Rejected

I was just rejected and I'm not bummed like I usually get. The reason? I submitted in Abstract summary form. It was rather painless actually. To me, rejection is not the problem, it's the waiting game and the work which might be good work for a good game, but just wasn't what they were looking for. We cut out that big, inefficient step and simply said "Hi, I'm Eugene, this is my game? What do you think? and they said, "Hey Eugene, thanks but we're not interested for reason X, good luck. And we're done. I can move on and knock on the door of the next publisher, possibly send the first one a different game...etc.

I was thinking that sending in a full prototype to a company is a huge investment and not a very good one. I wish more companies would accept abstracts instead. The way I see it is that an astract really sums up the game and lets them screen the ones that they are not interested in faster than reading a rulebook, playing the game,etc. Plus it's easier on the Designers and design process as you don't need to make prototypes for games that will never be tested or played anyhow. This eased pressure on both sides has further advantages. IF as a publisher, I only accept abstracts, I can really pore over many in a given review period and basically cherry pick from hundreds. Imagine the time it would take to read 100 summary/abstracts as compared to look over 100 prototypes. Plus I can lead the abstract process in any manner I like. I can ask loaded questions, and basically limit my scope of entries based on the responses. For the designer the process allows for you to spend less time replicating prototypes and more time creating and selling your game ideas.

Let's be honest, the odds of a game getting published are nowhere near even 1 in a 100. I would even say that more than half are probably poorly designed, quasi-plagiarized, not the type of game the company is looking to invest in, etc. So why spend an 8 hour day reviewing 10-20 prototypes at most when you probably wouldn't even like or be able to work with 1 of them. In the same time you could review 100 or more game summaries, cherry pick your favorite 5-10 and send emails requesting proper submissions with prototypes. It makes so much sense for the publishers and we all know it would work for us. If you all agree, I am thinking we should send this to all game companies we can get off our contact list as an open letter from the design community. Thoughts?