What follows is a longwinded post about Starmen.Net, Fangamer, the store, and where all three of them are going. This started out as a much more concise post (see the tl;dr summary below) but I wanted to explain why this is happening, so keep reading past the spoiler if you’re interested in the behind-the-scenes machinations.
Forumly Foundation
The Fangamer Store is owned and operated by Fangamer, a company founded this year by myself and a handful of Starmen.Net staff/oldbies. Our goal is to rebuild Starmen.Net and then use the new site as a template for building communities around other great games. Unfortunately, to do that, we need money. Using Fangamer investment money, I paid myself and ROFISH while we spent the first half of the year designing and developing this forum software. There are still bugs (I’ll be getting to them eventually I promise
), but we feel that this new forum is both a success and a solid foundation for the work which we’ll eventually begin doing on the site.
Unfortunately, development is expensive, so we had to stop coding once the money ran out (and ROFISH resumed college classes) and begin searching for a better way to generate money. You may remember that, a little less than a year ago, we tried putting ads up on the forum. It worked — the ads generated a couple hundred dollars of revenue — but it kinda sucked and wasn’t really ‘worth it’, so we left the ads behind after moving to the new forum. I won’t say definitively that they won’t return, but they’re not in the cards at the moment.
The Magical Uniting Power of Merch
We’ve sold merchandise through Cafepress since, like, 2002, but their stuff has gotten very expensive since then. Seeing that their base price for a medium-to-low quality t-shirt has risen to $18, we knew that we could create merchandise that was higher quality, less expensive, and lower cost (to you guys). We also knew we could turn a much larger profit on it if we did it ourselves.
We’ve always known that merchandise was a better way to make money; fans love it, and we (especially Jonk and I) love to create it. The best thing is that, unlike advertising, merchandise isn’t intrusive or irritating. In fact, people love it, which isn’t something you can say about “LOWER MY CREDIT RATING” ads. So after reviewing our Cafepress revenues, I felt strongly that starting our own store would be a worthwhile investment.
Store Launch wewp
Four months later, the store launched and we knew we were onto something good because the response was overwhelming. Sooner than we expected, we’ve nearly paid off our initial investment in the store. We’ll soon be generating profit that we can use to finance new merchandise and, more importantly, resume the redevelopment of Starmen.Net.
As you might have guessed, though, we can only take EarthBound merchandise so far. That’s not to say we’re low on ideas, because we’ve got concepts (and even mockups) for dozens of totally viable products, not to mention about a million shirt designs floating around in our heads. However, we want to avoid the impression that we’re milking EarthBound for all its worth (trust me, its a lot of work for a not-very-huge reward), even though the store is still very young.
Wanted: Cult Classics
More importantly, however, we realize that EarthBound only reaches so many people, and we can’t expect you guys to buy t-shirts every month for the rest of your lives. Well maybe you will, but hopefully only because you like the stuff we produce So while we love EarthBound, there are a lot of good reasons to expand the store by looking at other game franchises.
Personally, I’ve been a huge Chrono Trigger fan since the summer of 1995 when CT and EB were both released on the SNES. In fact, shortly before I created YANEB , one of the first things I ever ‘submitted’ to any site on the internet was a crappy colored pencil drawing of Crono and Marle I traced out of Nintendo Power. Since then, CT has always seemed like a ‘sister game’ to EarthBound, and fans of both series generally seem to appreciate both games.
Cut : Chase
All of this is a very roundabout way of saying “we’re expanding soon!” and that you can expect Chrono Trigger, which is being re-released on the DS in November, to be one of the first new games we’ll be bringing into the fold. This won’t happen overnight, but I wanted to begin preparing you guys in advance.
I would love to hear what you guys think about this. Are we greedy capitalist pigs? Are you even interested in merchandise for other games? If so, what games would you be most likely to support? Can anyone tell me with a straight face that there has ever been an RPG mechanic as awesome and well-implemented as the Triple Tech?
Even if you hate CT and have only half-thought about buying something from the store, I want to thank you guys for your excellence the awesome way you’ve supported this community and the store, even though it’s only been open for a month. Also, don’t forget to check out the new Onett pin sets and EB Yourself shirts ;D
Jamis
Frau Landers
Latios
