Also, here's some financial data for anyone looking to obtain the rights to use the Twilight: 2000 brand identity. I haven't personally been involved in any negotiations with Far Future Enterprises, but the numbers I heard for 93GS' license were
15% of all revenue with a minimum $7,500/year payment.
Let's do the math based on the Twilight: 2013 core rulebook's PDF. It normally sells for $20 at DriveThruRPG - not a bad price for a core book of that size. DriveThruRPG takes roughly 30% of the cover price, leaving a cut to the publisher of $14. At $14/copy, you'd have to sell 536 copies a year just to make the minimum license fee -
without paying your writers, artists, and production staff a cent or receiving any return on your investment yourself. And believe me, we writers like to get paid. It enables us to buy our wives nice things to apologize for spending months at a time ignoring them.
So you're thinking, "woo, 536 copies is cake." Not really, guys. The 2013 core book PDF was at "Gold" status on DriveThruRPG
in December 2010. A Gold seller is one that moves between 501 and 1,000 copies. That means the core book's entire lifetime sales (between its release on 08 Nov 2008 and the cessation of operations on 31 December 2010) weren't enough to make the minimum payment on the license.
Now, granted, this excludes the sales of the hardcopy core rulebook, as well as the Shooter's Guide and Anytown PDFs (some of which hit the Gold sales bracket in their own right). Remember, though, that hardcopy sales are far less profitable because of printing and distribution costs - and the supplement PDFs were priced so low that profits on them were pretty negligible.
- C.