Comments | the_monkey_king: Learning Open Design by Doing

the_monkey_king

Learning Open Design by Doing

May 31, 2006 14:42

If you had told me 6 months ago that I'd be discussing business models on this blog, I'd have laughed and called you crazy. But here I am. Since approximately everyone I know in the games industry has asked me, "How's that Open Design thing going?", from new freelancers to NYTimes bestselling authors, I figured I'd offer a report and some ( Read more... )

report, open design

Comments 4

peartreealley June 1 2006, 02:18:26 UTC

Wow. I almost want to jump in just to see it at work :D This is quite fascinating!

the_monkey_king June 1 2006, 02:59:23 UTC

From a creative standpoint, it's a roaring success. I'm thinking through some things that usually I do by instinct or from experience. That's good.

Even better, I'm taking a few more risks, because the audience expects it (and the patrons seem not to care for the "play it safe" style of recent WotC and d20 releases - if they did, why would they spring for an experiment like this?).

It's also been done in fiction. Diane Duane, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and others have tried patronage with novels, with fair results.

In that case, though, it's easy to use an installment/tip jar method: when the chapter is paid for, off it goes.

Baen peartreealley June 1 2006, 04:06:02 UTC

Baen Books also uses a patronage system to launch their Baen-Universe Sci-Fi Magazine.

http://preview.baens-universe.com/UCLUB?PHPSESSID=262613f5aa8386888fbcf26478d5b1ff

It has various levels of support and also offers tuckerization.

Re: Baen the_monkey_king June 1 2006, 05:14:06 UTC

I love it when the streams cross between, say, gaming and SF. I'd never heard of "tuckerization", but it's a wonderful, useful term.

Thanks for the pointer!