes into them, that’s still a fair price. But demand isn’t there, and supply of my time really isn’t there. So these took a back seat. The only thing that got spent here was my going in halfsies with a friend on a power planer, which will make future work easier.

Other Product Lines

The Dragon Heresy/Fifth Edition product lines were stagnant. I sold about $600 of easily identifiable product here, mostly through DriveThruRPG, and about 1/3 of that was my still-champion for quantity: Dungeon Grappling.

I hope to do more with Dragon Heresy in 2021.

Kickstarter Delivery

Late late late, dangit, late. That was the story of both Nordlond Sagas and More Perilous Journeys. I have learned my lessons here, and the new watchwords are

• Do not announce a product until the manuscript is finished, read, revised, and accepted
• Do not launch a Kickstarter until you understand the final scope of the book/project, and are at worst ready to start editing. At best, it’s all ready to go but the artwork.

Authors and Artists

I maintained good relationships with my art team, and worked with at least a dozen artists in 2020. While I’m not making books that look like Symbaroum or some of the rich work done in the big-dog products like D&D 5th Edition or other such works, I feel my works are really solid artistically. As much as I want to gripe about the cost of Nordlond Sagas…they’re very pretty.

Off Target: Challenges and Missteps

Each year brings opportunities for improvement, and some missed steps.

Goals Not Met

Obviously, when you lose $70,000 in revenue and your profit swings to a substantial loss, “things did not go well.” Let’s get detailed for the 2020 goals

• Nordlond Sagas finished, and shipped, and has been well received. I did in fact hold “late” to “three months.”
• I did not take more than a short break. I did not fully recover my sanity. Still haven’t.
• My only source of big revenue was Kickstarter. I did not try out GameOn Tabletop in 2020.
• More Perilous Journeys did launch. It did not include cards and counters. It did run late.
• I still have permission to make the Nordlond Bestiary, but it did not get done in 2020 like I wanted. It is the top priority in 2021 for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG line
• I did not break the 600-backer threshold. Some of my future commitments require on the order of 1,200 to even 1,800 backers to see done profitably, so this is a huge gap in my ability to succeed. Growing an audience to “over 1,000 backers on a regular basis” is a hard slog and I need to figure it out
• Still on WooCommerce. It still sucks.
• Still using Adobe. Affinity is rapidly making gains, but until they do auto-span columns (not yet), data merge (yay! added!), proper cross-referencing (present now in Publisher 1.9) it’s still going to be painful. The GREP and scripting features of InDesign are too powerful to pass up. I don’t plan on switching over to Affinity in 2021…but maybe the following year.

2020 Financial Summary

Gaming Ballistic overall took a colossal bath in 2020.

But I’m committed to making this my day job in 2021 and beyond. So it’s time to dig in, learn what I can, and make it better.

Revenue: Fell by 60%

GB took in only $46,000 in sales and other income in 2020. This was entirely due to only launching one Kickstarter/major project effort this year, More Perilous Journeys.

Website and other channel sales (DriveThru a bit, but mostly Warehouse 23) saw the best year ever. So that was a nice thing.

Costs: Fell by 35%

Thankfully, my costs fell as well (though since you spend money to make things, that’s a mixed story).

But no way around it, I spent more than I made, and that’s not good.

Net: A Rough Year

A company’s business is to make money doing cool stuff. I lost money, but made cool stuff. Not as much stuff as I need to make.

2020 was, financially, a failure. I’m not throwing in the towel yet, though. Far from it.

In My Sights: 2021 Goals

I need to look 2021 in the eye and be honest with myself. I have plans, and have learned lessons. Now to see how they do.

• The Character Collection concept will go live on Kickstarter in seven days: Next Friday. This is a return to the TFT space (obviously), and marks what will hopefully be a good start to the year.
  • Firstly, the first three books are finished with writing and layout. All three of the initial books will be finished including artwork before the campaign finishes its first weekend
  • My stretch goals are all based on backer counts. I have learned my lesson about what makes a project successful, and in a word, it’s customer count
  • I’m taking a lesson from some of SJGames’ successes (pledges getting more valuable as goals unlock) but also offering hardcopy, cards, and counters. It is notionally possible that if all goals unlock, a new-to-Gaming Ballistic backer could plunk down $400 or more for an “I WANT ALL THE THINGS” type pledge. I have a very robust product offering in this space.
• I have several exciting projects in queue for 2021
  • The Nordlond Bestiary is the biggest for the DFRPG. This is a big lift, but a Powered by GURPS Bestiary is something folks have been asking for. I hope they show up when it’s time
  • I have another very, very exciting project under contract with Kevin Smyth. It’s medium length, and I won’t reveal it for a bit. But it’s something I think will really open up some things
  • A short, fun DFRPG project is getting some of my attention here and there.
  • One or two more super secret things are in the works – again in the Powered by GURPS space – that I think people will enjoy hearing are in the works
  • See? I told you I was being more cagey with announcements
  • If the Character Collections project does well, I can make more. Easily.
  • If Dungeon Fantasy RPG people (or OSR people, for that matter) want such ready-to-play materials, well…that can be done
  • I was asked to do some more work in the TFT space by Steve; it’s based on some things I’ve done before, and yet still quite different. I’m excited by it. But that’ll be late 2021 and requires me to really crank it on the Bestiary. Might slip to 2022.
  • Mission X is on slow burn. It might slip to 2022 also, because it has to be done RIGHT.
• I launched a Patreon in January. I would appreciate more patrons to help advance the ball. Right now, the folks on it have been subjected to a constant stream of TFT materials in preview, but that will change now that MPJ is nearing the end.
• Dragon Heresy shall get a shot in the arm this year.
• I really need to make a push for more followers and backers if GB is to be my Real Job. If I can get 1,000 folks per campaign, I can really make this work. If I can get 2,000 folks, I can make anything work. Even big 300-page hardbacks like the Bestiary

The quick summary, shared by many: 2020 sucked.

But 2021 has a lot going for it. If I can maintain my discipline, increase interest in my product line, and diversify a bit in my offerings, I have a lot to make for people this year. I’m looking forward to it.