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You might think that after the meeting where we discovered that SupaGenius had stolen thousands of dollars from us, we wouldn’t ever talk to him again. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the case. For one thing, there was a lot of stuff–bank accounts, web hosting, etc. that we had to make sure we could access and he couldn’t, and some of that required his cooperation. Also, Corporate Sugar Daddy was still hoping to get some of his money back, so he’d asked us to try to be civil when we had to deal with SG. SupaGenius didn’t make civility easy. For a couple of years after the meeting, he kept showing up at conventions, often wearing Hex T-shirts and pretending he was still somehow involved with the company. Eventually our intense shunning worked and he stopped following us around.
We completed QAGS 2nd Edition in much less time than we’d spent on the first edition, in part because we were worried that if we took too long CSD would change his mind about covering the print run. As a result, we didn’t fiddle with the system a lot–we still felt like it worked pretty well, so aside from a few minor changes it stayed the same as first edition. We focused instead on providing advice on running games and crunchy bits that people could actually use (also, more dumb jokes). We got the big purple FU back from the printer sometime in early 2003.
Unless Q2E sold really well, it was going to be our last book. Back in those days, the only way to print books was using traditional offset printing, which meant even a printer that specialized in short runs generally required that you print at least 1,000 copies (with a higher per-copy price for smaller print runs). That actually wasn’t so bad at the time, since most sales still went through the distributor–>retailer channel, and as I’ve mentioned already the big distributors always ordered way more books than they could sell. At least this time we were prepared for the inevitable return of books a year or so later. We printed 2,000 books, which at least doubled what we owed Corporate Sugar Daddy.
For the next couple years, we kept working on new stuff knowing we might not ever be able to actually release it. We were selling Q2E, but not nearly enough of it to justify sinking money into printing more books. Around this time we started hearing about people releasing games in PDF format, but we were naysayers. We didn’t think PDFs were “real” books and would never lower ourself to half-assing it like that. Our opinions on PDFs have obviously changed since then (PDFs are our primary sales channel these days).
In addition to PDFs struggling to become relevant, advances in printing allowed the emergence of POD (Print On Demand), which meant you could print books in very small print runs without a massive per-book cost. The ability to print enough books to cover our convention and web sales for under $100 allowed us to release Qerth, Rasslin’, the first Sindbad book, and others.
Over the next few years, PDFs were normalized (thanks in part to centralized sales platforms like Drivethru) to the point where people would ask whether our stuff was available in PDF. This caused us to rethink things and start selling books on the PDF sites. Eventually realized that since PDFs were so much cheaper to produce, we could produce more niche items that we’d have never made our money back on with the traditional “print and distribution” model. We embraced PDFs and focused on making books that we liked, not books that would sell when someone saw them on a retailer’s shelf. We would have never been able to justify releasing a book like Hobomancer under the old business model.
The next 15 years or so of Hex Games had its ups and downs, but nothing as exciting as having some jackass steal a bunch of money that wasn’t even ours. I’m hoping to cover all of that in the next issue and finally get into the why we’re finally getting around to a 3rd edition of QAGS 21 years after 2E was released.
