RPGs and the Free Economy
Gamers tend to be a tech friendly group. This means a game company needs to use all the tools the internet has to offer to best promote their company. Having a website or blog is the bare minimum. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are also highly important. However, a game company needs to be in tune with the free economy to grab serious attention.
What is the free economy you ask? The free economy is when you give your material away for free to get the attention of gamers, letting them see your material before they buy it. I’m not talking simple previews. I’m talking about the actual full material of your products. Jonathan Coulton is the great example of this. You can stream his full songs direct from his website. If you want to listen to them offline you have to buy them. And they are all worth buying.
In the gaming industry, few people do the free economy as well as Kobold Quarterly. They routinely post free articles on their website that are later gathered together into their magazines or in the Kobold’s Guide books. This is a great example of the free economy done well.
Another good example is Super Genius Game’s Spelltweets. Owen K.C. Stephens regularly posts variations of existing spells to Twitter for everyone to use. Then they gather all those variations into a single PDF. Their Spell Variants series is really awesome and if you haven’t checked it out, check Owen’s Twitter page to see if these are right for you.
Recently, I started following in Owen’s steps and started my own series called Monstertweets. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we’re posting variations of monsters from the Bestiary books. These short descriptions will get new life out of the monster books you already own. And one we do a hundred or so, we’ll collect these up and release them as a PDF. Right now we’re just sticking with the monsters and templates in the first Bestiary, but we’ll be including monsters from Bestiary 2 and 3 in the future. Also we will be posting new templates to JonBrazer.com, including that template with additional variations in our Monstertweets that week. So be sure to follow us on Twitter and visit JonBrazer.com for more free monster variations.
Dale C. McCoy, Jr. is President of Jon Brazer Enterprises. Download Book of Magic: Signature Spells 1, now with Hero Lab support from Paizo or RPGNow.com today.
