Why I Put My Game Designs on a Blog Instead of Selling Them
People sometimes ask why I publish my game designs as blog posts rather than packaging them up and selling them "properly".
I did try the commercial route. I released a product on DriveThruRPG. I even paid the British Trademark Office so I could put the ® symbol on it instead of a plain ©, thinking that would give me stronger proof of ownership if anyone ever challenged me. After my product was already out, someone else released a product in the same field under the exact same title. I contacted him. He told me to fuck off and blocked me from all social media channels. I had no postal address for him, so taking it to court was impossible. I complained to the platforms selling his work. They essentially shrugged and said they would only act if a judge ruled it was intellectual property infringement. He went on to make podcasts and YouTube videos about his product using that same title. In the end I stopped chasing it. The evidence is still online for anyone who cares to look. Life’s too short.
That episode taught me a few useful things.
People will take what they want if they think it’s good. That should not stop you from making the work. Treat it as confirmation that the idea had value. I also learned that most people will only pay for something if it is either dirt cheap or conspicuously expensive. Anything in the middle struggles. Charging money reduces the number of people who ever see the work. Releasing it free on a blog, by contrast, puts a clear date stamp on it and gets it in front of far more eyes. Somewhere among those eyes is the person who will actually play it, talk about it, reblog it, or make a video. That is how momentum builds.
The point of these games is to be played. Fun is the product. The odds of a solo indie designer making meaningful money from a single release are low. So I made a deliberate choice: put everything on the blog. If I later turn a set of posts into a clean PDF with decent layout and some illustrations, perhaps even as a hardcopy print-on-demand, maybe people will pay for the convenience. Until then I would rather be a designer people have actually heard of than an expensive nobody sitting on work no one has seen.
What I call game design has two parts: the rules and the worlds. The worlds are what I love. Good mechanics should serve the world. They should flavour it, reinforce its logic, and stay out of the way of the story the players are telling together. The longer I do this, the more I want the rules to be simple. Mechanics that interrupt storytelling are a waste of everyone’s time. Overcomplicated systems that take hours to learn before you can even start playing are a particular nightmare, and it is surprisingly easy to fall into that trap when you are deep in the design process.
So the blog remains the main channel. It is fast, date-stamped, visible, and free of the usual commercial friction. The work gets out. People can use it. And if something later proves worth packaging more carefully, the foundation is already there.