Cloudberry Games Starts to Sprout

Cloudberry Games Starts to Sprout: "

In March 2009, I published a column highlighting two companies that were formed to help game designers bring their creations to a larger audience, whether for exposure or for the larger goal of publication.

One of those companies, Cloudberry Games, which was founded in 2008, has now emerged from its incubation and beta-test period to start inviting game development projects on a wider basis. Here’s a summary of how Cloudberry Games works from that previous column:

Cloudberry Games has developed a system that will help designers publicize and develop their games while simultaneously finding an audience. Says [co-founder Rustan] Håkansson, “An author creates a developer account on the webpage, which costs €10 per year, and starts a new project. He or she enters all the information there is about the game, including the rules. We check that it is at least a reasonable start of a game, and accept it as a project. With this, Cloudberry Games licenses the game from the author.” The game can be a new design or a previously published game that has since gone out of print.

The Cloudberry staff, gamers, publishers, artists and other designers can access this project – reading the rules, downloading files to print and play, making suggestions, tagging it – and the original designer can then make changes or improvements as desired based on the feedback he’s received. Artists can also participate in game projects, either voluntarily with the hope of future royalties or on a commission basis by Cloudberry.

Once the designer feels the game is finished and Cloudberry Games decides that interest in the game might merit a printing, the company will take quotes from printers, establish a quantity and price, then open an order window for thirty days. “We will either print the game or take it back and await further improvement or more interest later,” says Håkansson.

In fact, the developer membership is only €5 annually, something intended (I believe) to keep out the tire-kickers while still being accessible to a wide audience. Twenty games in various stages of completion are currently listed in the Cloudberry Games database, and developers can peruse them, download rules, offer suggestions, and so on. It will be interesting to see what rains down upon gamers from the clouds…

(Disclosure: I’m working with Rustan Håkansson on a new version of Boardgame News.)

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