Ci-dessous un article de Boardgame News sur deux nouvelles manière d’éditer les jeux. ca date de la semaine dernière mais je suis étonné que l’on en ait pas encore parlé ici (ou alors j’ai zappé, auquel cas je suis désolé de la redite).
Une brève synthèse pour les anglophobes :
- Un premier site (Cloudberry Games) propose la mise en ligne des protos, ouverts à tous les commentaires et tests, du public ou de la compagnie. Une fois le jeu achevé, ils s’occupent d’un appel d’offre auprès d’imprimeurs, puis ils l’ouvrent à la pré-commande sur le modèle des P500 pour les wargames. Une fois le seuil de rentabilité atteint, l’édition est lancée. Ils parlent aussi de lancer une nouvelle impression de vieux jeux (avec FMP comme exemple, et ça, ce n’est pas un poisson d’avril…).
- Boardgames Now mise sur le pdf pour les protos et la version finale. Une fois que le pdf a atteint un certain niveau de vente, la fabrication en dur est lancée.
- Blue Panther, pour des jeux plus abstrait, fonctionnera sur un modèle d’impression à la demande.
On avait souvent évoqué dans ces colonnes un système de P500 pour les jeux de plateau. Il semble que les créateurs vont pouvoir passer outre les petits obstacles de l’édition, absences de réponse, délais trop longs, contrats finalement non signés ou protos qui ne reviennent jamais… 
A l’inverse, à l’autre bout de la chaîne, cela ne va pas diminuer l’apparition de nouveautés…
En tout cas voilà qui devrait en intéresser plus d’un ici.
Alors, revolucion dans l’édition ? 
W. Eric Martin: Sales Tools for Game Designers
As in any creative field, the number of amateur or aspiring game designers far surpasses the number of professional or established designers – and even designers with an established track record can’t find a home for all that they create. Two companies established in 2008, Cloudberry Games and BoardGamesNow, are trying to alleviate the woes of would-be game designers by offering them a different path to publication, one that takes the designs directly to the potential end-users: gamers from all parts of the world.
Cloudberry Games was founded by general manager Rustan Håkansson, along with his wife and gaming partner Nina and his friend Pontus Nilsson, who has worked with Håkansson previously on other game projects. Håkansson, a former sales manager for the Swedish game distributor Vincit AB, has seen the inner workings of the industry first-hand. “Mostly it is focused on making print runs as big as possible, which means a need to adapt the games so that they are suitable for as large an audience as possible,” he says. “Standard publishers cannot publish great games for small audiences. The other end of the scale are the new authors who are struggling to raise interest in their creations and be picked up by a publisher; when they fail to do so, they print themselves, or the game is lost to the world. Self-publishing most often becomes a major project, costing a lot of time and money that the author would prefer to not spend.”
To overcome those roadblocks for designers, Cloudberry Games has developed a system that will help designers publicize and develop their games while simultaneously finding an audience. Says Håkansson, “An author creates a developer account on the webpage, which costs €10 per year, and starts a new project. He or she enters all the information there is about the game, including the rules. We check that it is at least a reasonable start of a game, and accept it as a project. With this, Cloudberry Games licenses the game from the author.” The game can be a new design or a previously published game that has since gone out of print.
The Cloudberry staff, gamers, publishers, artists and other designers can access this project – reading the rules, downloading files to print and play, making suggestions, tagging it – and the original designer can then make changes or improvements as desired based on the feedback he’s received. Artists can also participate in game projects, either voluntarily with the hope of future royalties or on a commission basis by Cloudberry.
Once the designer feels the game is finished and Cloudberry Games decides that interest in the game might merit a printing, the company will take quotes from printers, establish a quantity and price, then open an order window for thirty days. “We will either print the game or take it back and await further improvement or more interest later,” says Håkansson.
As for the finances of this system, Håkansson says, “We pay no royalties on the initial licensing, but we pay the complete royalties immediately when a game is accepted to be printed: 10% to the author and 10% to the artist of the full price, not the price to distributors, of the complete print run. This is possible because all orders for games need to be paid during the order window of thirty days. If a game is not accepted for print because the orders are too few, the amount will be paid back. If the orders are higher than anticipated and the print cost is lowered, the difference will be paid back.”
Any finished project will be printed to the quantity ordered, with a small surplus to allow for damages and demo copies, and the games will be shipped to distributors, stores and gamers, either directly or through partnerships with retail locations. “We have agreements with some specialised gaming printers and suppliers in Germany and some other partners,” says Håkansson. “We are looking for more options on low quantity runs, that is, under 300 copies, preferably in Europe to make delivery times as short as possible. We also have some such partnerships with stores established and are looking for more all over the world as of mid-March 2009. Any store that is interested can contact me by email or phone.”
As a last resort, Håkansson says that Cloudberry will work with an author to make a game available on a downloadable basis. On the other end of the succcess spectrum, if a game is popular enough to warrant large print runs, Cloudberry will license it to other publishers just as an agent would.
Says Håkansson, “We are currently looking for beta testers for the development platform. Anyone that is a beta tester will get a free Developer account for one year when we open up to the public. To be a beta tester, you need to be an author and have a game that you would like to work on with us.”
Steve Jones, the man behind BoardGamesNow LLC as well as Blue Panther LLC, shares the same goal as Håkansson: Give game designers more exposure with the best designs ending up in print.
Rather than run a warts-and-all system like Cloudberry, however – a system in which the development takes place in the open and everyone gets a say, whether right or wrong, on what should be changed – Jones wants Board Games Now to showcase games that are currently getting lost in the crowd. “There are sites for RPG-related PDF downloads,” he says. “There are sites for boardgame PDF downloads. Some sites are free, some are not, some are a combo of both. All of these sites have a few ‘diamonds in the rough,’ games that have been playtested and developed to the point where they could be picked up by a major publisher – but that’s a few among thousands of offerings. Why take the time to sort through thousands to find a few good ones?” To keep the quality of its offerings high, BoardGamesNow has a team of published designers that will review submitted games before they’re posted publicly.
Jones operates Blue Panther largely via a print-on-demand system. “[Thinking] of all the great independently-produced games I have bought over the years, some had great production values. (Remember Tenjo?) Then I tried to figure out which of these companies are still around – not many. Even some of the larger game companies have fallen by the wayside. There are some great games out there with thousands of copies sitting in the designer’s garage instead of being played, so before starting Blue Panther, we went looking for a business model that would not put us out of business if the first game sold too few (or too many) copies. And the model is based loosely on lean manufacturing as practiced by Toyota” – which means using parts purchased largely from U.S. suppliers and making and assembling a game after receiving an order.
While the nature of Blue Panther’s publishing system lends itself to a focus on abstract strategy games, BoardGamesNow will make its games available on a downloadable basis, which opens the design space to almost anything that will fit in a PDF. “Euros, abstracts, card games, wargames, party games – any and all gaming themes are supported,” says Jones. “One of the first offerings on BoardGamesNow will be a rugby game, for example. Some of [Blue Panther’s] published designs will migrate to BoardGamesNow as PDFs, and there have been several designs passed on by Blue Panther that would make sense for BoardGamesNow.”
Once a certain number of downloads has been reached for a title, the company will publish it as a physical board game and sell it through the website. Says Jones, “People who ordered the PDF version of a published game will receive that amount as a discount when they purchase the physical board game. Within the first year, we’d like to get noticed with a few dozen really good titles and get enough downloads to publish the two most popular downloaded games submitted to BoardGamesNow.”
Aspiring game designers, the next step is up to you…
Posted by W. Eric Martin on Mar 24, 2009 at 05:30 PM in Columnists, W. Eric Martin / 738
Je vois pas pourquoi ce serait un poisson d'avril...