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Bad people card game simulator7/31/2023 ![]() ![]() To make a publishable game, write down a game’s pitch BEFORE you start designing it. ![]() The second point above is instructive because it means the problem runs deeper than pitching. They design games for themselves, and then only think about how to turn them into products after they’re finished.They don’t fully appreciate how severe the competition has become and what games must be to succeed now.Why do so few game designers do this? Two reasons: If you knock these arguments out of the park, I can figure everything else out for myself via follow-up questions and playtesting (tip: don’t talk about how good the gameplay is. “The uniquely awesome thing about it is ”.No superlatives, and minimize adjectives. So address these product issues at the top of your pitch. Until I’ve got good answers to the above questions, I don’t want to know details about your game. This is the purpose of assessing hit-potential. Publishers with high batting averages are successful, and those with low batting averages go out of business. The publisher’s goal is to maximize its batting average. No one can predict whether a game can be a hit – This is true, in the sense that I can’t predict whether a baseball player will hit a particular pitch.Therefore, if a designer can convince a publisher of hit potential, their game is more likely to be licensed, regardless of how things “should” be. It’s not the designer’s job to predict whether a game can be a hit – the designer’s job is to get a game licensed and publishers need hits to survive and thrive.No one can predict whether a game can be a hit.It’s not the designer’s job to predict whether a game can be a hit.When I give designers this advice, they often have one or both of these objections: Maybe you’ve discovered an audience during your market research that other publishers don’t yet know exists, so there’s low competition. Maybe you already made an app of it and it has 10,000 active players. Maybe you have convincing data that an unusually high number of people who play the game evangelize it to their friends. Maybe you’re friends with Beyonce and she’s agreed to share it on Instagram. If a designer pitches me a game that satisfies all the constraints in that document, I’ll be interested.īut there are other ways too. For example, my company maintains a living document detailing the kinds of games it wants to publish. Ideally, the game is perfectly tailored to the publisher’s existing audience. If you can tell a story about how the publisher can reach the game’s audience, you have a huge leg up. That brings us to the second question: Question #2: How will this game become a hit?įor a game to be a hit, it not only has to be uniquely awesome, it has to find its audience. That means we can’t publish it, because this is a hit-driven industry: staying in business depends on hits. We can’t bring a game like that into the current market and expect it to have any chance of being a hit. With prodding it usually becomes clear the game has no feature which is both actually unique and actually awesome. All the matters is whether it’s awesome to the people who would buy the game. It doesn’t matter if it’s awesome to you, the designer. For example: “It’s a route-making game along the lines of Ticket to Ride but you have to buy easements to make your routes.” – the kind of thing you’d expect to find in expansion or variant of a preexisting game brand. They point to a unique but banal feature, usually some small twist on gameplay that isn’t enough of a head-turner.But those descriptions apply to other games and they don’t sell copies. They point to a not-unique feature, for example: “It’s a really social game and plays great with 7 players”, or “There’s a ton of tension in the bidding”.When I ask designers this question, they usually answer in one of two ways: The answer could relate to theme, mechanism, feel, components, potential art, etc. I want to know what it has that no other game has. I can boil the product side of a pitch down to two key questions: Question #1: What is UNIQUELY awesome about this game? Most designers, especially hobby game designers, don’t address the product side in their pitches, or do it poorly. A game also has to be a great product, which means it must satisfy constraints in addition to fantastic gameplay. Thanks to that competition, fantastic gameplay is necessary but not sufficient. More than 4000 board games are published annually. I saw more than a hundred pitches a year and was astounded by how bad they were. For several years one of my jobs was to listen to pitches from game designers who want to license their games. ![]()
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