The Business: Welcome Back To The Cottage, Gaming "Industry"

This is your future, tabletop publishers: THE PAST.

You are not going to be mass-market. You are not going to have your own conventions. You are not going to be major components of other conventions. You are going to become a hobby pursuit with no commercial viability, and you are going to hit that wall far faster than you think.

As such, you are going to be forced to confront this fact--that pushing paper, and especially pushing text-as-pixels, has no future as a business--and you will be forced to reconsider your options.

Shifting Operational Focus

This is the route of following Stupid British Toy Company, Converged Game Labs, or what outsiders think of Current Edition's value to Magic-Users By The Water: an adjunct to the real revenue-generator for the brand and property, meant to provide the audience something to do with the real product.

Stupid's real business is pushing miniatures, modeling tools, and paints. The games are an adjunct to that core business model. CGL is doing the same thing for BattleTech. Outsiders, not knowing the lore, think that this is Current Edition's relationship to Magic: The Gathering.

All of them have, and continue to have, plenty of tie-in media outside of tabletop adventure games that are far more popular than the games themselves and those aforementioned companies are putting more resources into those tie-in media for that reason.

Hell, even Palladium tried to do that (and, somehow, failed).

Let me say again what this business is and why it will still work: your real business is pushing widgets, and the game is the excuse offered to the audience to justifying buying and collecting them. If you don't think this is how it works, then you need to see tabletop games like Osprey's Gaslands and how it is just an excuse to buy and play with toy cars.

You can even go so far as to give away the game, as Chris Gonnerman gives away Basic Fantasy, as a value-add proposition. I would not be surprised to see Steve Jackson Games do this (again, but successful this time) with Car Wars.

The other route, as the savvy teased out already, is to sell tie-in media like comics and novels with plenty of illustrations as the primary product line. As part of development, make certain that those illustrations demonstrate the setting as a character unto itself. Does this work? You've heard of Middle-Earth Role-Playing and The One Ring, right? Yeah, this works; it's what drives tie-in games based on outside media properties like Mouse Wars. They want to visit this wondrous place, so you provide the game as the means to do so.

You don't have to be a mass media darling to do this. Author Brian Niemeier did this with his Combat Frame XSeed novel series. He could do this again with his other series if he had sufficient demand.

But far too many of you people are too invested emotionally in your hobby games as a business. That investment needs to be cashed out, and the game depreciated compared to what needs to be done to make it worthwhile to continue offering commercially at all- and as I've seen that the odds of this being achievable are low, it's time to return again to Gonnerman to show the other option.

Stop Pretending It's A Business

Just give the game away. If you can't let it go, then make it a self-funding hobby and be done with it. That's Gonnerman's way, and it's why Basic Fantasy is as good as it is; he gives away the digital and does Print-On-Demand at-cost because his game is a hobby.

So is yours. No, getting All The Money due to going cap-in-hand on Kickstarter does not change this. You are still just pretending.

So stop. No one will fault you for being honest about this being a hobby pursuit, and that you pay your bills by some other means instead. Hell, no one will fault you for not bothering to publish without receiving sufficient patronage to do so; you're just making it clear that they're buying your time to do that instead of something else.

This is the most viable route for the majority of you publishers. You can take your manuscript layout skills, your editing skills, your art direction skills, etc. elsewhere or go freelance and make real revenue that way- and use the game as Proof of Authority in the manner that Joshua Lisec sells his services to prospective clients: the book becomes your CV.

Either way, better get used to the cozy life in the cottage because there's no future in this hobby as a business anymore.

Which leads to how the hobby will revert back to its former form. That's tomorrow's post.