Quote (Jimbo @ Oct. 10 2005,22:21) |
Quote (MaksimSmelchak @ Oct. 10 2005,17:50) | Any advice that any of you might have for me would be most welcome. |
Having run my own gaming company publishing rules, the one piece of advice I would give is.
*** DON"T DO IT. ***
Unless you are prepared to lose money.
There is virtually no money to be made from rules, there is a small market and it is very picky.
Publish the rules on the web and be done with it if you really want to write some rules. |
Hi Jimbo,
In my final analysis, I agree with you.
There is no money in writing rule sets, even very good ones.
The money in gaming is for boxed games and, more importantly... MINIATURES.
I have written my ruleset, however, with expansion opportunities... the game modules.
I thought about just leaving my rule set on the net, but I want it to be better. Every time, I see the rule set that I wrote and ran years ago floating around a gaming convention as a photocopied set, I wish that I'd done a better job. I've even seen my old rule set being sold at a flea markets (And I gave it away for free TOO!)...
With the advent of small printers and PC publishing, I don't need much more than my computer and a fancy program to do game book layout so the biggest expenditure is printing as long as I keep rights to the game.
Ultimately, "Planetfall" is an experiment to see if I can break even. With current conditions withstanding, I think I can break even and even make a small profit... perhaps even over a hundred US dollars on the first printing run.
If there's more demand, I can run a second batch of printing. Otherwise, I'll switch to PDF downloads for further sales of the game. Offering the game through another company (such as RPG Now...) as a PDF Download reduces my profit margin, but keeps the game in circulation (Albeit not wide circulation since PDF Downloads are not terribly popular).
At any rate, I have a plan and figure the worst I could lose on this project is about a hundred to a hundred fifty US Dollars. However, I don't think that... that is going to happen.
Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.