A marketplace website for "in house" publishers!!! :-o
What it is:
A website that consumers can mail order games that were designed and produced independantly by people like us (folks that post on this forum).
In exchange for a small percentage like 10%, much less than regular licensing and an agreement that each product carries the name of the webpage as its parent company, at home producers could devote a single page of pictures and descriptions to a shopping cart style website.
What I
Actually, this is more of a general question, but it sort of relates to this. To become an in-house self-publisher, at what point do you incorporate into a company and/or start dealing with taxable income? I guess what you are describing is more like a craft-fair kind of thing (however, I don
Actually, you
Back to Krakits original idea in the thread ... I think that sounds like a very good idea. And as a soon-to-be developer of such games, I
I realize it
How in the heck did I miss this thread earlier? At any rate, We have discussed this very issue before in several chats. Everyone seemed to have different ideas about how to go about this, what should be offered, etc.
To recap, here is my thoughts on it:
1) Regarding designers who are
First, I think this is a good idea.
I did want to point out an additional option for those selling very small quantities of self published games, the Fairplay Games Independent Designers Program. They charge 20% and you need to send them 5 copies, but it
Yes, I like the idea as well. As with any idea, not all people are going to agree on its viability. I think you
Krakit,
I am willing to give you a chunk of the BGDF (say 10 - 20 megabytes to start?) to help get you started until you have the resources to do this on your own. I can provide you with an FTP account and then you can start working on it. With this method, you can see how viable it is without spending any of your own money. Then when your site gets going good, you can decide whether you want to move it to a more dedicated server. As far as domain name, I can provide you with a free subdomain (say games.bgdf.com or something similar) to start with, if you want an actual domain you
I think the name "Games On Demand" (like gamesondemand.bgdf.com) -- or at least its use as a subtitle -- is key (btw, the gamesondemand.com domain name is parked by some jerk consolidator, though things like games-on-demand.com are not). Just as mario suggested, printing on demand already exists as a basic business model, and while this has key differences at this time (each designer does their own printing rather than it being done centrally). I can see the gaming community at large latching onto the idea of games on demand, at least at some low level that could grow.
Gameplay quality is certainly of some concern (as mario noted, a wide variety of duds will certainly wipe out the service in a short time), but so too is physical quality of the games -- a bunch of poorly-photocopied games, for instance, could work similarly. I think it would be key to ensure that it
First, Krakit, kudos on a great idea. I think this is a great intermediate step that is much more accessible to most of us than the "self-publishing" route but doesn
I think your site is an excellent idea.
The hard part is getting people to become aware of your site. In my site
Krakit,
Check your private message from me concerning moving ahead with this.
-Michael
I think the key factor to getting your game purchased on this model would be (correct me if I'm wrong) having your game played once by someone who's opinion is respectable. I'm not sure how the judging for the design competition is coming, but I think you'd have some great initial offerings there, as they are being reveiwed even now. From that group you may have the first couple'a games that could be available.
The thing is, I love this community, I love boardgames, but like most, I don't have the time or $ to invest in a game that's bad, whether it's part of this community or not. I think it would probably take most folks about two bad experiences before they completely gave up (where bad experience = being the first time buyer of a game that isn't good). And asking for money back from a peer because you think his game sucks... ouch. What can I say.
As such, the BGDF design competitions (hopefully there will be more) seem like an EXCELLENT way of picking some indie winners to put up on a site. 'Specially if you're buying a proto model, which, even with pictures, won't look all that appealing to the prospective buyer. Now, if I heard tons of people saying "this game is so great, must play, etc.," I'd probably jump on the chance, even if it was print and play (!).
So I guess that definitely puts me in the quality over quanitity camp. I don't know if you'll be able to make that decision without playing the game.
Just a quick thought on determining if someone has grown "too big" to sell on the site. Have a max limit of games per person; say about 5. If they have more, they can remove one from the site and replace it with their latest and greatest. This would keep it more organized, smaller and anyone with more products than that should most certainly (and more than likely want to) move it to their own site.
The major benefit to hosting it here would just be for the simple fact of consolidation. If it has to do with independent board game design, you can find it at bgdf.com! Also, people here are a bit more open about their thoughts. Here, we can all see what each other is doing and really spur the creative juices.
I think this would be a great idea.
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I think what you are proposing is not a bad idea, but sites like boardgameGeek already offer essentially this sevice for much less than you are proposing and they have an established (although rather niche) customer base.
One of the major obstacles to allowing small games producers to access the international market is the cost and delay involved in international shipping of individual copies of games. I think what would be more valuable would be some sort of cooperative arrangment whereby independnet games producers in major cities around the world would hold stock of each others games and ship them locally for each other (for a commission). The per unit cost of shipping 10 copies of a game is less than 1/2 the per unit cost of shipping a single copy. Local shipping is about 1/3.
With a modest commission on each game shipped you could get someone to ship it locally for not much more than international shipping. If you were locally shipping as many of other peoples games as everyone were shipping world wide of yours then the commisiions would balance out and you would be doing about the same amount of shipping. If yours were not selling then you would make the commisiion on shipping other peoples games - not as satisfying perhaps but at least it is income. If yours were selling but no-one else