Board & Card Games Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people who like playing board games, designing board games or modifying the rules of existing board games. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
My understanding is that a book publisher typically publishes the work of an author, and takes responsibility for the printing and distribution of the book, and take some kind of percentage of the sales of the book.
Are board games published in a similar manner, or do board game publishers design games 'in house' and pay designers a fixed salary?
There's publishers who only have in-house staff, there's ones who farm projects out to freelancers, and there's ones who buy games off designers.
Some companies only use one of these models. Some companies use two or all three of these models.
E.g.,
So there's one person, who has designed games published by one company, under all three models.
You might get better answers from Tom Vasel of Dice Tower fame. He does weekly live Q&As on his youtube channel. I even feel certain he's talked about it on Board Game Breakfast at one point. You might be able to go through the titles and find one that looks like it might be related.
The long and the short of it was that different publishers do different system. There are some designers who are basically linked to a specific publisher. Other designers are more free to design for whomever they're up to design for. There are presumably pros and cons to each system. All of the examples in my head are mixed up. I wanted to say Eric Lang was a one publisher guy but I'm not certain that's true. And honestly I can't remember the names of a lot of the European guys whose situations I do remember better.
