Loose End Tying

I want to tie up a loose end today. A couple of weeks ago, I promised an additional installment on the cornerstone of establishing a game company. Let's get to it.

Passion. As I wrote earlier, passion is the cornerstone to any entrepreneurial venture, be it a car dealership, cabinet maker, or board game publisher. Running your own business is difficult, spirit-crushingly difficult, if you aren't passionate about what you are doing, you'll just quit.  So what type of passion do you need?

A passion for playing games? Certainly that helps. In seven years I've heard the following sentence hundreds of times, "Man, I'd love your job. You play games all day." But if that is your passion, if studying maps, pushing game chits, and devising strategies are your passions, then don't start a game company.

Yes, for us adventuring gaming geeks that stuff is awesome, but I've found that most designers/publishers have a passion for something else. Richard Berg designs war games, but he also writes plays. Mark Mclaughlin  creates epic science fiction adventures, but he also writes novels, David Julien designs Lock 'n Load modules, but he also draws. I believe the core passion that successful game designers and publishers share is a passion for creation.

Ancillary to that passion is the desire to share. I love making a buck as much as the next guy. Money is the grease that lubes the wheels of life, but hearing that someone loved the story in my World at War expansion Counterattack, or identifies with Mike Hudson in Revelation, means so much, recharges my will to create.

So that's it. Want to publish games? The first step is to check your passion. You can analyze the market, project costs, study margins, but without passion you'll fail.

Oh yeah. The picture is Night Ranger, performing "Passion Play." Here's how it sounded back in '83.