Educational game - opinion on trying to sell to schools? Gov

I am not aware of any publisher that will sign a non-disclosure agreement, and there is one very, very good reason for it: publishers receive hundreds and thousands of submissions each year, and develop games in-house as well. If a publisher like Out of the Box was working on a game that was very similar to yours, or had recently reviewed a submission that was very similar to yours, and decided to go ahead with publishing it, then read your submission under non-disclosure, they'd have a very hard time proving the game they were about to release wasn't invented by you. You'd have a non-disclosure in hand, signed by them, and they'd be stuck not being able to discuss it, publish it, or anything, for concern that you'd sue them, even though they hadn't stolen your idea at all. It's very, very risky for them to sign one, and they receive plenty of submissions all the time without one, so there's simply no percentage in it for them.

As far as Out of the Box the company, I have only heard extremely positive things. They have a great reputation in the industry, that I've ever heard.

On the educational sales channel in general: in one company of mine we attempted to work the educational channel and found one major barrier: they have almost no discretionary money to spend. Money is very, very tight, and in general if what you're proposing isn't taking the place of something they're doing now, you'll have a hard time making a sale.

That said, there are certainly distributors who service the education market, from direct sales to schools to education stores to teachers' conferences. I have no idea if Out of the Box is in this market, but if the education market is who you're looking to target, I certainly suggest that you ask them about it, and look into education supply distributors in general.

-- Matthew

We approached on the state and district level. Attempts to approach schools were pushed back to the district every time (though of course my sample size is maybe 10-12 schools before we just stopped trying that route, and we may have just hit the "wrong" ones).

I read in a couple of places -- though I'm sorry that I can't find references right now, it's been about 5 or 6 years now -- that things like games are often purchased by teachers themselves, and not out of some kind of budget but rather out of their own pockets, and this despite the fact that they're generally not well paid. They commonly have no budget at all, and often even have to buy regular classroom supplies out of their own pockets.

That doesn't mean, of course, that school systems have no money, necessarily. And I'm sure that's not true of all teachers.

-- Matthew

Stores like Lakeshore Learning, www.lakeshorelearning.com, target educators. This is the type of store that teachers will frequent to purchase extra little things for their classrooms, such as gomes that don't get supplied by the school. Sometimes, as Matthew suggested, they'll pay out of their own pocket. Other times they have a budget. And in some cases, they'll use gift cards provided by parents to purchase stuff for the classroom. In any of these cases, what gets purchased is typically at the discretion of the individual teacher.

Chip

Re: Out of the Box and educational games, their website lists them as attending the NSSEA Ed Expo 2005:

http://www.nssea.org/events/edexpo/EdExpo.cfm

So they might be willing to work with games that have an educational bent; a few of their reviews of Apples to Apples are from speech therapists and teachers.

Good luck with your game, however you decide to pursue the process.