Self Publishers tell me what you think of the Game Crafters

Hi David ...

Not sure if you caught the post on my website about them from last spring: Matt's Take on TheGameCrafter

I think most of those things still apply as far as their product quality goes.

The best thing they have is their top-notch customer service. They actively work with people through their forum and chat ... and especially through e-mail. Whenever I've had something that I wasn't happy with, an e-mail to them has turned into an open-minded conversation that resulted in a satisfactory solution.

However, in order to sell a lot of copies, you really do need to have a way and a reason to drive people to their site. I think this could work well for a small publisher who builds up a niche following ... but it's not going to be the same as main-stream sales of games. I think gamers who are willing to take a chance on a POD-published game will be more loyal, but there won't be very many of them.

As an example: Jump Gate is one of the top sellers at TGC (but not the top) ... and I've already sold more 2nd Edition copies (full telescoping box, hand-assembled by me) of the game through FunAgain.com than I have the POD 1st edition through TGC.

I have some smaller games that I don't expect to land with a standard publisher that I think will work nicely in a POD format ... so, I'll be adding more games to their shop going forward.

-Matt

I have a couple reviews of my experience on my blog:

http://planktongames.blogspot.com/2010/03/thegamecraftercom.html

and

http://planktongames.blogspot.com/2010/04/tale-of-two-pod-publishers.html

Both posts are about a year old, but they are both still nearly completely accurate, both the technical stuff and my opinions.

At least on Drive Thru RPG, there is a lot of trafic, so when I send my game in sale on site wide sale, my game get some exposure, so it's indirect advertisement.

I did not try publish "Fallen Kingdoms" on the game crafters because I would have need to reformat all my components. For example, they ask to submit cards individually, while I make sheets of 9 cards per page. So I would have need to cut each card and make a seperate picture file.

Maybe for my next game, I could find some compromise that would make my components both compatible on Letter paper PDF and their format.

Another thing I realised is that since they do not mount anything, it should be impossible to make tokens.

You can print a sticker sheet on stickers that fit onto their 1" token chips. This works really well. You still have to rely on the customer doing some work peeling the stickers and applying them, but there are multiple colors of token chips, so there are lots of possibilities.

I have some pictures of those stickers applied to one of my games, Yoggity, which you can see attached to my blog post at Plankton Games Journal.

I think they print on pre-cut sheets. You definitely don't have to cut them - just peel and stick.

I used he Game Crafters to prototype a card game. They are well organized, to be sure, and treat your publishing respectfully. My first printing was GREAT. All cards were printed, with colors and image centering, dead-nuts on. The deck was indistinguishable from that of any board game I've purchased.

My second printing was off by quite a bit. I believe the card art did fall within the guaranteed specs, but it was nowhere near the quality of the first printing. What happened? I'm only speculating (because I didn't pursue getting a replacement) that printing equipment issues they had reported at their website hit my project.

Will I go back a third time? I'm ready to send my latest revised game for a new set. I trust that they will hit the high mark they set earlier. Their prices are fantastic for what you get- a deck of cards you can shuffle like any other, full color art as fancy as you want, and a process that makes it a breeze to use.

TheGameCrafter cards have the same feel as thick playing cards. They're not plastic coated, but they slide against each other pretty well (a bit stickier than playing cards, about the same as typical game cards). The ink can flake off a bit under heavy use, but the ink hasn't faded at all that I've noticed; some cards get small white patches, often near the edges, where the ink seems to be flaking off, but this isn't a big deal, and I've only seen it on game decks that I've played multiple active games with. They still look good and play well even with these small spots.