The Business: A Viable Path To Making Competition For BattleTech

If you read yesterday's post, then you should have picked up on a key idea: your game needs to replicate the feel of your inspirational material.

Related is just as important, especially when you get to marketing and advertising your game: you must show AND tell your prospect that it does that thing. However, making an original IP to compete with BattleTech is akin to making an original MMO to compete with Globe of Gankcraft; if you're not already a titan, you're going to fail without taking years to make a nigh-perfect game marketing in a nigh-perfect manner.

In the tabletop space, that's not happening. You're better off getting started by going directly to the inspirational brands and making a licensed product (and then doing a better job than anyone that's ever done Robotech or VOTOMS ever did- you know who you are).

If I were sufficiently bold, this is what I would do.

• Take DP9's Not-Gundam game, Jovian Chronicles. Strip out all the knockoffs for their Gundam counterparts and remove counter-intuitive schema.
• The core of the game is a wargame. Make certain that this wargame works using HG Gunpla kits as miniatures. Make certain that the rules produce results that recreate what the series/movies/manga/novels show to the viewer/reader reliably by default. Make this expectation crystal-clear in the rules manual.
• During this process, I attend anime conventions and make contact with Bandai's people. Once I am certain I have the product ready, I approach them with a game tailor-made to cater to Bandai's core business: selling Gunpla. Then I arrange a demo to show them what I have. (If I am sufficiently bold at this time, I can point out that a companium app can be made to compliment the tabletop game.) I point out that the rules manual is ready to go, that I have a business plan ready to present, and that this gives their Gunpla line new utility that appeals to a market segment heretofore resistant to buying it.
• Knowing how this will go, I will be prepared to repeat this to successfully higher levels of executives until I get a shot-caller to do so. Given that I'm handing them a fait-accompli, arranging a license deal will not be that hard- especially when I point out that fucking Wendy's pulled this off previously as a joke.
• As I am confident that I would succeed, I await the deal to be approved and then negotiate the details of the contract; key would be to retain full rights to the ruleset, and that I am licensing only those trademarks and other specific IP for this Gundam-branded game (as Bandai is buying a license from me for the use of those rules).

Succeed or fail, I repeat this for Macross.

If necessary, I make provisions for translating the rules into Japanese before I make the pitch; the tabletop scene in Japan isn't what it is in the West, but it does exist and could explode if all those Gunpla builders now had a use for their kits other than flexing on YouTube (and had a reason to buy multiples of the grunt models).

I could replicate this for other mecha brands, and I would do so if the deal was right; the aim, of course, is to build up towards making tabletop Super Robot Wars a reality beyond occassional Reddit threads on r/mecha.

Oh, and to get Maximum Mike off his ass about a new Mekton edition as well as DP9 to get serious about JC and Heavy Gear again.