TheAlkaizer
Game Designer
Hi!
I know there's several people on these forums that designed games, made books out of them and got to printing them, and today I'm interested in seeking a bit of knowledge. I work in video games and for months I've been trying to convince the stakeholders of the company to diversify and attempt something in the tabletop RPG market. I love video games, but I'm really interested in trying to design a tabletop RPG of some kind. I don't know what yet, but that'll come. I've got projects going on right now that won't finish for another year or two anyway.
Anyway, I'm curious as to how the tabletop RPG industry works when it comes to printing material. Designing a game and giving PDFs is one thing, but the printing business is something else. Let's say I had a game already designed. I do a crowdsourcing campaign, and I want to offer the option to buy print books.
What's the chain? There's the company that creates the game, there's distributors in different areas of the worlds, there's a printing company? How do you find informations about these distributors and these printing companies? Does any regular commercial printing company would be able to do products like that? How is transport, storage and shipping handled? Do most tabletop companies outsource that part or take care of that themselves?
I've tried to learn a bit more about the process at my local gamestore but they've been pretty secretive about it, and the couple of searches that I've done haven't yielded much results. So maybe a few nuggets of informations from ENWorld will help me start my market research and hopefully allow me to work on something cool in a year or two!
I know there's several people on these forums that designed games, made books out of them and got to printing them, and today I'm interested in seeking a bit of knowledge. I work in video games and for months I've been trying to convince the stakeholders of the company to diversify and attempt something in the tabletop RPG market. I love video games, but I'm really interested in trying to design a tabletop RPG of some kind. I don't know what yet, but that'll come. I've got projects going on right now that won't finish for another year or two anyway.
Anyway, I'm curious as to how the tabletop RPG industry works when it comes to printing material. Designing a game and giving PDFs is one thing, but the printing business is something else. Let's say I had a game already designed. I do a crowdsourcing campaign, and I want to offer the option to buy print books.
What's the chain? There's the company that creates the game, there's distributors in different areas of the worlds, there's a printing company? How do you find informations about these distributors and these printing companies? Does any regular commercial printing company would be able to do products like that? How is transport, storage and shipping handled? Do most tabletop companies outsource that part or take care of that themselves?
I've tried to learn a bit more about the process at my local gamestore but they've been pretty secretive about it, and the couple of searches that I've done haven't yielded much results. So maybe a few nuggets of informations from ENWorld will help me start my market research and hopefully allow me to work on something cool in a year or two!