Eleven Years Wiser?

Eleven years ago this month I founded Reiver Games to self-publish my first game: Border Reivers. Then, as now, I was intending to make a small print run (100 copies for Border Reivers) by hand and to try to sell them via my website, BGG and by attending games clubs and conventions.

A lot has changed since then, both personally and professional and in the world in general. It'll be interesting over the next year to see whether my plan to essentially try to repeat the early successes of Reiver Games still works in the world of 2017, rather than 2006.

So what's changed?

Personal

The month after I founded Reiver Games I experienced my first Multiple Sclerosis symptoms. It took another seven months to get a confirmed diagnosis and then I had a pretty unpleasant couple of years of frequent relapses and constant fear over what my future would hold. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to get on a clinical trial of a treatment that has worked wonders for me - I've now been relapse free for eight years.

When I started Reiver Games I had a job that involved a reasonable amount of international travel, and the 300 hours of hand-making games in the first year, and then 450 in then second year was a struggle to fit in around the travel and wanting to spend some time out of work with The Wife. So I jumped at the chance of investing some of my life insurance money (yay MS!) into the company and quitting my job and going full-time. Of course I now have another job that includes a reasonable amount of international travel and I've still got a (the same!) wife and now two daughters under five too (one's only eight weeks old!). I'd like to spend some time with, so I'm back in the same boat as the beginning of Reiver Games. Thankfully Zombology only takes 45 minutes to make, so I'm looking at 113-150 hours of construction in the first year, assuming I can sell them all within a year, so that burden is lower at least. I'm hoping I can get this done in one or two evenings a week after the daughters have gone to bed.

Professional

Skills-wise I've learnt a lot in the last eleven years, not least having five years of board game publisher experience that I didn't have last time round. I also now manage a decent sized budget at work now, so I'm a lot more finance-savvy than I was the first time around.

I've also got a lot of contacts in the board game business and enough people know me that I can say 'I'm getting back into self-publishing' on BGG and get a few pre-orders purely based on my previous reputation!

Market

This is where things get interesting. I founded Reiver Games three years before Perry Chen, Yancy Strickler and Charles Adler founded Kickstarter. Since then the number of board game publishers has exploded, especially people self-publishing their own games on Kickstarter. Back in 2006 I was pretty unusual as a hobby self-publisher, now everyone's doing it. Furthermore, everyone else is funding games on Kickstarter without risking their own money, and making games that are professionally manufactured and have professional art. Is there still a market for hand-made limited edition runs of games? Especially those with, what I'll charitably call, amateur art? I'm betting a chunk of my savings on the hope that I can find 150-200 people who would pay £10 for a simple-looking hand-made game. Only time will tell whether it's a dumb wager to make...

It's All Go!

Another busy week. This time it's been Codename: Vacuum, Zombology and crazy ideas.

I didn't have any travel this week, so I managed to get a lunchtime playtest in with Ian on the new version of Vacuum. I'd made a bunch of changes since the fairly broken play at Games Night a couple of weeks ago, and we tried them out over lunch. I was pretty sure we could get a 2-player game done in under an hour, so I did a quick canvas and Ian signed up. He'd not played it before, so we had a 20 minute setup and rules explanation followed by a 58 minute game. Considering that was Ian's first play I was pretty happy with it coming in under an hour. He picked it up pretty well and ended up beating me 30-18 (time to change the rules!). The improvements I'd made last week fixed most of the problems, though there were a few graphic design/wording issues that I spotted during play. I'm happy to play that version again without changing it though, so a big step up on last time.

Games Night was pretty epic, with the first visitation of Mal so far this year and an amazing six different games played. It was a great night, and we finished up with a Zombology (which we'd not played for a while) and I was telling them about the recent pre-orders I'd taken and how I was considering another print run - at which point I took another pre-order.

I'm really torn about it. I think Zombology is the best game I've designed, and with its silly theme (mad 'scientist' hippies trying to cure the Zombie Apocalypse), wide range of players (3-8) and short play time (10 minutes) it's also my most accessible game. I'd love to see it get a wider audience and the pre-order rate for a second edition (despite the fact I'm not yet making one) has been pretty high the few times I've introduced it to people recently.

I could try pimping it to publishers, but it turns out that I really enjoy the graphic design and hand-crafting of games, so I'd rather self-publish again.

The big stumbling block is time. I travel quite a lot for work, have a young family and I'm two months away from becoming a dad for the second time. I know from last time what a wreck that leaves you, and how little free time you have when you've a new baby and are so hideously sleep deprived that 7:30pm sounds like a reasonable bed time.

What to do?

2015 The Year In Review

For the third year in a row I set myself some goals at the beginning of the year in four categories: blogging, playing games, designing games and app development. They were meant to be a stretch, but achievable so here's how I got on.

Blogging
I set myself three blogging goals this year: 10% growth in page views, blog every Monday and do something for NaGa DeMon. All modest and achievable, or so I thought. Blog page views have been climbing steadily since I started blogging again back in 2012, but for some reason around April they suddenly dived. Whether Blogger have started blocking spam bots or I've suddenly become far more boring than I already was (which would be a real stretch!), the readership tanked and never recovered. I was aiming for 45.5K page views and I only managed 36K, which was 15% down on last year. Epic fail. I did manage to blog every Monday (as far as I recall) and I did something for NaGa DeMon (publishing the handmade run of Zombology) so mixed success on the blogging front.

My most popular posts were:

1. Why Aren't I KickStarting
2. After The Drought, The Deluge
3. New Games Company Checklist

Gaming
My gaming goals were to play at least 365 games and to have played every game in my collection at least ten times (with exceptions). At this point, with a few days to go I've racked up 413 plays with the following over ten plays this year:

• 58 plays: Unpublished prototype (mostly Zombology)
• 27 plays: Ra (I think all on the iPad)
• 22 plays: King of Tokyo (one of the games I had to play ten times - nailed that one!)
• 20 plays: Carcassonne (all but one play on the iPad)
• 20 plays: Pandemic (iPad)
• 17 plays: Hey! That's My Fish (iPad)
• 15 plays: Lords of Waterdeep (iPad)
• 12 plays: Galaxy Trucker (ten plays list again and all on the iPad)
• 12 plays: Stone Age (mostly, but not all, iPad)
• 11 plays: No Thanks! (A Games Night filler favourite)
• 10 plays: Coup (Games Night favourite)
• 10 plays: Martian Dice (some in the flesh, some on the app I wrote for my phone)

The other goal was to have played every game I own at least ten times by the end of the year. Not necessarily during this year, if I've played it at least ten times in the past I didn't have to play it this year at all. I started the year with seventy-something plays required to hit that goal, and I didn't quite make it (there are four games at nine and two at eight plays left at this point and that's almost certainly how it's going to end). Close. But no cigar.

I've found the ten plays goal useful for honing my collection (I gave away 11 Nimmt!, 20th Century, Divinare, Euphoria, El Grande and Thurn und Taxis) but to be honest I've also found it to be a bind, it drove the games selection at almost every Games Night I had and sucked the fun out of things a bit. I mustn't get myself into a similar mess next year.

Another notable thing this year was the start of what I hope will be a large part of my life from now on. I've been a gamer since I was little. I've been a dad for three and a half years. But this year, I became a Gamer Dad. The Daughter has a few (very simple) games made by Orchard Toys: Where's My Cupcake?, The Lunch Box Game, A Game of Ladybirds and, since Christmas, Monster Dominos. She's learnt to take turns, roll dice, draw tiles and match symbols. She's also learnt to win and is in the process of learning to lose gracefully (that one might take a bit longer!). Where's My Cupcake?, a particular favourite, almost got a listing above with nine plays this year. As yet none of these games require any skill, it's just taking turns and following the rules. I don't want to rush her into proper gaming, I want it to be something that she wants to do for fun, rather than something I push onto her because I want to do it. We'll see how next year develops and what makes it into the list of ten least ten plays at the end of next year.

Designing Games
Only one goal here, self publish a game again this year with my own art. Well it was a roller coaster, but I just about pulled this one off. It started out with the goal of publishing a 50 or 100 copy run of either Zombology or Dragon Dance. Then that turned into making a 150 copy run of Zombology at £9 each. I took 20 pre-orders and started getting ready for that, setting up a bank account and everything and then disaster: I got promoted at work. Ok, that's not really a disaster, but it put paid to any notion I had of becoming a hobby games publisher again. At the last minute I decided to just make the twenty copies for the pre-orderers for NaGa DeMon at cost which I hoped I could get around the £9 I had initially advertised. Do you see what I did there? Folding two goals into one? Cheeky, but I make the rules so, I figure, acceptable. It turned out I needed to make thirty to hit the £9 cost so I wouldn't lose any money on it (but not make any either). During November I only finished fourteen of them (so I failed NaGa DeMon!) but the others just need the cards doing and I've shipped six of them, so that counts as a success as far as my goal for the year goes.

App Development
I'm still slowly learning German using the excellent Duolingo, but there's some stuff I'd like it to do that it doesn't, most notably, show verb conjugations and adjective declensions in a table and present similar words together. I'd started writing an app for that on my phone, and my goal was to finish and publish that this year. I've made some progress on that (it's now useable and I do use it on my phone) but it's not yet ready for public consumption, not even as an early beta/alpha, so another failure I'm afraid. I want to go back to working on that next year.

All in all it's been another good year, hard work and I didn't achieve everything I set out to at the beginning, but still good fun! Here's hoping for another good year next year.

In Flux and In Corporeal Form

Finally, after a few weeks of fannying on, I've finally printed out and constructed the new version of Zombology incorporating changes suggested during my trip to St. Louis at the beginning of June. I had the evening to myself last night as The Wife was out with friends, so after getting The Daughter to sleep I printed it out and made it all up. Excellent! Took long enough. I've been wanting to try this version out before sending it out for playtesting, but I have to miss this week's Newcastle Playtest because of travelling for work again, and I've not managed to fit a playtest in at work for a while either, so screw it, it's going out untested! It could be awful! It could be genius! Only one way to find out.

I've contacted a few friends who have done playtesting for me before to see if they'll try it out and give me some feedback, but what I really need is blind playtesters who aren't friends of mine and are willing to try it a few times and give me some honest, critical feedback. Fancy helping out? Let me know in the comments.

That's the 'Corporeal' part of this week's title. The 'In Flux' part refers to the fact that I'm still deciding what I want to do about Zombology. I've got three options as I see it:

1. Give up on publishing myself and either make it freely available (print and play) or try to get a publisher to pick it up.
2. Publish it in a time-light fashion, e.g. print on demand through a company like The Game Crafter or Drive Thru Cards.
3. Or the original plan of a small, hand-made print run that I'll sell through my own website.

If you'd asked me two weeks ago, I was utterly convinced that option 3 was the way I wanted to go, now I'm in the middle of a crisis of indecision. I'll give myself a couple of weeks to discuss it with The Wife and think things through, but then I'm going to have to make a decision and start acting on it.

Still, at least with the finished prototype I've actually made some concrete progress this week.

The Economics of a Small Print Run

This week I've been making some real progress on my second incarnation as a hobby publisher of small print run games. I've booked an appointment at the bank to set up a business account and I've been getting quotes for printing Zombology too.

When doing a small print run, just as with a large print run, there are three variables you need to balance against each other: total cost, cost per game and quality.

The three are tightly linked: better quality increases both total cost and cost per game; a bigger print run increases total cost but decreases cost per game due to economies of scale; reducing cost per game lets you increase quality or decrease total cost.

As a hobby publisher who has publicly eschewed KickStarter, all three of these are very important:

• Total cost: this plus some money for the overheads is my stake in the gamble of running a company. It's coming out of our family's savings, so I don't want this to be too high or I'd be being very irresponsible. First time round there was just The Wife and I in full time employment, and we had some money from an unexpected windfall to invest, but it's different once you've got a kid - priorities change. So low total cost is important to me.
• Cost per game: in addition to the manufacturing cost I need to pay for: a website, advertising, PayPal fees, convention attendance and many other things. I've previously stated that I want to keep cost per game around 50% of retail so that the sales will cover the other things and hopefully make a small profit. I'm not going to take a salary (again!) but I want the company to at least pay for itself, and if I make a profit I'll have more money to invest in potential future games. Keeping the game price low is also important for boosting sales, especially in other countries. I'm aiming to make the game retail at around £10, which is in the same ballpark as 6 Nimmt! and other similar games in the UK. But that's $15.50 at today's exchange rate in America or 13,80€ in Europe both or which are quite high for that type of game, plus there's shipping on top to make it more expensive still for people outside the UK. Clearly with a small print run I'll be selling directly - there's not enough margin for shops or distributors to take a cut.
• Quality: I'm aiming for a similar quality to Border Reivers, the first game I self-published back in my Reiver Games days. The cards were on decent card stock and professionally laminated to protect the ink, the box was a tray and lid one with wrap-around artwork, that looked similar to, if not quite up to spec of, a professional game. With a small print run you don't have enough copies to amortise the cost of an artist, so I'm doing it myself (an obvious weakness in the quality). The cards will be cut out by hand but at least the corners will be rounded, so again, it looks of reasonable quality.

Bearing all this in mind I've priced up the cost of box card and printing for 50, 100, 150, 200 and 300 copies. I made 100 copies of Border Reivers by hand and then 300 copies of the first print run of It's Alive! again by hand, so these numbers aren't ridiculous. I've used the same print company as for those two games so I know what quality to expect. I reckon I could sell 50 copies pretty effortlessly - I've already got 8 pre-orders from people who didn't know which game I was going to make or what price I was going to charge! When my friends and family find out I'm sure I can get a few more sales and then a minimal amount of advertising on BGG would wrap up the rest. 100 is a bit more of a stretch, I managed it with Border Reivers, but I had more time to devote to it back then and went to several conventions to raise awareness, which will be a trickier now that I've got a kid. 150 or 200 would be hard work this time round I think and 300 really hard. I managed it with It's Alive! But at that point I'd been doing it for a year or so and had a decent following and a mailing list and everything, none of which I have any more. So it's all down to the numbers:

50: £7.84 per copy, total price £392, profit (if I sell them all at full price and before expenses mentioned above) £108
100: £5.28 per copy, total price £528, profit £472
150: £4.44 per copy, total price £666, profit £834
200: £4.11 per copy, total price £822, profit £1,178
300: £3.66 per copy, total price £1,097, profit £1,903

50 copies is not going to break even once the overheads are accounted for, they'll almost certainly come to more than £108. 100 copies is much better, but at 150 it gets interesting. I'm willing to invest/risk £1,000 in this venture (plus a bot-load of my time for free!), and 150 copies falls well within that. So that's a tick (check for Americans). £4.44 is less than half of £10, but also actually less than half of £9. £9 retail would reduce the cost for Americans by $1.55 and Europeans by 1,38€. It would also shave £150 off my potential profits, but £684 is still plenty for the overheads I'm expecting and should leave some money behind so that I've got more money to invest in another game if I want to in the future. Tick!

We have a plan! Now I've just got to get the artwork done and get all the company stuff set up...

P.S. Anyone want a lovingly hand-crafted, limited edition copy of Zombology for only £9 plus postage and packing? ;-)

Feeling Like A Publisher Again

In 2004 I was a hobby games designer. In 2006 I became a hobby board game publisher. In 2008 I became a (bad!) professional board game publisher. In 2011 I was a failed entrepreneur and really didn't feel like designing games any more.

When I had the idea of Codename: Vacuum at the end of 2012 I started my second incarnation as  a hobby games designer. And that's where I stayed for nearly three years.

My Reiver Games failure hung over me, so I've been in no rush to get back into publishing. I know just how much hard work goes into hobby publishing (hand-made Border Reivers-stylee) and how many copies you've got to make and sell to be successful in the professional arena. Also, my confidence took a bad knock: games I thought would sell really well didn't sell and the game I had designed personally was the weakest of the games I published as Reiver Games.

So for the last two and a half years I've been a hobby games designer and nothing more. That's been fun, and I've now got a great support network in the form of Newcastle Playtest. All this time my games have been slowly developing. I've been keen not to rush into publishing again with a sub-par game.

This year's goal of hobby publishing a game is finally starting to take shape and once again I'm starting to feel like a publisher (albeit a hobby self-publisher). Rather than designing the games or doing the basic graphic design required for a prototype, I'm starting to think in terms of production.

This weekend I've made a new prototype of Zombology, trialing a net for a wrap around box label (currently just a white sheet - no art at all).

I'm also working out how best to arrange things on sheets of paper to minimise printing costs. I've got a quality bar that I want to stick to (as good as Border Reivers), and depending on cost I'm going to have to choose a print-run size based on where the economies of scale make it affordable.

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again!

Crowdsourcing / Market Research

It's been a good week. I've had my first Games Night for four weeks (and sadly last Games Night for another three due to work travel) and a few more good playtests of Zombology.

I'm now ready to call my first game that I hope to self-publish in my second innings as a board games publisher: It's Zombology.

Last week I made some changes to the scoring of Zombology, making it a true semi-co-op game along with tweaking the way the gurus work to make them more useful/interesting.

We played four games back-to-back at Newcastle Playtest. These guys have played it a lot. Over the last year and a half we've played it at the beginning of almost every session, often a couple of times. It's been through a lot of changes and incarnations, and people are still willing to play it, which is nice. This time the feedback seemed much more positive, Paul who usually doesn't enjoy it said he'd enjoyed it and finally 'got' this version and later Alex described it on twitter as "straight up 'published game'-level fun".

We played a few more games on Thursday, a couple of three player games at lunchtime, and then a couple of seven player games at the beginning of Games Night. DJ and Mal (both of whom have tens of plays of various versions under their respective belts) had good things to say: DJ said it was the best game of it he'd played and Mal (who had said the last version felt further from ready than the one before it) said: 'Don't make too many more changes, it's ready to publish'. Gav's feedback email was entirely positive too.

So I'm ready to start the process of publishing a game again. At least, almost ready. I've got my checklist to work through and there are a few other things I need to sort out, including getting a few playtest copies out to other groups. Before I do that, I need some help - which is where the title of this post comes in.

I need an exposition. A paragraph or so that explains the game and makes it sound so fantastic that your only option on reading it is to wire me vast sums of money to sate your powerful need to play this game immediately. Currently I have:

Zombology
Unlikely cures vs. the zombie apocalypse
Zombitis is sweeping the globe: it's already killed millions and billions more are at risk. There's no government stockpiled vaccines and pharmaceutical companies have nothing. You and your peers are mankind's last hope. Just a couple of months ago they were ridiculing your 'advanced projects agency' for its crackpot ideas, now they're praying that it might just work. You've got eight weeks to try to cure the zombie plague, will you be heralded as one of the heroes of mankind, or will you back the wrong method and remain a crackpot to the end of your days? Work together to achieve a cure or try to trip up cures that you don't support. Time's running out... 

Which, let's be honest is weak. This is not my strong suit. So I'm appealing to you my loyal readership for some advice/improvements.

Also, I need six things that are unlikely to cure Zombitis. Currently I have:

• Healing crystals
• Vegan diet
• Psychotherapy
• Homeopathy
• Reiki
• Acupuncture

I like the first four, not so sure about Reiki and Acupuncture. I'm also considering Faith healing, Voodoo dolls and Electroshock therapy. What are your thoughts? Got any better ideas?

Self-Published Run: Specification

It's been a great week on the blog here, thanks largely to W. Eric Martin of BoardGameGeek covering last week's blog post - thanks Eric!

I've not yet decided whether it'll be Zombology or Dragon Dance that I try to self publish this year (currently leaning towards Zombology) but either way there a bunch of things that are the same for both.

Printing

I'll get all the artwork printed professionally (but digitally, not litho - for a small print run the litho set up costs are prohibitive). The box and cards will also be laminated, which makes them more durable and the print more hard-wearing. Professional laminating is nothing like the lamination pouches that you can get done in most offices, it's almost unnoticeable. The cards and box for Border Reivers were both laminated in this way and I was very happy with the results. For Border Reivers and the first edition of It's Alive!, I used a digital print company who have since changed their name to StressFreePrint. They'll be my first port of call as I was very happy with their service and products in the past.

Box

I'm going to hand-make tray and lid boxes and then wrap them in printed labels. The boxes will be 123 x 95 x 20mm, the same as most two deck card games (think 6 Nimmt! or No Thanks!). This means they will be small and pretty cheap to post.

Cards

The cards will be laminated as described above and have their corners rounded, very similarly to Border Reivers.

Other Bits

Zombology is 108 cards and a rule book. Dragon Dance has some other components: eight dice and a number of wooden bits. The wooden bits would be published game quality (I'd get them from SpielMaterial.de again) but generic, I'm thinking yellow wooden discs for the dragon's life tokens and red wooden hearts for the knight's. I've got my eye on some nice Chessex dice, but I'm not sure my budget would stretch to it.

Price Point

I'm aiming for £10 per copy as the retail price for both games which is about what you'd pay in a store (not online) for that sort of game in the UK. That's $15 or 13€, both of which are a bit expensive for what it is, but I'm expected most of my orders to come from the UK (friends and family will probably feature heavily!). Seeing as it's a very short run I'm not looking to get it into shops or distributors, so all of that (minus PayPal fees for online sales) will be going to me. I want to charge twice what it costs for the components so I've some money left over for website, playtest materials and potentially I'll can make a profit toward making a bigger game next year if it goes well. So my budget is £5 per copy for the materials and the printing. I've no idea yet whether this is feasible, but that's my goal at this point. So that's £250 for 50 copies or £500 for 100 copies.

In other news, I've not much to report this week. The Daughter's been sleeping badly again, so early nights all round and The Father-in-Law made an impromptu visit on his way back from Scotland for the last half of the week. Next week I'm away for a couple of nights for work, so I'm hoping to start making some progress on finishing of the NaGa DeMon winners' copies of Dragon Dance. And, despite the fact that I've not settled on a choice of game, I've already got 4 pre-orders!

Why Aren't I KickStarting?

Since announcing my intention to get back into board publishing as part of my 2015 goals post last week, the question I've been asked the most is:

So, why aren't you KickStarting the (yet to be decided!) game?

It was the first question the guys at Newcastle Playtest asked and the first question that came up on twitter too. I've spoken at length before about my concerns with KickStarter for board game publishing, but to be honest that wasn't really the deciding factor.

When I started Reiver Games back in 2006 my family consisted of myself and The Wife. The Wife was in the middle of a PhD and fairly busy so I had some time to kill in the evenings. I was quite happy to commit to 300 hours of Border Reivers assembly plus the numerous hours I spent posting copies and on promotion and half-arsed marketing.

These days things have changed. I'm now a dad and I want to spend my free time with The Wife and The Daughter doing family things and enjoying these fleeting moments of The Daughter's childhood. When The Daughter goes to bed, I want to spend time with The Wife. My priorities are totally different. So I can't commit to a massive expenditure of time. Which makes making the games by hand sound even more ridiculous, but it's not. There's method to my madness (I hope).

With a small run there's less monetary investment and much less worrying about stock clearance. I don't need to market to shops and distributors (which took a lot of effort) to get widespread availability and I don't have to worry about ongoing warehousing costs. Plus, I've done this all before, so I've got experience and knowledge, plus (I hope) some potential customers from my Reiver Games days.

But probably the biggest benefit is a known budget in terms of both time and cost. With KickStarter, people expect you to offer stretch goals and different pledge levels. Until the KickStarter is complete and you know exactly how much money you've raised and how many people you've got at each level you've no idea what you're letting yourself in for. I've got a full time job and a family, the last thing I need on top of that is an unspecified amount of work I have to do in my spare time that I'm contractually (and morally) obliged to.

With a run of 50 or a hundred copies, where each copy takes about an hour to construct, I know exactly what I'm letting myself in for. Plus, I don't expect to have sold out of the print run before I start it, so initially there will be less that than amount of work and then just a trickling amount from then on as the last of the stock slowly sells through.

This is something I can prepare for and plan for, and something I can do in my evenings after The Daughter goes to sleep. It's achievable around my job and my family, both of which I consider higher priorities.

This time round I'm not in it to make a fortune, or to try and go full time, I'm just in it to make games and hopefully bring some gaming joy to some of my customers.

Oh, and I've already got two pre-orders, despite the fact that they don't know which game it is yet!

In other news, this week I managed to make it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time since October! It was a great evening and I managed to get in three games, two of which contribute towards my goal of having played every game I own at least ten times. Both the games I played on Games Night helped as well! Off to a good start...

Once Bitten

I'm on holiday this week, so here's a blog post I wrote last week and tried to post automatically, while didn't work, hence a day late. It'll take me a few days to respond to comments, since there is apparently no mobile signal or broadband where we're staying...

As many of you know, several years ago I started Reiver Games to publish my first board game: Border Reivers. Over five years I published four games (one of them twice!), to limited success before shutting the company down in 2011 and writing off a loss of several thousand pounds.

Now I'm designing games again and, for the first time, thinking about submitting games to other publishers. I'm also hanging out with other designers more too. Most of the designers I knew in my Reiver Games days were self publishers and most of them had been doing it for years. Noticeably, they are still going now and I'm not, so they were clearly better at it than me. In contrast, most of the designers I hang out with nowadays are not intending to self-publish but want to get their games published by existing publishing companies.

Getting my current crop of designs published by an existing publisher is one of the routes I'm currently considering, yet it's a route I've got no experience of whatsoever. I've never pitched a game at a publisher, so I don't really know how to do it. I know what I wanted back in the day, but that may not be representative of what a more successful company wants.

If I'm going to self-publish, or print on demand publish, then the game needs to be absolutely awesome as I'm the final gate before publishing. There's no-one else to block publishing if they don't think the game is good enough or to do any development to get it up to scratch. I look back on the games I published and although I was happy with each one at the time, knowing what I do now about game sales I don't think they're good enough. They needed more development or a gate saying 'not ready yet' to prevent me wasting money publishing games that wouldn't recoup the costs I invested in their publishing.

If I'm considering another publishing company do I need to polish it so much, or will they want to do some development and polishing themselves? I just don't know. Will they accept a game with potential that still needs some work, or do they want a completely finished product? I've still got some games industry contacts from my Reiver Games days. Perhaps I should do some investigating...