I have a game that I'd like to post as a Print and Play game on BGG. At the same time, I'm looking for a publisher for the game.
My experience so far is with Zombie in my Pocket, where it was a PnP game, then got picked up by a publisher in part due to it's popularity as a PnP game.
What reasons are there to -not- post it as PnP? If it gets a lot of great ratings/comments, would that offset any of the reasons not to?
I have heard publishers speak of not picking up self published game because they feel they have already saturated most of the games potential market.
I don’t know if this applies to PnP games since they would be offering a much improved product.
My personal objective was to publish as PNP first. Get reviews, comments and suggestions from players. Then if the sales are good, try to submit the game to publisher and give the number of sales as an argument to convince them to publish my game.
What reasons are there to -not- post it as PnP? If it gets a lot of great ratings/comments, would that offset any of the reasons not to?
Time for a little brainstorming:
If I were a publisher, what reasons could I possibly have that would make me reject a game, solely because it was PnP? As a creator, why would I not PnP a game?
* You may choose not to PnP a game because it has many complex components that would negatively affect quality of play if they are incomplete or assembled poorly. This would lead to an inaccurate assessment of the enjoyability of the game, which would harm sales of a commercial game.
* You may choose not to PnP a game because it has a clever idea that would be too easy for other publishers to "lift" and put in their games that are already in development. Their products hit the market first, and commercially publishing the original PnP game has less impact since it looks like it is derivative.
* You may choose not to PnP a game because you want to modify it and its existing PnP fanbase has already categorized it in a specific way.
* You may choose not to PnP a game because you don't want to have to overcome the existing "low budget" market impression of the original PnP version of the game. A similar concern would be that you don't want to have to overcome lasting previous impressions of the game that you "fixed" before commercially printing it.
* You may choose not to PnP a game because you feel that the existing PnP version of the game is too complete and will cut into sales of the commercial version of the game.
* You may choose not to PnP a game because BGG ratings. The BGG community has a very specific "bent" to what they like and don't like in a game. There are a lot of very interesting games on BGG that do not have good ratings. A publisher may be reluctant to publish a game that has low BGG ratings, expecting low retail sales.
That's about as much as I can offer...
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This is just what I was looking for. I had many of the same thoughts, I just wanted to see if someone else was coming up with something on the negative that I hadn't thought of.
As I see it, there are many reasons to release as PnP, but not too many against it.
The biggest concern for me is that some publisher feels that the game has already been 'published' and is worried about copyright or something like that. So, my biggest concern is with just causing unnecessary confusion.