Working for a Game Publishing Company

[Senkusha]

If you play role playing games, and own a great many of them, you probably have thought to yourself at some point, "Gee, wouldn't it be swell to work for a publishing company?" or maybe even, "I'm going to take over the planet Earth with my gaming company! MUHAHAHA!".  So, let's examine what types of jobs and roles would be involved to produce and publish a role playing game!

My first thoughts about this were:  Yeah!  This would be great!  I can sit down all day, work from an office (or even my home), creatively brainstorm all day, produce something that's actually really good, and our weekly meetings wouldn't be all about this month's profits projections, it would be more like, "Hey, we need to playtest this!  Four hour mandatory meeting.  Bring your own dice and a pencil!"

I mean, maybe it could be like that, but I don't see myself dressing up in a suit just to sit at a mahogany conference table to roll some silver-clad d20's around.  But, let's just take a peek into the industry.  I know that there's an insane amount of competition right now.  There's the monoliths, like Wizards of the Coast and other well established game publishers that have decades of experience, like Steve Jackson Games, and Iron Crown Enterprises.  However, we also have access to very large communities of people who love to role play, everywhere from Facebook to Reddit, and even here (someday... hey, a girl can dream!).  Let's look at the process of creating a game:

First, we'd need a concept of a game.  I've noticed that most, if not all games fit into a genre -- even games like GURPS, where they claim they are generic, one-size fits all, that in itself can be considered a genre.  Even Big Eyes Small Mouth, fits into the genre of anime.

Once we have the genre we want to make the game for, there's LOTS of examples of other gaming systems to review.  This second step is research.  We're going to queue the population to see what in general they like, and don't like about various mechanic systems.  Obviously, we're going to want to avoid the features that people don't care for.  For this step it would also be beneficial to actually know these other systems, and how to play them.  Actually having played them would be a real benefit here too.

The third step would be to collect what fans like about various mechanics and review them.  We would need to ask, "Is there anything we can do with these mechanics or rules to make them any more efficient?".  (I mean, I don't want to have to read a 200-page tome, just to sit down and play.  We as gamers wanna dive right in and PLAY!

After this collaboration step, we need to organize everything and write it in a concise, but easy to understand format.  We'll want to pass the book around and have it peer reviewed, just to ensure that it is actually easy to read.  We want a fourth-grader to be able to pick up this book and create a game with it.

Finally, we're almost ready for publication.  But we need one more thing first.  We have to advertise, or market the publication!  After all, what good does having five-hundred copies of this masterpiece going to do besides collect dust if nobody knows about it, let alone if anybody's even interested in it?  We're probably going to need a webpage, and we'll need some groups on the above mentioned other platforms (Facebook, Reddit, and probably a Twitter account (Yes, I know it's X.  But really, Elon, it's always going to be Twitter!)

And after we have collected a fan-base, we announce the long awaited release date of the book, and the start of our epic journey as a role playing publishing company!  We might even earn enough to keep the lights on!

So, what do you think?  Did I forget anything?