Hello All,

I don't often post in this forum but there's something that's been on my mind about the public perception of indie published games.

Before I started coming to this site I would never looked at freebie published web games or even for sale .pdf games for much the same reason I didn't read web published poetry or fiction. That reason was it hadn't be 'legitamately published.'

Now, what I meant by 'legitamately published' was that it did not have the approval of an unbiased 3rd party observer. If something was published through taditional means it said to me, 'Wow, this is SO good that somebody who doesn't know the desiner from Adam is willing to assume personal financial risk for this product.'

A corralary to this thinking is the, 'I don't play games that aren't supported' line of thinking. Where supported means an ongoing line of supplements.

However, I think the real key to this thinking is the 'approval' part. This is why I sometimes say that Ron publishes the mini-supplements because he personally approves each and every one of them. Ron disagrees because he doesn't pesonally assume any financial responsibility for the product. But I'm thinking about average joe gamer.

Do you think that this is a common mindset among gamers? How can it be changed?

Jesse

P.S. Games that ARE indie published but done so in book form don't necessarily suffer from this problem because of knee-jerk assumption on the part of book consumers. That is, if ignorant gamer x picks up Little Fears there is an automatic assumption that Jason L. Blair and Key 20 Publishing are not one and the same thing. That is, that someone over at Key 20 Publishing has 'approved' Jason L. Blair's work. Again, I don't know if this true or just my percpetion. How pervasive is this thinking?

Jesse,

I think that it's because of a prejudice against e-publishing (pdf, what have you) It just seems so easy to do that the public at large doesn't take it seriously. Never mind the cost of purchasing Acrobat, right. e-publishing is more-or-less free. (Never mind the free pdf makers for a second)

Also, a printed book represents a more substantial investment on the publisher's part. ANd for self publishers like Jason, this means they have to really believe in their product to bother dumping money into it.

I mean, like you said, most people don't know that Jason, more-or-less IS Key20 but even for the ones that do it's like "This Blair guy wrote his own game and then he started a company to publish it." I don't know how many people are on Key20's payroll, but assuming it is just Jason for our purposes here, it doesn't matter. It takes money to start up a company. It takes money to buy the artwork, to hire a layout artist, hire a print, store the books and so on. Not that money makes the world go around, but it does put indellibly in the consumer's mind that the publisher was serious about this product. Serious <> quality, but the consumer thinks it ups the odds for quality.

Compare this to epublishing. Anyone can put their RPG (or D&D house rules) up on a Geocities site for nothing. All it takes is the time to write it, and you don't even have to proofread it. Even pdfs are like this. If I buy Acrobat, I buy it once then I could publish any number of books I choose. There's less invested so it doesn't seem as serious, even if the publisher is dead serious about the product.

Stephen King scored a blow for this with his story "Riding the Bullet." I believe you could find an article or two on it if you look. As e-publishing gains more ground, it will become a more legitamate means to publish RPGs. Especially with these ebook devices out there. It's only a matter of time.