I guess it's time to talk about what our direction as a company is and what we want to do. As part of the April TTRPG Maker Challenge, I want to go over what my objectives are for the company and what we are going to do to achieve them.
Let's look at our mission statement:
Loreshaper Games aims to create professional-grade games that are available freely and openly.
That's not a direct quote, because we're sort of skint on the details, but let's talk about what our goals and agendas are.
My goal for Loreshaper Games is to hit an operating budget of $6000 USD, at least for the short-term. This allows a fair amount of commissioning freelance work. I used to be able to do this with my day job, but I've had circumstances change and I can no longer afford to do this with my own cash (and, if we're being honest, I couldn't really afford it before either, I was just eating into my own personal savings when I probably shouldn't have been).
This is mostly an abstract of our vision. I use numbers here because it helps reflect the various things we want to do: get the materials we need (primarily art from external sources) that lets us make the games that we want to make.
We've got a few other things that are laid out for the future as well.
One thing I want to move toward is having a print/physical product line. These products always have a cost associated with them, and we would be able to sell them at a mark-up (whereas free digital products have no price attached, and we don't make a profit unless people want to pay for them).
With Print on Demand, this is easy. However, Print on Demand has the lowest margins on your investment, because you don't get the economies of scale that having a more full-sized production run can grant. The difference gets smaller every year, but it's something that matters.
In any case, the numbers side and business side are "boring", and they're actually pretty far removed from our objective. We could have people who agree with our vision contribute (and we're open to that, though I need to do some reading up and make sure I'm doing so in a way that doesn't produce legal entanglements to later distribution of our products; the Othenar wiki, for instance, required everyone to agree to license their stuff via TAL or otherwise very explicitly mark their work as non-TAL, though no third party users ever contributed anything), but that's something that could be far and few between, and it's the equivalent of asking someone to play for free for publicity.
Making Games
One of the things that goes into our process is actually making things that people want to play, and making the whole hobby something that is a lot easier to enter. Other people have come up with the same idea (see WOTC with the OGL and later with 5e's SRD and basic edition, or Posthuman Studios with Eclipse Phase), but we want to take it a step further and not just facilitate game players but also game creators by providing them with a lot of free stuff with precisely one entanglement (giving us credit for what we did).
This means that they can do whatever they want and use our work as a foundation for their own.
Now, there's a "freeloader problem" in this, which is that people might eventually surpass us with the products of our own work, or that they can do what they want to do without supporting us, but I think there are a couple things to consider here:
First, having people build upon your work makes it better. This won't happen in every case, but in the majority of cases your game will be transformed into something that fits a certain niche better. It's sort of evolutionary design on a grand scale.
This doesn't necessarily mean that we can use their stuff, but we do get to have a certain benefit in return traffic from people wondering what the fuss was about and looking at the people who made the game that was later used in someone else's work.
Second, we're totally okay with that because we're not just in it to make money. We view any cash intake not as a traditional purchase but as a reflection of our reputation and the utility we've delivered. I'm not planning to make Loreshaper Games my day job unless I get such a tremendous response that it's clear that people really love the games I'm making.
However, if other people benefit, we view it simply in the same way that we view it: they've made something that is inherently enriching and beneficial. Our mission has been accomplished, even through vicarious means.
Making Art
Everything we commission is available under the TAL, just as our main work is. This is a philosophy that I wanted to stick to and really deliver upon as Loreshaper Games started work on its larger projects like Hammercalled.
We want beauty and art and the benefits of our creations to be available to everyone, regardless of circumstance and regardless of distance.
This is part of the reason we like commissioning art, because we know that we're creating something entirely new and bringing it into the world, then spreading it without reservation.
There is another thing I want us to start doing as a company, however.
Finding ways to support creators of existing openly-licensed content is something we're considering very strongly, like some of the work by zonked, who we've gotten permission to use stuff from and whose Patreon we have started supporting. We want to be able to support these people whose goals are very similar to ours, while simultaneously repackaging their work for other people to enjoy.
If you know about anyone like this (or if you are someone like this), please let us know. We'd be overjoyed to begin working with more people who share our ideology and goals.
