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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 5765192" data-attributes="member: 3586">The most successful modern wargaming company - GMT Games - has been using a preorder system (the P500) to fund its games for over a decade now. It's a very useful system for niche products - especially expensive ones, as wargames tend to be.For the P500, you pledge to buy the game (at a reduced price). You pay no money until just before it is produced, and a couple of months later the game is mailed to you. It helps weed out the ideas that sound good but no-one actually wants to buy them.Choosing which products to buy is made slightly easier by previews of the games as they're worked on, but more often you work by subject matter and game designers. (If I see a game by Chad Jensen, I'm likely to preorder it).Could this be a model that smaller RPG companies use? I think it quite likely, especially when they're creating more risky products. Have a look at <a href="http://www.gmtgames.com/s-2-p500.aspx" target="_blank">GMT Games P500 page</a> - it shows which products are in production, which ones have made the cut but aren't scheduled yet, and the ones that aren't there yet.Most wargame publishers use a similar scheme in modern times. However, there's a particular problem when a company delays too long between a product hitting the mark and producing it - which is very true of Multi-Man Publishing, who produce good products but take way too long to do so.Cheers!</blockquote>