I had a consultation with a guy in the industry – like, a paid one and everything – and based on we discussed I could probably swing getting the whole Fermi Resolution RPG up and running for about a grand. Do it through DriveThruRPG, sell it for $15B&W/$25 color. It’s mostly done, and the remaining steps aren’t insurmountable.
The problem is: I’ve already distributed a working copy of the game to my Kickstarter backers (I’d make sure they got clean PDFs of the finished version), so I don’t know if it would fund. I also don’t know how many I’d sell, although honestly having it on the vendor table would be useful in other ways. Anybody have any thoughts on the subject?
You may be right about the Fermi market being saturated for the momement, unless the conventions you are attending have heavy Indy RPG playerbase, and that would expand your market with them.
I’m not sure I’d take *another* project on my plate, but that’s just my own work flow. You do you.
Assume for the moment that you won’t get *overwhelmingly* funded. It’s either bare funding or nothing.
It boils down to three questions, then:
– What’s the cost of failure? How much effort is it going to take you, and what kind of material outlay? Will there be any reputational effects?
– What’s the upside of bare success? What does “just barely funded” win you?
– What’s the likelihood of the former as compared to the latter?
Number 3 here is murky and unclear, but if you can get a somewhat clear idea of what 1 and 2 are, you can get a decent idea of what the ratio on 3 would need to be to make it worthwhile.
My *guess* is that the answer is going to be “no, for the moment”, but you’ve got a lot more data on it than I do.
1). I’d have to scrounge up the cash to do it anyway, and that would interfere with my get-a-novel-published-a-year-somehow schedule.
2). I have another thing to sell at conventions, and it’ll help bring people in to the table.
3). That’s a really, really good question. Gaming projects do do well on Kickstarter, but most of my potential customers already have v.80.
1) why would you have to scrounge up the cash to do it anyway? Couldn’t you just run the kickstarter, and then if it doesn’t go through, just… not do it? I thought that was part of the *point* of kickstarter.
I feel like the novel-a-year thing has real value. I don’t feel like it’s worth risking that one at this point. For the moment.
I guess that my thought would be to let it marinate a while. Let the people who have it read through it and play it and get back to you with feedback. (Solicit said feedback. Run a few games yourself. Possibly a con game or two?) Let your money level get up to the point where you can do this thing *and* publish a book that same year. Fix all of the issues that came out of 0.8, so that you can release v1.0, where it’ll look better to the new folks and possibly draw backing some of your die-hards. You’ve gotten some value out of the current version. Let the whole thing mature a bit before you try to get more out of it.
There are intangibles in play, as well. It’s something that’s Not Finished, and I’d like it gone. It’s not overwhelming, otherwise I’d have spent the money already. 🙂