Hello. Would this make sense? > releasing alpha, pre-beta versions of a ttrpg of a game in development on whatever platform (I dunno! GoogleDrive, Substack, Patreon. Fundit?). Gathering a community of spontaneous play-testers and with their feedback finish writing the book. Release the pdf version of the book for free. See if it is successful to then launch a Kickstarter or FundiIt campaign to actually release a printed version of the book.
Where would you make you early version of the game available? Itch.io?
Where would you write about your development progress? Could Substack do the job? Would Pika.page be an option (Pika isn't free though)?
Would you create a Discord server to gather the people's and playtesters' feedback?
Then where would you release the PDF version of the 1ed of the book? Itch.io?
Should this finished 1ed still be free at this point, when should this become a product on sale?
Can one sell directly on DriveThru as well? What are other good platforms to sell PDF material?
Would all these steps be a good way to prepare the way for a successful kickstarter campaign?
Many questions from an ambitious noob with a passion! Thanks for your replies. :)
I am not entirely sure I follow what you are asking. Those are all relatively well established TTRPG business model activities.
The bottom line is that I generally think you should give a free sample which demonstrates that the more full game actually has content worth paying for, and then charge a fair price for the larger game. You do want free sample works, but my experience with Pay What You Want is that it devalues the product. Demonstrate your product is worthwhile with the free stuff, then charge a fair price for a few things.
Another thing to consider is that you should make a DTRPG publisher account ASAP. DTRPG lets you buy site advertisement slots with PPP. You get PPP for making sales on the website equal to the dollar value of your sales, but you can also passively accumulate PPP just by having a developer account sitting there at idle, even before you've ever uploaded anything, so make a developer account about the same time you start working in earnest on your game.
Bear in mind that DTRPG will give you less PPP if you are a non-exclusive publisher (meaning, you publish on Itch.io or Amazon, as well.) I would recommend being non-exclusive just to make sure you have freedom to act outside of DTRPG.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing. I know these ideas are nothing groundbreaking, I wanted to gather feedback and comments to make sure I kind of at least get the gist of it and am not preparing to do anything too outlandish.