It has been a few years and I’ve been seriously looking in retrospect to the state of the IP, what we wanted it to be and where it landed.
Promotion is Hard.
One thing I didn’t realize was how hard it would be to put a product into people’s minds in such a crowded space. I thought, if we made a fun project that people could relate to, it would take off.
Between beta and go live we had to make a name change. We actually applied for trademark for a name (and were awarded it), but we found later another game had the same name. We basically ate the money for the trademark because it didn't feel right to take it. We sat up all night literally rebranding everything.
I also suffered a bit of impostor syndrome, devaluing our own work, which is not good. We worked very hard on this project, but I never felt confident or correct in crowdfunding. We even gave away hundreds of virtually free copies of the rules as ‘beta’. All this was on the hopes that the ‘merit’ would help carry the project.
Except we had no advertising venues, and the podcasts which I hosted weekly for a year were primarily targeting OSR players. Compounding that, I did very little self promotion on those podcasts. I always felt like I was being pushy.
That left conventions. We didn’t have physical copies to sell, the publisher was DTRPG, and so a booth was a waste of space. We had to get a gaming table and run the game.
This is where Swords & Shaman really shined. Our table always seemed to be the ‘fun’ place to be. People repeatedly told us that our game was the most fun they had at the con.
Except that we could only do a few conventions yearly, and some conventions weren’t receptive to indy games.
Except we had no advertising venues, and the podcasts which I hosted weekly for a year were primarily targeting OSR players. Compounding that, I did very little self promotion on those podcasts. I always felt like I was being pushy.
That left conventions. We didn’t have physical copies to sell, the publisher was DTRPG, and so a booth was a waste of space. We had to get a gaming table and run the game.
This is where Swords & Shaman really shined. Our table always seemed to be the ‘fun’ place to be. People repeatedly told us that our game was the most fun they had at the con.
Except that we could only do a few conventions yearly, and some conventions weren’t receptive to indy games.
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