Sunday, July 22, 2012

Creative Commons and Mythweaver

After much man vs. self conflict, I've decided to publish Mythweaver: Legacy under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I know that this may not seem like a big deal to some, but it's (more than) a bit unnerving to step out from under the 'protection' of copyright with something that's been my creative outlet for some time. However, there are several realities to the situation...

1. I'm a relatively marginal publisher in a relatively marginal industry. I love RPGs, but the fact is that few people are selling many games. If I sell 250 copies of Mythweaver, it will be (far and away) the most successful publication I've ever had. And I've been doing this for ten years...

2. My primary 'business plan' is to cultivate a core group of people who actually play the game and want to contribute to the community. The only way to make that possible is to open up the possibility for other publishers to generate their own Mythweaver products, publishing these and possibly making money off of them. This means someone may beat me to publishing stats for a monster I wanted to develop or a spellbook I wanted to create. Geee... poor me. Other people getting excited enough about my game to create new content for it. That would be rough. If I spoke to anyone who knows anything about how to make money selling a game, I sure wouldn't put a $1 price tag on it. ICONS experimented with that a few months back, and all reports were that it was a financial setback for the game. I'm going totally for the low-end buy in here. I just want to get the game into the hands of people who will play it, and hopefully want to see it continue.

FYI, the game is DONE (I've done final edits, clean-ups, tweaks to layout... I'm just giving it a few days to percolate before I go through one more time with a fine-tooth comb and a clear head). Hey, maybe I can get back to actually playing it now!

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