Soapbox: About the Industry

Let's Team Up!

by Sandy Antunes
May 07,2004

Let's Team Up!

Okay, time to talk business, or 'so you want to start a game company?'. Well, actually, I already covered that.

In fact, at this point in my life I get the sublime pain of constantly being told, "yes, you're right, I should have listened to you." I can provide a list, a resume of sorts, of current and ex-companies whose owners will say, yes, I should have listened to Sandy's advice, but didn't.

Sadly, I can't point to any highly successful companies willing to say, yes, they listened to me. Perhaps I'm too cheap-- my current "price" for a gaming start-up consultation is 'buy me lunch'. Sometimes 'buy me a drink' suffices.

If I were to say, 'Pay me $500', well, at least I wouldn't have to worry about "I told you so", since most start-ups wouldn't bother and thus I'd be spared being ignored. And any start-up saavy enough to realize $500 is a mere pittance in the cost of starting up, is probably saavy enough to argue me back down to my 'buy me lunch' rate.

The focus of this column is on the alternative to doing a start-up-- teaming up with other new publishers instead. What a great idea! Even I've been prone to suggest it, though heavily bracketed with 'here is how it would have to work', the primary issue being 'you need a non-creative running things', which pretty much nixes most people's implementations.

I'm taking this pretty much verbatim from a post I wrote to an industry list. So this is a case of me giving advice (in response to a question) without charging my usual fee. I'm so cheap.

The usual version is "why doesn't Publisher A and Publisher Z team up, reducing their business efforts and doubling the stock list they present to a distributor?" The idea of pooling resources is excellent, and reducing the number of 'one-hit wonders' a distributor has to face increases the odds of their product actually being carried (if you're a distributor, do you want to do five phone calls t score 1 product from five different companies, or make one call to one company with 5 products?)

I've always lamented that people start up an entire company to publish one game. That's a wacked model. I've seen attempts at collectives, and this is why they fail:

1) I only should team up with similar companies, to better focus. But they're also my competition. So I won't.

2) I should only team up with different companies (i.e. if I do RPGs, they do minis), so we don't compete on the same turf. But then our needs are so different there's no advantage in teaming up.

3) I'd love to team up, but want right of refusal for any of _their_ products that I think might dilute or negatively affect the company as a whole. However, I require the creative freedom to produce my own stuff without oversight.

4) A collaborative would be great, because then I could focus on creating while one of the more business-minded people can handle the business end! Also called 'Who will bell the cat'.

The way Image comics handled collective work was: millionnaire supported creator-owned works and kept the ones that prospered. This meant a) a boss and b) projects could be killed by the boss. In a small-press collective, though, 'killed by the boss' breaks the collective and you end up with more small self-publishers.

Here is an alternative model, stolen from Stan Brown's group. Form a group like The Game Mechanics, produce stuff, then sell it to other publishers as a read-to-print package of known quality.

Problem with the studio approach is, most people don't like finding out other companies don't want to publish their stuff. Also, publishers are... finicky. Okay, flat-out control mad. When I reviewed the book "Beyond Role and Play" last month, I suggested to a publisher (who really wanted a book, and had been in correspondance with ones of its editors), that he simply get rights to POD it here.

As the forum threads show, he agreed but wanted rights to edit it before publishing 'to ensure it was high enough quality'. I'm like, wait... either it's great and you should publish it, or it isn't and you tell them.

The idea that the uber-publisher should hand-tweak every already-layed-out- and-ready-for-print book is death in small publishing. The cost in people-hours and labor to redo things is more than the small print run will return. The likely increase in quality is, forgive me, probably negligible-- if it's good enough to accept, it's good enough to either print or request edits.

Successful groups like TGM work if the people in it has enough of a 'name' to build credence, and if they work professionally enough to make it cost effective to work with them, and if they deal with professional companies that are able to make good business decisions. Lots of ifs.

The other model is folks like Gold Rush Games imprint and vanity publishing efforts, where you front the money and they handle the biz end. Better than forming your own company, but still...

So here is my free (and harsh) advice that no one, I expect, will follow. If you have a game you want to publish, don't form your own publishing company. Just shop your products out to other publishers.

If you can't convince another game publisher that your game is great, why do you think you can convince the buying public?

Until next month,
Sandy
sandy@rpg.net
freelance