Ronin Round Table: Feedback and Reviews, Please

In the middle of last week, James Dawsey of the Vigilance Press Podcast invited Mutants & Masterminds designer Steve Kenson and I to talk to him about the release of Emerald City and the just-announced ICONS: The Assembled Edition, which Steve also designed.

We had a good talk, which you can listen to on the Vigilance Press site, and we covered a lot of ground. Steve explained how ICONS started and why he decided to have Green Ronin publish the latest version. I talked about Emerald City, its history, and how happy we were to finally see it in print.

As we were wrapping up our conversation, James asked if there was anything else we wanted to mention. As it happened, one of the things I’d been thinking about in the last few weeks is the feedback we receive from our fans.

I have a small group of fans I call on weekly to give me their opinions on the PDFs we release regularly as well as a number of our upcoming books. They are a very valuable “second” set of eyes and often catch things that make our books much better than they would have been otherwise.

We also have a number of very active, helpful, and passionate people who participate in conversations on our Atomic Think Tank forum. They give us ideas for new products, offer opinions about the books we release, point out typos and editing errors that need fixing, and generally help to keep Steve and I motivated to make every book the best possible. We love hearing from our fans and if you’re looking to find out more about M&M, what’s going on with our upcoming releases, have questions for us, or are looking for write-ups of some of your favorite comic characters, check it out.

The last thing I mentioned was reviews. Green Ronin, thankfully, sells a lot of games and books, but one of the things I’ve noticed recently is that we don’t get a lot of reviews posted online. All of our books are for sale in the Green Ronin Online Store and at DriveThruRPG, and DriveThruRPG has a place to post reviews built right into each product page. I’d love to see more reviews posted to those pages.

Anyway, at the end of the interview I asked listeners to please provide us with their feedback and write reviews of our products. Not only to help us make our books better, but to give other people who are curious about this game or that supplement more information to go on. As people spend more and more money online for PDFs, reviews become that much more important. Unlike picking up a book in your favorite local game store, you can’t page through a PDF to see what you think of it. All you have to go on is a couple of images (at most) and sales text written by the people who created the game you’re interested in—hardly unbiased, right?

So that’s my request of you. If you like our games and want to help other people to make better-informed decisions about them, please consider hopping onto the Atomic Think Tank to join the conversation, writing up a review on your blog, a gaming site, or at DriveThruRPG, or otherwise making your opinion known.

As someone who’s already picked up Emerald City, Power Profiles, or any of our other books, you have knowledge others could benefit from. We prefer positive reviews (who doesn’t?), but what we’re really looking for is a critical examination of our efforts because it helps us make better books and gives potential buyers all the facts. Plus, in the future, maybe someone you inspire to pick up one of our books will write a review you find useful… and wouldn’t that be nice!

Thank you,

Jon Leitheusser
M&M Line Developer