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RE: Production kind of slow!
Thanks for sharing the below with the public Mike. It explains a lot in why things have slowed down to a manageable pace for AP. Next year's release schedule should be interesting as the rest of this year as well.
Posted on CSW/AP game page:
They're both among the Panzer Grenadier titles needing my attention, with Fire&Sword next up after South Pacific. When Panzer Grenadier's development team moved on, I decided not to replace them with outside developers but instead restrict new designs to designers I'd worked with and I knew would deliver games/scenarios fitting our requirements (in short, wouldn't try to re-design the damned game system). That takes up a lot of time and energy on my part, but I already was giving every game very close editorial attention so it's not that much more (and sometimes, I've been glad I saw things early on). I don't believe that all of our games in the past were the best that they could be: 1967 needed the time I gave it, and so did the Infantry Attacks 2e rules. They're all getting pretty intense work before release, including the new editions of older games.
The major change came with our ejection from distribution. It was a serious blow to the business and it took a long time to recover from it. Overall, we're going to be better off; selling through distribution only gives you 40% of retail, and it also means that your product is fully available to online discounters, which badly undercuts your price and drives you to unhealthy tactics like fire sales. But on the positive side, it was really nice to get single payments that covered the month's entire overhead (when they came; I don't miss trying to time our releases around the new Magic: the Gathering, which would suck every dime out of the system and, once your game becomes "old" (a week or so later) those sales don't come back. Ever.). And you also get a lot of exposure without having to earn it yourself (well, not directly, anyway). It's taken me, personally, a long time to adjust to that change: I don't really like the marketing side of things, not being very good at it, but it's absolutely crucial (no cash = no games, no food). But steadily we've developed our marketing techniques, with things like the Gold Club and the Campaign Studies and other things.
It took that expulsion for me to finally accept that Avalanche Press was no longer the sort of publisher it had been, and hadn't been in some time. It's a creator-owned and -operated firm, which is common in comics and role-playing publishing but rare in wargames. We haven't been announcing major new titles while we finish with what we have, and after that will operate more like a creator-owned studio, worrying about one game at a time. We don't take outside submissions outside of the current cadre of Panzer Grenadier creators (the "Submission Guidelines" page came off the website some months back). When most of the games you produce go into cartons and off to someone else's warehouse, you can spend most of your time making games. That's not true any longer, and it's taken a while to adjust to the new reality. I can't just make games, I have to sell them, and I can't hand that off to anyone else.
So anyway, we have the new pieces for Fire&Sword and I hope to have it out this autumn.
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