If you're new to the game industry, you've probably heard a lot of myths about publishing. The truth is more complicated -- and, if you're planning to publish your new game, perhaps more encouraging.
[h=3]“PDFs should be free!”[/h]It costs nothing to copy a PDF, everyone knows that. Digital books are no more complicated to produce than it is to move a mouse. So, games companies must be just trying to gouge their customers.
While many games companies do give out free PDFs, it isn’t because they cost nothing. A PDF book costs the same as a printed one in terms of commissioned art and writing, layout and graphic design etc. Now, it does have a much smaller unit cost, which is zero. However, the unit cost of any book is a tiny fraction of what the customer is paying. The unit cost is the base charge the publisher will add a little to when they sell to a distributor. The distributors add their own mark up and sell to retailers who add another. This makes the unit cost much less than a quarter (or even a fifth) of the final retail sale price, if that. So discounting a PDF by half that price (as is the standard on DriveThruRPG) is actually a pretty good deal.
Some companies offer PDFs for free, but this is not because they cost nothing. In general, a customer with the PDF might come back to buy the hard copy, but if they have the hard copy they rarely come back to buy the PDF. So given those statistics, offering a free PDF with the hard copy is a good sales incentive. It is a pain for retailers to compete with this, but that’s another article! All I’ll say for now is check out Bits and Mortar (.com).
[h=3]“Amazon knows the real release date!”[/h]You see this a lot. A customer announces on a forum that they know when a product is coming out as Amazon (or similar) has it listed with a date, despite the publish having said nothing. This then picks up traction across the forum until people are demanding it for the ‘correct date’.
So, first off, if a company hasn’t put out a release date, any other date you hear is probably wrong. But how do these spurious dates appear? After all, Amazon didn’t get it from nowhere. The reason is due to what publishing companies have to tell retailers and distributors to get their products into shops at the right time. The lead time on this is three months at least (and longer for a Christmas release). So when a company thinks it can deliver a product in three months it offers it to distribution so they can place orders at the right time. But it doesn’t always work (in fact it often doesn’t work). There are legions of things that can delay a release, and all the while some distributors the order date to their customers as a release date, even though it was only ever a hopeful guess from the publisher. When it’s a big company like Amazon who don’t update all their products, these dates stay on their website, further convincing people that it is on the way. These confusions are why most companies stay vague about release dates for their customers until they know they can hit them.
[h=3]“The gatekeepers won’t let me in!”[/h]With the advent of digital publishing, the gates to becoming an RPG game producer have never been further open. Yet still you see a few people complaining that the industry is hard to get into and no one will ‘let them in’.
There are a lot of reasons for why you might think that, and these are mostly because you may be approaching the industry the wrong way. Most games companies have their own lines and anything that doesn’t fit into one of them isn’t going to be considered, no matter how good it is. Even for a writer with a good track record, getting someone to publish your new games idea is a huge investment for any company, and one that can seriously stretch their resources. So, if you want to get into the industry, talk to the people who produce a game you know well about what they might be looking for in terms of supplements and adventures.
However, if you have a game idea and you want to get it out there, you don’t have to wait for someone else to produce it for you. Print on demand companies like Lulu and DriveThruRPG (One Book Shelf) are a cheap and easy way to get your game on the market, and Kickstarter can get you the funds to take it further. But that’s a whole other article!
[h=3]“It’s OK to base something on a book/TV show/film/video game if I don’t make a profit.”[/h]This one comes up a lot, and there are many sad stories of people falling foul of it. I can’t give you all the legal details (and British and American law are also a little different) but this is generally an abuse or misuse of someone else’s ‘Intellectual Property’ (IP). It is never OK to use anyone else’s intellectual property for any reason, and some will sue you for a lot of money if you do, whether you made money or not.
There are a number of legal reasons for this. For one, if you own an intellectual property, you need to preserve its standards and integrity. Letting anyone do any old thing can bring down the perceived quality, sometimes even more so if they are doing it for free. It comes down to the fact that an IP belongs to someone, and you need to ask before you play with someone else’s property. Additionally, there are some forms of law that work on precedent, and if you allow someone to do something with your IP without your permission, you have effectively allowed anyone to do the same, profit or no profit.
In short, IP law is a very complicated subject. You can often make something similar if you are careful, but the names (and especially anything trademarked) and specifics of a world are not available without license. So, before you write your version of ‘Game of Thrones’ ask yourself if you could defend it as solely your own work in court.
[h=3]“No one will be interested in my game!”[/h]To finish on a more optimistic note, you may be thinking the idea you had for a game just isn’t any good. But you may be wrong. Gaming is a small industry with a huge product base. There are plenty of games that are very similar to each other all doing well in the market. You do need to find something that makes your game stand out. But the variety of the community means that even if you have nothing but a clone of D&D with a few tweaks, it might be just what someone out there is waiting for. Self-publishing and the array of community content options have made it easier than ever before to get your work out there. But to do that you have to get it written. So get back to it and finish it right now, because just maybe, you have inside you a game that everyone will want to play.
This article was contributed by Andrew Peregrine (Corone) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. We are always on the lookout for freelance columnists! If you have a pitch, please contact us!
[h=3]“PDFs should be free!”[/h]It costs nothing to copy a PDF, everyone knows that. Digital books are no more complicated to produce than it is to move a mouse. So, games companies must be just trying to gouge their customers.
While many games companies do give out free PDFs, it isn’t because they cost nothing. A PDF book costs the same as a printed one in terms of commissioned art and writing, layout and graphic design etc. Now, it does have a much smaller unit cost, which is zero. However, the unit cost of any book is a tiny fraction of what the customer is paying. The unit cost is the base charge the publisher will add a little to when they sell to a distributor. The distributors add their own mark up and sell to retailers who add another. This makes the unit cost much less than a quarter (or even a fifth) of the final retail sale price, if that. So discounting a PDF by half that price (as is the standard on DriveThruRPG) is actually a pretty good deal.
Some companies offer PDFs for free, but this is not because they cost nothing. In general, a customer with the PDF might come back to buy the hard copy, but if they have the hard copy they rarely come back to buy the PDF. So given those statistics, offering a free PDF with the hard copy is a good sales incentive. It is a pain for retailers to compete with this, but that’s another article! All I’ll say for now is check out Bits and Mortar (.com).
[h=3]“Amazon knows the real release date!”[/h]You see this a lot. A customer announces on a forum that they know when a product is coming out as Amazon (or similar) has it listed with a date, despite the publish having said nothing. This then picks up traction across the forum until people are demanding it for the ‘correct date’.
So, first off, if a company hasn’t put out a release date, any other date you hear is probably wrong. But how do these spurious dates appear? After all, Amazon didn’t get it from nowhere. The reason is due to what publishing companies have to tell retailers and distributors to get their products into shops at the right time. The lead time on this is three months at least (and longer for a Christmas release). So when a company thinks it can deliver a product in three months it offers it to distribution so they can place orders at the right time. But it doesn’t always work (in fact it often doesn’t work). There are legions of things that can delay a release, and all the while some distributors the order date to their customers as a release date, even though it was only ever a hopeful guess from the publisher. When it’s a big company like Amazon who don’t update all their products, these dates stay on their website, further convincing people that it is on the way. These confusions are why most companies stay vague about release dates for their customers until they know they can hit them.
[h=3]“The gatekeepers won’t let me in!”[/h]With the advent of digital publishing, the gates to becoming an RPG game producer have never been further open. Yet still you see a few people complaining that the industry is hard to get into and no one will ‘let them in’.
There are a lot of reasons for why you might think that, and these are mostly because you may be approaching the industry the wrong way. Most games companies have their own lines and anything that doesn’t fit into one of them isn’t going to be considered, no matter how good it is. Even for a writer with a good track record, getting someone to publish your new games idea is a huge investment for any company, and one that can seriously stretch their resources. So, if you want to get into the industry, talk to the people who produce a game you know well about what they might be looking for in terms of supplements and adventures.
However, if you have a game idea and you want to get it out there, you don’t have to wait for someone else to produce it for you. Print on demand companies like Lulu and DriveThruRPG (One Book Shelf) are a cheap and easy way to get your game on the market, and Kickstarter can get you the funds to take it further. But that’s a whole other article!
[h=3]“It’s OK to base something on a book/TV show/film/video game if I don’t make a profit.”[/h]This one comes up a lot, and there are many sad stories of people falling foul of it. I can’t give you all the legal details (and British and American law are also a little different) but this is generally an abuse or misuse of someone else’s ‘Intellectual Property’ (IP). It is never OK to use anyone else’s intellectual property for any reason, and some will sue you for a lot of money if you do, whether you made money or not.
There are a number of legal reasons for this. For one, if you own an intellectual property, you need to preserve its standards and integrity. Letting anyone do any old thing can bring down the perceived quality, sometimes even more so if they are doing it for free. It comes down to the fact that an IP belongs to someone, and you need to ask before you play with someone else’s property. Additionally, there are some forms of law that work on precedent, and if you allow someone to do something with your IP without your permission, you have effectively allowed anyone to do the same, profit or no profit.
In short, IP law is a very complicated subject. You can often make something similar if you are careful, but the names (and especially anything trademarked) and specifics of a world are not available without license. So, before you write your version of ‘Game of Thrones’ ask yourself if you could defend it as solely your own work in court.
[h=3]“No one will be interested in my game!”[/h]To finish on a more optimistic note, you may be thinking the idea you had for a game just isn’t any good. But you may be wrong. Gaming is a small industry with a huge product base. There are plenty of games that are very similar to each other all doing well in the market. You do need to find something that makes your game stand out. But the variety of the community means that even if you have nothing but a clone of D&D with a few tweaks, it might be just what someone out there is waiting for. Self-publishing and the array of community content options have made it easier than ever before to get your work out there. But to do that you have to get it written. So get back to it and finish it right now, because just maybe, you have inside you a game that everyone will want to play.
This article was contributed by Andrew Peregrine (Corone) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. We are always on the lookout for freelance columnists! If you have a pitch, please contact us!
