Theres been some discussion round cutting CD's for games. Not much, but some. As it happens, browsing a techie catalogue, I see you can get a mass batch copier for between £1500 to £5000 or so - some inclding their own printer.

So, although this is still a bit on the steep side, and a function for which as yet has no target audience, but it is a reachable microbusiness publishing solution. Thought I'd mention that.

If you're the average indie guy, there's no real point to getting one of those mundo-batch burners: your average home CD burner can burn a full CD in 10-15 minutes (and most game collections will be 10-100MB, taking only 3-5 minutes.) It's more work to do it by hand, but it works pretty well.

I sold my first game (The Nutcracker Prince, written with Peter Seckler) on CD, and it worked pretty well.

Nearside Games did this for their Nearside Project game. The also burn't some added extras onto the CD as well (sound track and character sheet I think).

They sold the CD from their website for $10, IIRC. We send you the CD then you will pretty-please send us ten bucks sort-of-thing.

The model didn't work cause very few people sent back the money, though I don't think they tried Ron's "friendly email after they get the game" procedure.

Advantages other than cost? Easy portability - you can carry a lot more to conventions etc. Any others?

Alan.

Hi there,

Gareth, thanks for the info.

Opinions about CD publishing for role-playing games remain very mixed. Some older threads about it include:

Publishing pencil & paper games on CDs
CD "book" publishing
CD publishing

Plus there are all sorts of references or side-topics within other threads throughout this forum.

Best,
Ron

I can see a day in which RPG's come equipeed with spreadsheets, character design packages and mapping systems intended for use at the table. Not yet, though. All I mean is that its sufficiently low-priced that you could put yourself back in the black on a relatively small volume of retail sales, assuming you have a model that puts something worth buying on the CD - rule- and sourcebooks will not be it, IMO.

Hi Gareth,

I agree with you in those points, definitely. Right now, Cynthia's taking this route with Cartoon Action Hour, so it looks as if some real data could finally come down the pike. So far all we have is my abortive and disastrous venture with the Sorcerer CD, which still has negative effects on Sorcerer's retail success.

Best,
Ron

The problem with these proposed add-on utilities is the expense of creating them. Even a relatively small computer application will easily run to $10k up front, plus a lot more down the road to support it with bug fixes (the program that doesn't have bugs hasn't been made). Assuming roughly $1.50 to produce a CD at home (accounting for cost of media and jewel boxes/envelopes), and a retail price of $10, you'd need to move roughly 1,200 copies to cover your costs.

You can cut application development costs by getting a fan to do one at a reduced price, but fan-produced software will either be poor quality or take a long time in coming. Alternatively, you can put together spreadsheets or MS Office "applications". Experience with both of these routes says that they'll ultimately make you unhappy.

All of those are valid concerns - my only point is that at a unit depreciation value of £1 per disk you only need to move max 5000 copies to recover costs over say 5 years. Thats quite reasonable for a small business investment; producing the content, and indeed jewel cases, are separate issues.