What the…?!! We’re already one quarter of the way through 2018? Wow, that was fast. Which means it’s time for the quarterly update on BRG sales for the first 25% of the year.

Let’s start by offering up the actual sales numbers, with 99% of them coming from OneBookShelf sites (DriveThruRPG and RPGNow) and the rest from BreakoutCon this past month.

Launching T-Shirts Into The Crowd…

There’s a vast difference between the total number of sales and the money we earned as a result of those downloads. It’s a difference I expected for one reason: freebies. There were two new releases launched this quarter, HPS Legends and Duel. Both of them are free PDFs (with Legends available in paid softcover copies through a variety of sites). While Duel was always intended to be a free PDF (it’s only 8 pages long), there was some internal debate on Legends‘ price. The deciding factor was building an audience. Because BRG used to be part of the Mystical Throne Entertainment family, those sales were part of MTE’s data and were not guaranteed to port over to ours. As a result, the decision was made to make Legends free to help build up an audience for BRG (as well as HPS) and because it was created as a kind of stretch goal from the Kickstarter. That’s why this section is called “Launching T-shirts…” because that’s exactly what this first quarter was all about. Just without the t-shirts. Or the canons that killed Ned Flanders’ wife.

The numbers for both new products are very encouraging as both earned over 400 downloads a piece, primarily in the month of March. There were even a couple of softcover sales for Legends online. As both products were the central focus of this first quarter, mission accomplished. The true measurement of their success will reveal itself by next quarter.

Speaking of free stuff, this quarter also saw the release of the official High Plains Samurai website (highplainssamurai.com). Beyond your typical setting-based website with basic rules, setting overview, and purchase links, the site features a weekly blog post called the Atlas of the One Land. If you haven’t checked it out yet, have a peak and learn about new locations, characters, even gargantuan monsters that wander across the Wastes. Data on the first two weeks of operation have been right on cue. To quote the Gauntlet podcast, this site is giving me life right now.

Add on the few sales for our older products, especially Killshot, and these numbers were very much what I was expecting. Q2 will be light with the launch of our second Fragments mini-game, By The General’s Hand, before the latter half of 2018 brings the full glory of HPS to the masses. Expect something about it on the site soon or you can learn more by signing up for the Broken Newsletter to the right side of this page (or on the bottom if you’re on a mobile). So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a core rulebook to finish.