thread: 2008-10-02 : Fellow Publishers: Success? Failure?
On 2008-10-05, Nathan P. wrote:
1. What's your name?
Nathan D. Paoletta
2. What's your publishing company?
Hamsterprophet Productions
3. What game or games have you published?
In print: Kildarrin, Timestream, carry. a game about war, Annalise
Available in PDF: playtest drafts of Countdown, Vesna Thaw
4. When you first started publishing, what success did you hope for?
To make game design and publishing a self-sustaining hobby. To meet all these cool people I read about online. To go to Gen Con and have an awesome time.
5. Did you achieve it?
No, yes and yes, respectively. My overall numbers for HPP are still in the red, mainly because I'd rather go to Gen Con every year than make a profit on game design.
6. What success do you hope for now?
Right now, I want people I respect to play my games and think they're worth something.
Outside of that, I honestly don't know in any concrete way. I want to reach a non-standard audience with my games while sustaining my personal links to the community, which is kind of contradictory.
I also want to rebuild myself as a hobbyist/publisher. HPP is on hiatus and probably not coming back. I'm not sure what's going to come back in it's place.
7. Have you achieved it?
Kind of, nope and nope.
8. If a hopeful new RPG publisher came to you and asked you for your wisdom, to help her set reasonable expectations for her own games' success, what would you tell her?
In hobby game publishing, the only reason to make art is because it makes you happy. Fuck everyone and everything else.
That said, be ambitious, but don't spend anything you can't afford to lose. Publish from your heart. Spend more time that you think you should in identifying your target market.
Last time I had this conversation, I asked a lot of questions about what her goals for publishing were, and then asked her how those would change once the initial goals were met. We then talked about a lot of product development stuff, and how and where to print things without breaking the bank. Also, playtesting.
