Posts Tagged ‘icons rpg’

Hey! So, yeah, I took my sweet time here with my ICONS contest from late May. (I’ve had a bit of an insane few weeks, with moving, conventions,job changes and all that — apologies to those waiting for this!)

Per my rules, I had two entrants: Josh Rensch & Chris Czerniak. (I did discount Steve & Eddy, because of their ties to ICONS. No offence guys; I wanted some fans to win this one.)

So, Josh & Chris, here’s the deal:

You both win.

I haven’t had a chance to play ICONS yet, but I still think the character creation ideas will provide for a lot of fun just on their own. (I was hoping to get some time to play it in the last couple months, but it isn’t meant to be at the moment.)

I’ll be contacting you individually about your prize. Thanks for playing!

- Ryan

Many of you saw the post from the other day about ICONS, and some of you might have stuck around to see that Gareth and I cleared the air. I said I would post up a public apology here, and I was thinking about what to say.

Then a friend and I were talking about this, and a good point was brought up: I say that ICONS deserved “better marketing” than that in my post…but doesn’t that mean it’s also mean it deserves better than some fuck on the Internet mouthing off? I thought about that overnight, and came to this idea as a way to show this mea culpa as well as put my money where my fat mouth is:

Welcome to the “Taunt Ryan Macklin with how awesome ICONS is” Unofficial ICONS Contest!

I did keep saying that I wish the best for Steve Kenson and ICONS, so here’s the deal. I said that I might not have an interest in ICONS when the PDF is actually available for purchase. But if I keep hearing about how awesome ICONS is, you bet your ass I’ll be grabbing it June 1st. So I’m going to do this contest. You comment on this blog post about the fun ICONS characters you’re making or playing, and one of you will win me buying you the next few ICONS supplements.

No joke. This isn’t something I’m doing with Adamant. It’s just me doing my own thing, because I can and I should.

RULES:

• You may submit one (1) comment to this post per day. Posting more often will decrease your chances. (I want to be flooded, but past experience shows that people who gunshot post just to post don’t post awesome ideas.) Otherwise, each post you enter gives you more chances to win.
• If you’re worried about whether my time zone will count two posts as being on the same day, keeping them18 hours apart is good enough for me.
• Said post must contain the random bits generated and the character idea that gave you.
• If you’re an asshole in your post, you’re disqualified and I’ll delete it. (I hate having to write this, but it is the Internet.)
• The contest ends June 1st, when I can order the PDF of ICONS. At that item, I’ll close comments on this post and post a follow-up.
• Important: The point of this contest is to continuously taunt me with how awesome ICONS is. If this post gets no comments in a 36 hour period, then the contest is closed with no winner.
• The Winner will be chosen at random from those entries that are valid per above.
• The Winner will receive me buying for them PDFs of future ICONS supplements (when available for purchase), to no more than $50 or until August 2011, whichever comes first. (Should there be no supplements for whatever reason, uh, we’ll figure something else out.)
• Should the Winner not already have a copy of ICONS, but submitted because he has a friend who got it and looked at his laptop and no one would never, ever pirate games because I mean come on, I’ll buy that PDF as well (counted against said limit above).
• I reserve the right to change these rules at any time. Probably to make them more awesome.

BRING THE HEAT! Taunt me (nicely, don’t be a dick) about the awesome that is ICONS!

- Ryan

[EDIT: Scott Mathis pointed out in the comments that my intent for this post, to talk about how a particular marketing method doesn't work and use my experience as a case study, was only discussed well in the comments. Sorry about that, folks! I forgot about my own rule regarding using the specific alongside the abstract.]

…but I can’t. And that makes me a sad panda.

Specifically, I would like to spend money on the new superhero RPG by Steve Kenson, ICONS. I hear people already geeking about it now that they have their pre-order PDF copies, and that’s got me excited. Leonard Balsera was IMing me today about the characters he was making. That taunting bastard! :)

And if I could right now buy it, I would. But since I didn’t pre-order, it’s not available to me. From one of the posts on Adamant’s site:

The commercial PDF of ICONS will be available beginning June 1st, and the print edition of the game should be available to stores (and shipped to pre-order customers) by mid-June.

Well, fuck. I didn’t pre-order it even though I was genuinely interested, because I didn’t know where I was going to be living in mid-June. (And I still don’t, but hopefully I will in a couple weeks.) And I don’t have a lot of shelf space these days, so I don’t order as many books as I used to. Thus, I’m waiting on the PDF.

The PDF won’t be available for another 13 days.

That is a year in Internet time. That is a long time for me to lose interest in this “SQUEE WANNA BUY” state, enough time for something else to take up my impulse dollars, enough time to hear things about the game that would turn me off — not necessarily something that would make me not want to play the game, but something enough to cause me to stop being excited about it.

I like Kenson and his work, and if I had a PDF today, I might be able to get a pick-up game together at the Memorial Day con in L.A. — my vacation con that’s before June 1st. But since I didn’t pre-order, no dice. (Pun intended, baby. That’s how I roll.)

So while my friends are geeking on it, they’re doing so when that geeking can’t generate sales. And such excitement doesn’t last long. Hell, this blog post might even generate sales, since people click on shit (and I buy that “There’s no such thing as truly bad PR” philosophy). But by the time you can buy the PDF, this post will be old news. The only thing it’ll be good for is collecting spam.

(Now, maybe the PDF isn’t finished. But it’s not like the power to send purchasers an updated PDF doesn’t exist. That’s what Fred did with Dresden. And it worked pretty well, I think.)

But, yeah. Guys, on today, May 18th 2010, in response to the geekfest on my Twitter feed, I want to give you money. Might not have that interest on June 1st. And ICONS probably deserves better marketing treatment than this.

- Ryan