Question 11 of the #AprilTTRPGMaker activity is “What's yer brand?”. Generally I'm a bit dubious of the value of independent designers also creating a “company brand” for their products. It seems to me that it potentially splits your brand/reputation into two pieces. If you're a fan of Hive account@paulczege as a game designer do you remember that he puts out games as Half Meme Press? For most of his game design career Vincent Baker was publishing games as Lumpley Games, but now he seems to be consolidating with his wife game designer Meguey Baker under the Night Sky Games banner. Does it make sense to have this "company" level of indirection between a customer and what they're building a fan relationship with or is it injecting confusion into the marketing? On the other hand, mainstream games aren't strongly associated with designers, they're put out by “game companies”, so fitting into that mold can help with expectations from both customers and stores. Plus I'm sure there's a certain romanticism to having a business name for your small business, even if that business is a solo act. I haven't put out many games (yet?) but I did post one game as pay-what-you-want on DriveThruRPG.com so I needed to decide what to put as a publisher name.

A no-win scenario?

(image from memory-alpha)

I decided my publisher name would be “Game Maru”. Since “Maru” is the first part of my last name but also part of a Japanese ship-naming convention (made especially famous and geek-relevant by the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) I thought that might be a good way to split the difference between a personal brand and a company brand, especially since some people have trouble with my full last name anyway (it's Maruschak, I pronounce it with a long U so the RUS part rhymes with goose, and the full “ch” sound in the chak, and the emphasis on the second syllable, so it's like “muh ROOSE chack”, but I don't mind if people blend the “sch” into a “sh” since that seems easier for a lot of people). I tried to think of a few different ideas for the first part, but couldn't come up with anything good. I debated trying to find something that made sense in Japanese, but I don't have any special association with that country or the culture so I thought it would be weird, and since I don't speak the language I didn't want to end up with a questionably-translated name. I brainstormed a few different English words related to brain or mind but none of them seemed to fit. I decided that I should just keep it simple and go with “game” or “games”. I think “Games Maru” probably would have rolled off the tongue better, but I thought that having four letters in each might be preferable for a logo with “Game Maru” so I went with that (although I haven't tried creating a logo yet).

It was a quick decision

Honestly I made this decision more quickly than I would have in an ideal world. When I did it I had an eye toward giving up completely – I felt like I was wasting money on hosting my personal website but wanted my game Four Panels to have a permanent home somewhere so I created the page for it on DriveThru. Since I was debating giving up on game design when I did it I signed up for the “exclusive” publisher arrangement on DriveThru (so you get 70% per sale rather than 65%), which I might end up regretting at some point. In the end I couldn't bring myself to shut down my personal web hosting before the auto-renew payment kicked in, and obviously I haven't been able to give up on the idea of game design. And I can probably also create a new publisher identity if I want to, so even if I ultimately decide I don't like this brand it probably won't weigh me down too much. Or maybe it's good, I don't know.

The #AprilTTRPGMaker questions:

(from Kira Magrann's twitter)