To-may-toe, To-Mah-toe.

You might not like to think of it as being "forced out", but the implication we're getting is that Adam, David, and Jennifer were put in a situation where they had to choose between their ethics and their job. In fact, all three have stated as much, so we know they were *forced* to choose between an intolerable ethical situation and the jobs they loved. In fact, according to Frank's sources (which can be verified), when David and Jennifer presented their findings and repayment plan to Loren Coleman, that exact same day they turned in their resignations. We don't know what happened in that meeting, but we do know that whatever went down, it was sufficient to apply enough ethical pressure to get them to quit on the spot. The implication here is that Loren Coleman demanded their resignations, but there's no way of knowing that.

To try and get this thread back on track, a question was raised on RPG.net over rather or not sales of the SR4.5LE will raise enough cash to save CGL. Now, the question is: how many people intend to buy a LE, who haven't already pre-paid for one?

That's a really good point, since a lot of us actually gave money to Catalyst last year... Hmmm.

Bull

It would only take on the order of 20,000 of them to cover the alleged discrepancy in the books.

No, because CGL doesn't get 100% of the cover price.

Oh jeez. The last thing this thread needs is a flame war about climate change. Didn't we beat that to death a few months ago?

Regarding SR4ALE (Shadowrun for ale? Yes please!): I think people are still shelling out for them. I just purchased mine a few weeks ago, so I would hope that money is already in some freelancer's pocket.

On the CBT forums, there is many a claim that <<500 have sold. Shocks the heck out of me, as I know 12 orders from my three SR groups.
For purely drek and laughter, I would love to see the sales numbers for CBT and Battletech.
That and there is a chance said numbers would really fuel the fire.


BlueMax
/me makes more popcorn and watches all of these threads on the net.

You might have noticed the smiley

I sure did. I should have included one in my post, as clearly the humor didn't translate.

Patents protect "ideas". Though that's not actually correct, it is the general idea.

Via direct sales? Who else gets a cut?

Of course, 20,000 "limited edition" books.....

So there you have it: If the SR Freelancers apply themselves, they can just about make CGL pay them. I guess they must have just been slacking on applying themselves last year.

Recently getting back into Shadowrun after a long hiatus in white wolf and Palladium. I'm a bit distressed to come and find these forums only to find it in a seeming crisis.

So, to help a guy out that missed the first two or three versions of this thread and to sum up... as best I can tell the most recent books cant' be bought or downloaded right now, due to a problem with company money finding it's way into an owners accounts and freelancers not getting paid?

If this is so, is there an ETA on the books not being sold now?

Which books are they?

And will future books be delayed?

I'm getting an Ipad on Saturday and I'd love to have my Shadowrun 4th on it. (( i mean how poetic would it be?))

I still want to know how Midnight got out. I thought it was being held for copyright issues. If CGL violates that hold, can those other parties seek compensation for this?

Welcome back to Shadowrun--we'll be trying to get products moving as quickly as possible for you to enjoy! I don't have a complete list of the products affected, but I believe it's Vice, Dawn of the Artifacts 1 & 2, Seattle 2072, and Running Wild. I hope to be hearing news about some of those books very shortly, and will update people on Dumpshock when I do.

Future books are invariably delayed at least a bit--the loss of production staff, as well as freelancers withholding copyright or canceling contracts, causes some delay. I'm doing the best I can to make that delay as short as possible. The basic order of the upcoming releases remains unchanged, with Corp Guide being the next in line based on what I know now.

Congrats on getting an iPad--the sales of the core rulebooks aren't affected, so load 'em on! I wouldn't be at all opposed to seeing a photo of SR4A or something on an iPad . . .

Jason H.

It was a mistake. Shipments have stopped, but hopefully this will be resolved very shortly and the book will begin moving again.

Jason H.

Thanks for the quick and informative reply.

And will do. I've got SR4A already so as soon as I get it and figure out how to load up the PDFs I'll post a pic.

Solution: move to Munich. Last snow melted mid march. First snow in november, IIRC.

Edith says: Oh, and an hour ago, it started snowing again. Damn.

You got the version from the official Catalyst spokesperson, just keep that in mind. To further answer your question as to what's gone on...

Frank Trollman, ex-freelancers, part-author of things like Street Magic and loudmouth extroadinaire broke the story that Catalyst is in financial trouble because although Shadowrun is profitable, Loren Coleman, one of the owners of Catalyst, misappropriated funds. This has been brewing for a long time apparently. Reaching the conclusion after long non-payment that they actually wouldn't get paid at all, numerous core freelancers walked from Catalyst. This included key people such as Jennifer Harding and Adam Jury. Some of these people were supposed to be working on getting Coleman to repay the money he nicked. They have since resigned for 'ethical reasons'. On the same day. Suspicions are rife. Meanwhile a number of books have been withdrawn from sale because the authors have withdrawn copyright due to non-payment. The fact that Catalyst didn't immediately pay up speaks volumes.

Maybe JM Hardy is correct in what he says about getting things back on track. But keep in mind the source and don't bank on things going smoothly. At every stage of this, Frank has said something and later turned out to be correct.

K.

I would think that a large portion of those that would buy the LE have already got it on pre-order. It was supposed to be a Limited Edition, after all. And you're not going to get many impulse buys of this from people seeing it in the shops. It'll be sold primarily to people like Dumpshockers who are in the know.

I personally considered ordering one as I needed new rulebooks at the time. But due to CGL's inability to tell me anything at all about how the LE would differ from the very nice SR4 20th Anniversary edition, I bought two copies of the latter. I'm certainly not spending money on a third rule book,

K.

I would be very concerned if a Limited Edition became just a More Expensive Edition just to make some money regardless. It wouldnt speak very highly of any long term plans.

Yeah. I hear "Limited Edition" is synonymous with "same price as the normal edition" in the gaming industry. True story.

I hope they get it squared away. This sort of thing happened at Palladium years ago and not a week goes by that they don't blame it for not hitting release dates and all the woes in their universe. I love Palladium books but yeah, after years and years the excuses ring hollow.

It'd suck if I got back into Shadowrun, just to find it happening over here too.

Could somebody please just a short line onto the blog of SR4.com, saying all this was the worst April's fool in years, and that it's over now? I'll stay on the site all day, hitting my F5 key every 10 to 20 seconds, so no need to hurry.

As a matter of fact, I'm waiting for the inevitable blog posts slash press releases announcing that the SR license goes to Wizards, White Wolf or Microsoft.

AAS

Personally, I am waiting for CGL to pull out of this, get the license renewed, get the freelancers paid, and all the people running around with their pitchforks and torches to end up getting a big serving of Corvus....

According to the retailers fact sheet, supply is limited to 1500 copies. The Battlecorps has an additional 500 for direct sale. As the ability to order said book is still there, that should mean the sales of direct only haven't hit the 500 sales yet. We can't say anything about the preorders outside of Battleshop, because we don't have the numbers from retailers, and the retailers don't even know if they'll get the amount of books they ordered.

So my conclusion was that through direct order (Battleshop) less then 500 books were sold, if that's not the case then CGL is really fncking with us ('limited' edition not being so limited).

I may be breaking my NDA here, but my understanding was the LE edition had gold leaf on the page edges, yellow fringe on the cover, included a full set of multi-sided dice (can't remember if it was emerald or ruby used for the dice) and each edition was signed by either former-president Bill Clinton, former-president George W. Bush, or President Barack Obama.

So, yeah, I'd say it really is a "limited" edition in that it is very markedly different from previous rulebooks.

That sounds awesom!

Anyways, the ship that was carrying the books has apparently hit land, so in a week or two we shall find out if it was worth waiting around for it, or just a waste of money.

Stop it with the April's Fool's jokes.

*points at the new Shadowrun: Gibson Edition!*

See all the madness on this thread has broken the world

Does anybody really not know what the SR4A Limited Edition will be like ?

My Limited Editions of SR3 and SR4 are both faux-leather hardcovers with a ribbon bookmark, and one extra page stating that they are limited editions. Otherwise the insides of the books themselves are no different than the regular editions of each book. The same is true for the Limited Edition rulebooks for many many other RPGs. Why would the SR4A LE be any different.

P.S. Some White Wolf Games LEs did have slipcases, and the Deadlands (second edition) LE was the Weird West Player's Guide and Marshal's Handbook combined in a single-volume hand-stitched real-leather bound hardcover with the logo embossed (not printed) but that truly was the exception (and my favourite LE)

There's pictures available here if you're curious!

Jason H.

Very cool, I was happy knowing I would have another black-leather hardcover. The slipcase and poster put this right up there with the Deadlands (2nd Ed.) LE.

4th edition LE includes the story at the end of a really clueless shadowrunner.

Knasser, please don't put words in my mouth. I have not publicly stated a reason for leaving Catalyst because _it is, at this time, none of the public's business_ -- and David, Jennifer, and myself resigned all on different days, too. I can't speak for what David and Jennifer knew about each other's resignations, but neither of them knew about mine until I started making post-resignation phone calls.

I'm very sorry. I was mistaken. I remembered Jennifer's statement and got my facts wrong.

Sincere apologies.

K.

Thirty days? That's rather steep for just pointing out the obvious without using a hint of saucy language (at least in the post that Darren quoted, I stopped reading the thread long ago). My guess is the length has more to do with how long Darren figured it'd take for the CGL situation to come to some sort of resolution, one way or another, and then matching yours to Frank's.

I wouldn't give Darren that much benefit of the doubt.

Speaking of that thread, one question I raised was this: exactly how much does CGL owe it's freelancers? According to a post on another Forum, AH received about $5k for all the work he's done, on ten different books. Exactly how do CGL freelancers get paid? I understand they get paid by the chapter, and not by the word. If we count the number of freelancers involved, and the number of books, we should be able to come up with a ballpark estimate of how much CGL owes its freelancers.

I can see slow payments if we're talking tens of thousands of dollars; but from the look of things, we may be talking less than 10k.

I once tried to convince my ex-wife to consider writing for Shadowrun. She is an award-winning writer with ten published novels. She said she wouldn't touch that business with a ten-foot Hungarian.

This is incorrect. Every contract I've had for working on Shadowrun books, dating back to my time with FASA lo these many moons ago, was for a specific word count. Some chapters are bigger than others; "The Infected" in Running Wild, for instance, is right at 10,000 words. The Lone Star node I wrote up for Target: Matrix was substantially smaller, about 1,500 words. But I was paid by the word each time. I can't imagine they'd change their boilerplate contracts just for my benefit.

I'm not going to tell you what I made per word; I don't see that it actually serves a purpose, or that you are actually entitled to know how much CGL owes me or anybody else. I think that's what's honking me off the most about these threads: The notion that anybody else in the world besides Catalyst and my wife think that they're entitled to know how much I make (or don't, as the case may be) as a freelance writer.

A lot less than I make at my day job is all I'll tell you. The rest is none of your damn business.


Just totalling up what I'm owed and what some other freelancers, both current and former, have told me they're owed, it's somewhat more than that.

Yeah, that's roughly correct. I haven't added it all up. Standard rates are 3.5 cents a word (4.5 cents for assistant devs, so I'm told), which are slightly above-average in the industry (compare that "top dollar" at per-word rate is 6 cents a word for a publication like Dragon). At the time I terminated my contracts CGL currently owed me $3,100 for books already printed or accepted (depending on the terms of the contract), and I had other outstanding contracts for about $2,100.

Not counting comp copies which, y'know, are shipped out so rarely I could easily have waited for Christmas before seeing my three hardcopies of Vice.

Doesn't sound like much, but a given project or contribution to a project might be minor - my additions to On the Run, Dawn of the Artifacts: Dusk, and Dawn of the Artifacts: Midnight are so minor (generally amounting to only stating out a single character or something else equally trivial) that they don't even rate a comp copy, and are done more as a favor or suggestion to the authoress than anything. 10 Gangs was a small project (and had to be revised, since my original rape-gang was a tad too explicit!), and I helped edit 10 Jackpointers for free. Many times I'm partnering up with people so even though my "influence" might extend over an entire chapter, really it's a collaboration and we split the paycheck. My "big scores" are when I end up writing a sizable chapter (or chapters) solo (or as solo as you get with an editor!) - like Ghost Cartels or Vice. I also did my share of pro bono stuff, like Digital Grimoire and the SR3->SR4 Character Converter.

If you don't mind my asking how were you to be paid for PACKs? Word count is great and all, but that doesn't seem to account for all the extra time crunching numbers and whatnot.

The Runner's Toolkit contract was a tough one to calculate because the number of words is artificially inflated by various hanging symbols, numbers, and whatnot. At one point there was talk of getting me a little more dosh for it, but at the time I terminated the contract it was for $700.

<Random Tangent>

As cool as it would be to have more fiction, I think the product line lacks a consistent rules focus and would love to see someone of the same caliber added from a rules perspective.

More and more fiction gets all the limelight but its not the only useful tool to those of us running the games at home.

I can't wait to see where Jason takes the game as line dev, or whatever the fancy title he has is.

BlueMax

I'm not trying to throw rocks or anything here but the numbers you've provided seem strange.

You say they owed you about $3,100 at one point. Even using 4 cent per word average, that's seventy seven thousand five hundred words add in the other $2,100, and that's one hundred and thirty thousand words. Maybe I'm looking at it weird (( again not a published author or anything)) but I didn't think that RPG's werwquite that chock full of text. There's good fluff in Shadow run but still. That seems like A LOT to me.

Am I just failing to comprehend something in the math? (( again. Not throwing rocks. Just trying to understand))

Thank you for trying to help out the average layperson/ RPG player to understand the problem though.

Looked it up, average word count is considered 250-300 words per page. By this math, that's five hundred and twenty pages of text. Just text. An we klnow RPGs don't do just straight text. There's pictures and illustrations and tables though out. I'd have to think that you'd be lucky to get 2/3 of standard page count of WORDS per pages published. So that's more like Seven hundred pages in an RPG. Is there THAT MUCH new RPG out there that you've personally penned and are owed money for?

An average *novel* has about 250-300 words per page. An average RPG book has 750-1000 words per page (that's factoring in all the art, maps, etc.) Take a quick count of one of them, you'll see.

What Adam said. Also consider that that 130,000 words you're talking about is the word count of a single sourcebook, maybe two if they're skinny. I can't remember what the final count wound up being, but the spec for Running Wild called for about 120,000 words plus art. I'm thinking it grew, but again I don't know for certain what the final count came up as for that particular book.

Interesting...

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-stati...iscellanea.html
How much are SF/F novelists paid?

A few years ago, Tobias Buckell got curious about this question and ran an anonymized survey. In 2005, he re-ran it, and his full results are here, with input from 108 authors. (Note that his figures refer to the US market.)

If you want a full run-down, I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, with discussion, but in a nutshell: the median advance for a first SF/F novel is $5000. For authors going through an agent it was $6000; for unagented novels it was $3500. (As I noted in an earlier CMAP posting, an agent is on commission and takes 15% of the author's cut. And they're cheap at the price, going by this finding!)

For established authors, the median advance for an SF novel is $12,500, and for a fantasy novel it's $15,000. Agented books average $12,500; unagented average $7,250. The range of advances is much wider in fantasy; the survey logged advances of $0 to $40,000 in SF, and $1000 to $600,000 in fantasy (the latter being a one-off that should probably be excluded from analysis of the results).