Swords & Wizardry Light - Forum

Sunday, April 28, 2013

ENWorld is Giving Away a $1000 "Design an RPG" Contest Prize With a Major Catch

Lets be honest. Even some fairly good game designers would be hard pressed to get a thousand bucks for their game idea up front in the economics of our hobby. The chance for the hobby designer to get 1k for their idea before it's even published is pretty awesome, but there is a major catch - just by entering you give up all rights to your entry, win or lose. (link to article on ENWorld)

You enter your game - preferably as a PDF, but you can use any file format you like; it's being voted on, so the more inaccesible your file format, the fewer votes you'll get - and the RPG community spends a week voting on them. The winner gets $1000, which I will send by Paypal immediately the week's up.  
The catch? I (as in EN World) get to own and [try to] sell your game, whether you win or not. That's how I - hopefully - make my $1000 back. Yes, I might try to sell all of them, if they're any good (and I may have to spend a bunch of money on them to make them pretty for sale). Please, please - if your work is precious to you, has sentimental value, is the product of years of development, is a mark of your genius and is worth much more, or is too good for a competition like this, don't enter it. Same goes if you have any reservations, compunctions, disagreements and general dislikes about this competition. It's utterly, utterly, utterly voluntary. But if you feel like writing an RPG over the next 7 days (or have one you've written that you'd like folks to see), this is a fun way to do that. Plus, hey, maybe $1000!
What Morrus has done here is pretty much pure genius, as that $1000 prize could potentially return him the rights to a dozen or more RPGs.

I wouldn't want to give up my rights to my creations for the chance to win a thousand bucks, but I'm fairly certain Morrus will get a sufficient number of entries to make this potentially profitable. I say potentially, as little is ever certain in this hobby.

This will certainly be interesting to follow if nothing else.

1 comment:

  1. He msut have edited the post as it now says...
    "The catch? I (as in EN World) get to own and [try to] sell your game if you win (if I don't publish it, I'll simply return it to you). That's how I - hopefully - make my $1000 back."
    ...and now only says he gains the rights if the game wins.

    Later in The Rules...
    "If you win the contest, you will receive $1000 by PayPal and ownership of your entry will transfer to me. I will acknowledge and credit you as the author of it if I publish it.
    If you do not win the contest, you retain ownership of your work, but I may approach you about publishing it (possibly in a compilation)."

    So, a losing entry does not give him rights to your game.

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