Betrayal At Krondor

Raymond Feist <raymond.TakeThisOut@bittersea.com> wrote:
>In article <40F98A2C.270A9C1E.TakeThisOut@comcast.net>, Craig J. Ries
><silvanthalas_cjr.TakeThisOut@comcast.net> wrote:
>> Raymond Feist wrote:
>> >
>> > As for what most gaming Riftwar fans would enjoy, I have little idea.
>> > As I said up-thread I've got 20 million books in print and about 200k
>> > of both games sold, so either gaming is about 1% of my readership or a
>> > heck of a lot of gaming Rifwar fans didn't care to try BaK or RtK.
>>
>> Or didn't know about them, didn't have a computer, didn't have a store
>> where they could get them (since this was before Amazon.com).
>>
>> There are a number of factors that go into why the numbers weren't
>> higher. No, the games wouldn't have sold 20 million copies, but they
>> could've easily been higher.
>
>Or just weren't interested. The numbers of copy to be a hit in books
>or games is roughly the same (50K in hardcover: 150k in paperback), but
>games have a very short "back list" shelf life. The drop off in sales
>in games is very dramatic after 6 months. Magician, for example, has
>never been out of print in 22 years.

It must feel pretty good to have a book that a publisher wants to sell
22 for years in a row. A lot of authors can't get anyone to do even a
single run.
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In article <u5alf01eqs3frbpp0u7glcf9hv9i19nmtb.RemoveThis@4ax.com>, Bateau
<Gamera.RemoveThis@work.stomping.aza> wrote:

> Raymond Feist <raymond.RemoveThis@bittersea.com> wrote:
> >In article <40F98A2C.270A9C1E.RemoveThis@comcast.net>, Craig J. Ries
> ><silvanthalas_cjr.RemoveThis@comcast.net> wrote:
> >> Raymond Feist wrote:
> >> >
> >> > As for what most gaming Riftwar fans would enjoy, I have little idea.
> >> > As I said up-thread I've got 20 million books in print and about 200k
> >> > of both games sold, so either gaming is about 1% of my readership or a
> >> > heck of a lot of gaming Rifwar fans didn't care to try BaK or RtK.
> >>
> >> Or didn't know about them, didn't have a computer, didn't have a store
> >> where they could get them (since this was before Amazon.com).
> >>
> >> There are a number of factors that go into why the numbers weren't
> >> higher. No, the games wouldn't have sold 20 million copies, but they
> >> could've easily been higher.
> >
> >Or just weren't interested. The numbers of copy to be a hit in books
> >or games is roughly the same (50K in hardcover: 150k in paperback), but
> >games have a very short "back list" shelf life. The drop off in sales
> >in games is very dramatic after 6 months. Magician, for example, has
> >never been out of print in 22 years.
>
> It must feel pretty good to have a book that a publisher wants to sell
> 22 for years in a row. A lot of authors can't get anyone to do even a
> single run.


The single biggest source of satisfaction for me as a writer has been
my endurance.

Best, R.E.F.
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An article is posted by Raymond Feist, who is old and wise,
and with the following gibber, the Holy Lord Kalten replies:

> I'll agree with this assessment, save for the words "a lot," but
> otherwise yes, the game was a great marketing tool for the books. But
> keep in mind that many copies of the game were bought by those already
> reading the books.

I suppose "a lot" might be a bit extreme. :0) However, look at it from
another perspective. Whilst most games released get the developer a certain
amount of revenue from the sale of the game. With BaK the amount you made
on people like me is nothing short of fantastic. He buys one game and then
goes on to buy 10 of your books. A game without the books rely on the
expansion disk to generate extra revenue. I definately you're on to a good
thing - having said that, that's only because of the quality of the game!
:0)

Also I guess its probably worth mentioning that it probably got you an
increase in male book fans. So by simply mathematics, assuming that:
a) You can work out the gender of the buyer for each copy sold and
b) no other factor's need to be taken into consideration
....then by the increase in male to female book fan ratio you might get a
rough estimate of how much extra you made in books through the sale of the
game.

No offense to the girl gamers out there! :0)

Cheers,

Kalten~!!!
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In article <40fc1b9c$0$6446$cc9e4d1f@news-text.dial.pipex.com>, Kalten
<LordKalten.DeleteThis@pandion.chapterhouse.eos> wrote:

> An article is posted by Raymond Feist, who is old and wise,
> and with the following gibber, the Holy Lord Kalten replies:
>
> > I'll agree with this assessment, save for the words "a lot," but
> > otherwise yes, the game was a great marketing tool for the books. But
> > keep in mind that many copies of the game were bought by those already
> > reading the books.
>
> I suppose "a lot" might be a bit extreme. :0) However, look at it from
> another perspective. Whilst most games released get the developer a certain
> amount of revenue from the sale of the game. With BaK the amount you made
> on people like me is nothing short of fantastic. He buys one game and then
> goes on to buy 10 of your books. A game without the books rely on the
> expansion disk to generate extra revenue. I definately you're on to a good
> thing - having said that, that's only because of the quality of the game!
> :0)
>
> Also I guess its probably worth mentioning that it probably got you an
> increase in male book fans. So by simply mathematics, assuming that:
> a) You can work out the gender of the buyer for each copy sold and
> b) no other factor's need to be taken into consideration
> ...then by the increase in male to female book fan ratio you might get a
> rough estimate of how much extra you made in books through the sale of the
> game.
>
> No offense to the girl gamers out there! :0)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Kalten~!!!
>

Hell, if I wanted to just sell as many copies as possible to male
gamers, we'd just published Nude Female Avengers of Krondor.

<G>

Best, R.E.F.
>
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Raymond Feist wrote:
> Hell, if I wanted to just sell as many copies as possible to male
> gamers, we'd just published Nude Female Avengers of Krondor.
>
> <G>
>
> Best, R.E.F.

Sounds good to me--when's the release date?

--
chainbreaker
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"Raymond Feist" <raymond.RemoveThis@bittersea.com> wrote in message
news:190720041243315831%raymond@bittersea.com...

> Hell, if I wanted to just sell as many copies as possible to male
> gamers, we'd just published Nude Female Avengers of Krondor.
>
> <G>
>
> Best, R.E.F.


ROFLMAOPMP!!


Regards, John Waters
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>From: "John Waters" jwaters.TakeThisOut@tampabay.rr.com
>Date: 7/21/2004 11:09 AM Eastern Standard Time
>Message-id: <wGvLc.54129$IX4.6792614@twister.tampabay.rr.com>
>
>
>"Raymond Feist" <raymond.TakeThisOut@bittersea.com> wrote in message
>news:190720041243315831%raymond@bittersea.com...
>
>> Hell, if I wanted to just sell as many copies as possible to male
>> gamers, we'd just published Nude Female Avengers of Krondor.
>>
>> <G>
>>
>> Best, R.E.F.
>
>
>ROFLMAOPMP!!
>
>
>Regards, John Waters

I went to Amazon and tried to put a deposit down. Worked for me.
 >> Stay informed about: Betrayal At Krondor 

"Raymond Feist" <raymond.TakeThisOut@bittersea.com> wrote in message
news:150720040621559116%raymond@bittersea.com...
> In article <40f65f5d$0$163$edfadb0f@dread11.news.tele.dk>, Arcana
> Dragon <this.TakeThisOut@ress.is.invalid> wrote:
>


> I think the gaming experience in BaK is a sold one. The problem right
> now is as much legal as technical. Given developmental tools today, it
> would probably be easier just to take the old script, salvage the
> music, create new art assets and do voice recording, etc. as it would
> to try to salvage anything from that old code. Selling a 2-D came with
> what was essentially cardboard cut-out figures in the day of Diablo
> would be tough. Even tougher would be to find someone at Vevendi who
> even knew what we were talking about in terms of contract. Sierra just
> bit the big one coroprate-wise, and as Dynamix was folded into Sierra
> years ago, it's getting harder to even identify someone to talk to.
> I've got legal issues with these people that need to be resolved, and I
> can't even get an aswer to my agent's letters and calls.

I know I am going to upset a lot of Bak fans but couldn't you drop Krondor
and its assorted copyrighted aspects and start fresh. I guarantee you are
going to
start fresh with the coding anyway (pretty much guarantee). Or do your books
focus on the evolution of the Gorath, Locklear, etc. characters?

>
> And that was the problem for years. The run-up time for games was such
> that by the time they were publisher, you were often creating games for
> old hardware. BaK should have been a Windows game and should have been
> portable to the Mac, but at the time, Dynamix wasn't convinced there
> would be a big enough installed user base in either Windows or Macs to
> make it profitable. 20/20 hindsight tells us they were backing the
> wrong horse. There were so many compromises made in that code, and it
> was such a bitch to even get the damn thing to run half the time ("go,
> and see how much expanded memory you've allocated . . .").

It runs absolutely perfectly on my machine. Thanks to the help of the
fansites for showing me how to run this dos game in win2k. In fact it
even runs smoothly with some resource hogging programs still running
in Win in the background; Windows media player for example. And I
don't have a very good pc. Oh.... I still can't get any sound but that's ok
it works well with Led Zeppelin.

>
> Well, the nice thing here is that I'm bending Matt's ear that we want
> to stay away from being platform specific if we can. There are 6
> million Mac users out there who certainly are an untapped audience for
> this sort of thing, not to mention the potential for Sony's PX3 when it
> ships.
>

Bah..(easy for me to say)...
Of that 6 mill. 70% ++ are using at work in desktop publishing. Most have
a pc at home.
Adobe tries to play both markets with some excellent and expensive programs.
(Photoshop and premiere for ex) And they run beautifully on the Mac. And
they still run beautifully on the Mac. Oh how well they run the Mac.
Mac and Adobe oh yeah.....
(To be fair I haven't tried the latest versions of the two Adobe prods. on
pc.
I mentioned. I am sure that they have realized the foolishness of
ignoring Windows standardizations...Alt F4 to exit you simple
bastards not CTRL Q)

Les F.
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In article <TyHLc.77057$Mr4.31345@pd7tw1no>, Les F
<Lesnospam.RemoveThis@getlost.com> wrote:

> "Raymond Feist" <raymond.RemoveThis@bittersea.com> wrote in message
> news:150720040621559116%raymond@bittersea.com...
> > In article <40f65f5d$0$163$edfadb0f@dread11.news.tele.dk>, Arcana
> > Dragon <this.RemoveThis@ress.is.invalid> wrote:
> >
>
>
> > I think the gaming experience in BaK is a sold one. The problem right
> > now is as much legal as technical. Given developmental tools today, it
> > would probably be easier just to take the old script, salvage the
> > music, create new art assets and do voice recording, etc. as it would
> > to try to salvage anything from that old code. Selling a 2-D came with
> > what was essentially cardboard cut-out figures in the day of Diablo
> > would be tough. Even tougher would be to find someone at Vevendi who
> > even knew what we were talking about in terms of contract. Sierra just
> > bit the big one coroprate-wise, and as Dynamix was folded into Sierra
> > years ago, it's getting harder to even identify someone to talk to.
> > I've got legal issues with these people that need to be resolved, and I
> > can't even get an aswer to my agent's letters and calls.
>
> I know I am going to upset a lot of Bak fans but couldn't you drop Krondor
> and its assorted copyrighted aspects and start fresh. I guarantee you are
> going to
> start fresh with the coding anyway (pretty much guarantee). Or do your books
> focus on the evolution of the Gorath, Locklear, etc. characters?
>
> >

No. Realize this thread was simply directed at the question raised
about modernizing the game. We're just discussing why we're not going
to. The new game will be totally unlike BaK for several reasons,
mostly because it will be an on-line, multi-player product that is
"open-ended" in design. There's a lot I can't say yet, but while most
people will think one thing or another, let me say the plan currently
is to come up with something very different than what currently exists
in the market place. To me it makes little sense to bring out another
chaotic environment full of simple tasks (find treasure, spend gold on
better weapons, lean spells, kill stuff, repeat over and over, etc.)
and just cosmetically slap a lot of place names from my books on it.
There will be enough hack & slash and dungeon crawls for the gamers who
want such, but we're also going to do something never attempted before
relative to a continuity centered around themes and characters much
like the books themselves.

> > And that was the problem for years. The run-up time for games was such
> > that by the time they were publisher, you were often creating games for
> > old hardware. BaK should have been a Windows game and should have been
> > portable to the Mac, but at the time, Dynamix wasn't convinced there
> > would be a big enough installed user base in either Windows or Macs to
> > make it profitable. 20/20 hindsight tells us they were backing the
> > wrong horse. There were so many compromises made in that code, and it
> > was such a bitch to even get the damn thing to run half the time ("go,
> > and see how much expanded memory you've allocated . . .").
>
> It runs absolutely perfectly on my machine. Thanks to the help of the
> fansites for showing me how to run this dos game in win2k. In fact it
> even runs smoothly with some resource hogging programs still running
> in Win in the background; Windows media player for example. And I
> don't have a very good pc. Oh.... I still can't get any sound but that's ok
> it works well with Led Zeppelin.
>
> >

One thing about old DOS games, they weren't much bigger than 640K. <g>
In modern machines, that leaves a lot of overhead left.

> > Well, the nice thing here is that I'm bending Matt's ear that we want
> > to stay away from being platform specific if we can. There are 6
> > million Mac users out there who certainly are an untapped audience for
> > this sort of thing, not to mention the potential for Sony's PX3 when it
> > ships.
> >
>
> Bah..(easy for me to say)...
> Of that 6 mill. 70% ++ are using at work in desktop publishing.

Not my experience. But then I'm among the Mac earlier adapters. But
anyway, among my friends all the Macs are at home and in laptops, with
their work machines being PC's. It's just that if you have the knack,
these days, it's easy enough to massage files and send them from a Mac
to a PC.

>
>Most have
> a pc at home.
> Adobe tries to play both markets with some excellent and expensive programs.
> (Photoshop and premiere for ex) And they run beautifully on the Mac. And
> they still run beautifully on the Mac. Oh how well they run the Mac.
> Mac and Adobe oh yeah.....
> (To be fair I haven't tried the latest versions of the two Adobe prods. on
> pc.
> I mentioned. I am sure that they have realized the foolishness of
> ignoring Windows standardizations...Alt F4 to exit you simple
> bastards not CTRL Q)
>

Gee, why didn't they think of it? After all, the word is AltF4uit. <g>

Best, R.E.F.
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In article <410040cb$0$154$edfadb0f@dread11.news.tele.dk>, Arcana
Dragon <this RemoveThis @ress.is.invalid> wrote:

> Raymond Feist <raymond RemoveThis @bittersea.com> skrev i meddelelsen
> news:220720040538519240%raymond@bittersea.com:
>
> > One thing about old DOS games, they weren't much bigger than 640K. <g>
> > In modern machines, that leaves a lot of overhead left.
>
> Well Ultima 7/1 and 7/2 came on several 1.44-disks, and 7/1 (Black Gate)
> took up a whopping 20 megabytes - 20% of my harddisk at that time.
>
> Of course, I don't know HOW old DOS-games you're writing about??? Dos 1, 2
> or 3?

Dos 3.1 or therabouts.

Best, R.E.F.
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On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 02:09:50 GMT, Raymond Feist
<raymond.DeleteThis@bittersea.com> wrote:

>But as complaints go, this is one of the silliest I've encountered.
>Lots of people get married all the time.
>
>Best, R.E.F.

Still have fond memories of the game Betrayal at Krondor.

Tried reading your books, but got so friggin' irritated by the short
sentences you start each chapter with that I have been unable to
finish a single one of your books. Another silly criticism, I know,
but I could see no point to this' literary device.'
James
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On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 13:26:28 +0100, "Kalten"
<LordKalten.RemoveThis@pandion.chapterhouse.eos> wrote:

>An article is posted by Pierre Vandevennne, who is old and wise,
>and with the following gibber, the Holy Lord Kalten replies:
>
>> Raymond Feist <raymond.RemoveThis@bittersea.com> wrote in news:170720041453055938%
>> raymond.RemoveThis@bittersea.com:
>> > Or just weren't interested. The numbers of copy to be a hit in books
>> > or games is roughly the same (50K in hardcover: 150k in paperback), but
>> > games have a very short "back list" shelf life. The drop off in sales
>>
>> I bought both games, new. I had read just one book before that, which I
>> purchased second hand... bought several more after playing the games.
>
>Absolutely.
>
>I got a floppy copy of the game from a friend when I was at Uni. Got
>absolutely hooked and by the time I got round to buying it, the CD version
>came out which I bought.
>
>Anyway, after that I wanted to know more about the characters and bought the
>Magician series and the series with Janny Wurts as well.
>
>I think that Ray has to realise that the game might have boosted sales of
>his books especially his older books which would have already been bought
>ages ago by his current book fans. His gaming fans that had not read his
>books would account a lot for the sales of his older books and added to the
>book fan community.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Kalten~!!!
>


There is a Magician game? I loved the series, what the name? where can
i buy it? wildd.RemoveThis@bellsouth.net thanks
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In article <5595g0dis7p46t5m2pkf7osa6ihuo2c33t DeleteThis @4ax.com>, J.S.T.
<spamfree DeleteThis @spamfree.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 02:09:50 GMT, Raymond Feist
> <raymond DeleteThis @bittersea.com> wrote:
>
> >But as complaints go, this is one of the silliest I've encountered.
> >Lots of people get married all the time.
> >
> >Best, R.E.F.
>
> Still have fond memories of the game Betrayal at Krondor.
>
> Tried reading your books, but got so friggin' irritated by the short
> sentences you start each chapter with that I have been unable to
> finish a single one of your books. Another silly criticism, I know,
> but I could see no point to this' literary device.'
> James
>

There was no point. It was what is known in publishing as a "vanity,"
i.e. a decision from an author that has no specific reason, other than
I liked it.

But if that sort of thing truly "irritates" you, life must be very grim
indeed.

Best, R.E.F.
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