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Saturday, April 14, 2012

SO, YOU DESIGNED A STAR TREK GAME

Steve Cole comments:

Probably once a month, we get an email or letter from some game designer who wants to sell us his Star Trek game. Sadly, most of those conversations quickly determine that the designer is unaware of a few facts, and once he becomes aware of them he loses any interest in negotiating a deal to publish his game.

First, we're game designers and while we do publish outside designs, we don't (strictly speaking) need them to find things to print. If we see a great one (or a small one that doesn't take much trouble) we'll do it, but we're not going to stop everything we're doing to print a game someone else did and give him all of the profit.

Second, most of these outside designers have no real idea what ADB is or realize that we cannot print any old Trek game, but only games specifically designed to fit inside the Star Fleet Universe. Maybe you did the greatest TNG game ever, but we cannot print it. Very few people realize that we can only use a very limited set of Trek material (and a very large set of things we created ourselves) and assume that we can use anything they find in any website that says "Trek" on it somewhere. This leads to a lot of arguments and hard feelings. We told one designer (who did a card game) that a particular card would have to be removed as it violated the Paramount contract. He declared that the card must be included and it was up to us to do whatever it took to get Paramount to agree. That particular project came to a screeching halt at that point. Another designer kept copying art from the Paramount website that isn't allowed by our license and refused to remove it (or to allow us to replace it). That was another project that died on the spot. We're not going to go ask Paramount to expand our license (they won't do it anyway) and if we tell you "no" that is pretty much final.

I have seen a lot of game designers declare that their design is unique and like nothing on the market, only to have me point out other games that are virtually identical.

Few game designers have any idea what it costs to do something and build expensive components into their design. That's not a deal breaker (expensive games mean more profit if we can convince ourselves to risk the investment) but it does mean that the game has to have a BIG market.

Few game designers realize the need for playtesting and assume that because they wrote it down and played it with their local buddies that it's ready for production. It all but certainly isn't. It all but certainly fails to get all of the rules out of the game designer's head and onto the papers. It's very very unlikely that they deliberately tested the design the way we have to test games. (In a recent playtest of one our new games, one player spent the entire game deliberately trying to make one thing happen and it never did, meaning it's too hard to make it happen and the brilliantly written rule for that little thing will never actually come into play, so we had to change the percentages.)

Few game designers realize how little money there is in game design for the Adventure Game market. They think that since Milton Bradley will pay them a quarter of a million bucks, we will as well. I don't get paid anything remotely close to half that much and I run the company! You might, on an average SFB module, making a few hundred. You might, on a really good selling expensive stand-alone game, make a few thousand. You're not going to make enough for new house, not even enough for a new car.