Self-Publishing: Is it really that bad?

Wow, what a can of worms!

I'm a couple months late to the table for this question but certainly feel capable of addressing it.

The short answer to the question is only self publish if you REALLY enjoy the business aspects of running a business and if you have the time, energy, and capability of playing salesman, accountant, graphic designer, project manager, and marketing manager, and if you have enough money in the bank to fund at least three games.

Now for the longer answer, for which I must provide some background. I started as a self-publisher but my business model migrated quickly away from that area for several reasons. First is time. Now that I am publishing I don't have time to really develop my own games. My effort is spent mainly on marketing and production and this leaves little time for much else. The second reason is that it is easier to be objective about someone else's game than your own, and thus to make better business decisions.
Good business sense is required to be a successful publisher. I've seen plenty of self-publishers who have decent (or better!) games that do nothing in the market because they aren't good business-people. I myself am still learning, but I enjoy the role and think I'm doing a decent job of picking up stuff along the way.

Some of the reasons why self-publishing might not be the way to go - it takes time and repeat exposure for both the public and the trade to notice your company. Your first game is much more likely to be noticed if published by a pre-existing company with channels in placed than by a startup. Especially since the number of startups has been high the last few years. Trust me, I've been there. I was lucky - my company is represented by a fulfillment house, so I have plenty of distributors. But I still don't have nearly as much market penetration as I think I could have, because I've only had two games out thus far. Each one gets more exposure, and I have high hopes going forward, but it takes a lot of time and more importantly, a lot of money, to build the business.

Look at Uberplay. They're not self-publishing, but they are a brand new publishing company. Just about everyone has heard of them. Why? Because they've got lots of money for advertising, and to produce a lot of good games in a short amount of time and thus be noticed. Most of us don't have a fraction of what their budget must be, and so we must build the business more slowly. We all hope that our game will be the next great hit, but the reality is it is unlikely, especially with the first game where we make all our newbie publisher mistakes. (Trust me... you WILL make newbie publisher mistakes no matter how many of them we warn you about. Again, I've been there :? ) You have to have the funds to keep going if the first game doesn't make a lot of money.

Which segues into game economics 101. It's REALLY unfavorable toward the new publisher and is a bit of a catch 22. The fewer copies you print, the more expensive each is, but the more likely you will be able to sell them. But if they are too expensive, it becomes impossible for you to break even. Some of my biggest headaches as a publisher come from figuring out how and where I can print a game in a way that I will at least break even. This gets easier with additional games, because each game sells more copies because of that increasing market awareness factor, but as of yet still hasn't become a non-issue for me or many other small press companies.

If there is enough interest, I'll dig up an article I wrote for the GPA newsletter about Game Economics 101 and post it here to give y'all an idea of how the numbers work.

I think Anye probably covered a lot of what I would have to say on this topic. I would also agree with TJ that before you even consider publishing or submitting you need to playtest as widely as possible. Playtesting is a whole topic on it's own, and I think there has been some discussion here and in other formums on that. Suffice it to say, you probably have not playtested enough.

Having self published my own first game and made a lot of the newbie mistakes I can add my support to the warning that it is a difficult road. However, if you have some money you can afford to lose, and a lot of spare time, then it does have some advantages.

The first advantage is that if you have even a modicum of business sense and some understanding of the games industry then you should see a monetary return earlier than you would see from sending the game off to publishers. If you have a working game then you can probably get it in boxes and ready to sell it in 6 months to a year. If you are going to break even at all then you will probably do that within the first 12 months of sales. So that is about 12-18 months from a working game to a profit. If you submit the game to a publisher, they will take anywhere from 1 month to one year to either accept or reject the game. Of course it is more likely to be rejected than accepted, but even if it is accepted by the first publisher you send it to, it will probably not actually be published for a further 18 months to two years and you probably won't get a royalty check for at least 6 months after that. So the time you will wait for a return is likely to be at least 2 years and most likely more.

If you do it right (by which I mean that you manage to produce the game to an acceptable standard for no more than 12% of the final retail price) then your direct return per box on a self published game is likely to be much higher than a royalty payment for the same game, even taking account of your extra expenses. However, until you establish yourself your sales are likely to be lower than they would be through an established publishing house with established distribution channels. Of course that is not the whole story. The tendency when self publishing is to either not pay yourself for your time and effort or at least not pay yourself at market rate. By the time you take that into account, a first time self published game is almost certainly not really a profit making concern. Of course this is true to some extent even if you submit to a publisher rather than self-publish. I'd hate to work out the hourly rate for most authors, but it can't be too flash. Nevertheless it is easier to justify the authoring time as hobby time, so if you only ever intend to publish one game and you don't think you would enjoy the experience of self publishing then you would be well advised to try your luck with established publishers.

If you like the business aspects or at least are not put off by them, and you intend to publish more than one game, then you should find that the second and subsequent games will be easier and more profitable than the first. By now you've made the newbie mistakes, made the contacts, set up some sort of distribution and got a much better handle on how the industry works. For me this is still speculation. I have only self-published one game. But I feel very strongly that the next game will be a much easier road and it is a road I am still keen to travel.

Don

Scott, have you considered trying to get in with Impressions or one of the other fulfillment services? Although it isn't the be-all and end-all, I've found that it greatly increased my accessibility for distributors because they could order a few of my games at the same time that they order games from other Impressions clients, with much less hassle.

I've got 20 distributors at last count. They're not all big, but offer geographic variation and reach that I couldn't possibly have gotten on my own. My guess is that if I weren't with Impressions, I would have at most three or four distributors, and that's being generous.

Sorry 'bout that, I should have posted the info in the first place! If you do contact Aldo at Impressions, be sure to tell him I recommended him ;)

Some other folks who have similar services would be Osseum (though I think they might do primarily RPGs) and Bizarro Sales. I don't have links for either of them though, although if you email me offlist I can send an email address for Christina Stiles who runs Bizarro Sales. (I don't like posting email addresses on boards though for obvious reasons!)