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Tony Fanchi
United States
Iowa City
Iowa
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It's been a while since our last post, but that doesn't mean we haven't been hard at work. When we had Basketball G.M. polished to the point we felt we could call it "done," we set to work on some new ideas. We currently have prototypes for two games, which we are calling Downtown Dash and Intruder Alert! (Those who follow us on Twitter may know the latter as Self Destruct.) This past weekend, Gamicon was held right here in Iowa City, Iowa, so I packed up the two prototypes and took them to the convention. There, I had the opportunity to demo them for Jay Tummelson, the CEO of Rio Grande Games. This was a fantastic opportunity and a very encouraging experience. Though you won't be seeing one of our designs published by Rio Grande in the near future, I came away from the demos with lots of good feedback and many ideas about how to make the games more appealing to publishers. But that's not the main focus of this post.
In addition to demoing our prototypes, I also had the opportunity to listen to Mr. Tummelson talk informally about game design and, perhaps more importantly, game publishing. Mr. Tummelson has more than a decade of experience publishing games (he founded Rio Grande Games in 1998) and provided great insight into what it takes to sell a game design to a publisher, so I thought I would share some of what I learned in that respect with any other aspiring game designers out there.
1) Game publishing is a hit-or-miss business. Part of Rio Grande's business plan is to publish lots of games and hope that a few will hit the mark with gamers. Print runs for Rio Grande typically are about 2-3000 copies. Games that sell out will get reprinted, but those that don't, won't. Board gaming is a fairly small and highly competitive market, so just because your game gets published, doesn't necessarily mean it will succeed, so temper your expectations.
2) Rio Grande pays 8% royalties to designers. Other companies are likely somewhere in the same ballpark. That's 8% of what Rio Grande gets from a game. A game that sells in a store for $50 will probably bring in $20 for Rio Grande, which amounts to $1.60 for the designer. Coupled with #1 above, this means that even if a developer gets that first game published, it probably won't net the developer that much money. Perhaps a few thousand dollars. If you're hoping to make a fortune on game design, you're probably better off looking into another line of work.
3) Your best chance to sell a design is at a convention, particularly a German convention like Essen. Many game publishers have webpages indicating how to send game designs to them, but the best way to sell a design is to pitch it to the company directly, and the best way to do that is at conventions. Obviously this requires upfront investment to get to the convention, but it is far more likely to pay off than an online submission. (Still, it's no guarantee of success.) And the best conventions to attend to pitch a design are German conventions because game companies send representatives to these conventions specifically for the purpose of finding new games. And if you go, go early. Thursday and Friday are the best days to pitch a game idea because the conventions are much less crowded on those days.
4) Art is not required to sell a game. Publishers don't really care much what your prototype looks like or if it has professional art. They'll most likely replace the art anyway. However, that's not to say appearances don't matter. You still want the prototype to be functional and clearly presented, and if you want to get people to playtest it or demo it, you'll want it to look nice, but as far as publishers are concerned, art is not a requirement.
5) Don't worry about someone stealing your ideas. If you ask a publisher for a non-disclosure agreement, you'll get laughed out of the room. Publishers look at lots and lots of game designs, and most of them have similarities with other designs. There are very few truly original ideas out there, and even if your idea is an original one, it's probably cheaper for the company to pay you for your design than to pay someone else to develop it. So don't hesitate to share your designs with publishers.
6) If you're a game designer, you don't want to also be a publisher. While it is possible to self-publish a game first and then get it picked up by a publisher (we've seen this happen with a number of games recently, like Flash Point: Fire Rescue), being both a publisher and designer is not a great long-term strategy. It's just too much of a time drain to do both. As anyone who has self-published could tell you, publishing is a lot of work, which means you won't have much time for design. Once you get that first design picked up by a publisher, let them do the work.
7) Give your game to only one company. If a company likes your game enough to take a copy to look at closely, then they will actually put resources into doing so. If they come back to you with a contract for the game and you've sold it elsewhere, you've just lost a potential buyer for future games, and word will get around about that. However, when you hand your game over to a publisher for a closer look, you can ask how long they expect it will take to get you a final answer, and if they take longer than that, you can ask for your game back and they will return it with no hard feelings.
8) If your game is picked up by a publisher, they will make changes to it. You have to be okay with that and work with them. If you are too inflexible, they will tell you to take your design elsewhere. You can voice your concerns over potential changes and tell them why you think they won't work, but do so succinctly and don't press the issue if they don't see things your way. It is their game to change as they feel is necessary. And if they publish the game, you have to love the game as it is, at least publicly. No one will buy the game if they think even the designer doesn't like it, and you won't get other designs sold if you publicly complain about the final product.
Those are the main lessons I took away from Gamicon. I hope that you find them useful. I want to thank Mr. Tummelson again for taking the time to speak about game design, and for offering feedback on our game designs. It was very enlightening and encouraging to have the opportunity to speak with the founder of such a prominent game publisher.
Thanks for reading!
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