Esker business update

For those of you following the business side of my indie game publishing project with Doctor Esker's Notebook, here's an update. I'm up to 115 total sales with revenues of $1,108, set against costs of $3,530, for a current (but shrinking) loss of $2,422.

The bulk of the costs is the development process and the print run, but I continue to have additional costs with marketing and promotion. If I sell out the entire rest of print run, I probably have another $8,800 in potential revenue, which (barring massive future marketing expenses) would make the project profitable. That assumes my time is worthless - if we paid me even a minimum-wage hourly rate for my work on the project, I'm deep underwater. Given that this is a so far a passion project, I'm fine with my time being counted as free.

Here are the numbers is in graph form:

The time axis advances to the right here, showing increasing revenue compared to mostly fixed costs, but the time isn't linear - it's just whenever I do an update.

For this one, time is linear - this is the history of the project starting with the print run at the end of last year, with additional costs added to revenues as time progresses to the right.

Plankton Games on Facebook

Hey, if you wouldn't mind, please like Plankton Games on Facebook. Here's the page:

https://www.facebook.com/planktongamesco

Some guy who's account is clearly hacked or fake took the planktongames username, and Facebook doesn't care, so I had to add the "co." I guess I should be flattered that my trademark is worth stealing.

Thanks!

TGC Esker Contest Continues

Only four more days until we know the winner of the TheGameCrafter Doctor Esker's Notebook Puzzle and Parts Challenge. 624 entries so far, which is wild. Who will win free games?

Cubist podcast appearance

I had the great pleasure to be on The Cubist podcast with host Bill Corey, talking about puzzle game design and lots of other topics. Give it a listen!

Sponsored contest at TGC

I had the idea that I might be able to run a giveaway on The Game Crafter for Dr. Esker's Notebook. I have used TGC for nearly all of my game prototype production and boardgame publishing since I first heard of them in 2009, and I'm a huge fan of the site. I contacted them, and it turned out Tavis (one of the founders, and their marketing guy) was about to do a contest celebrating their adding their 2000th game piece type to their inventory.

I came up with ten clues to ten of their many, many parts, and Tavis and I developed the contest from there. I also sponsored up to ten copies of Dr. Esker's Notebook as prizes. If you want to give it a try, the link is here:

TGC Esker Contest Link

Tavis' video intro is here:

I had fun doing this, and I think it will potentially end up generating some exposure for me. I'm not sure how much I'll end up spending on the sponsorship - high-end case, it would probably be around $170 if all the winners win games and all of them are overseas, but I think it will probably be more like $40-$60 in games and postage. If I sell 5-7 games from the publicity, I make that back, but it will be hard (or impossible) to know if anybody buys for that reason. 

The contest has been live for 14 hours, and there are already 338 participants, so that's pretty good. I'll keep following it to see how it goes.

Doctor Esker's Notebook mentioned on The Cubist

Eric from The Cubist Podcast (Episode #103) reviewed Doctor Esker's Notebook - very cool. His comments on the game run from about the two minute mark to about four minutes.

Dr. Esker's Notebook sales and revenue update

I'm nearing the end of my fourth week of Dr. Esker sales. After an initial bunch of sales to friends and acquaintances, I'm starting to see a shift to a slower but steady set of sales to people I don't know, with 78 total sales in 26 days, averaging a couple a day now. My sales have shifted almost entirely to Amazon and away from my site, so I think most folks are discovering the game either via Amazon or on other sites and then buying from Amazon. It's hard to tell exactly how that happens.

My ad campaigns have not borne much (or any) fruit, which I mostly expected. I have no apparent sales from either Facebook ads (suspended now after hitting $50) or from Google search ads (nearing $50 and suspension). I can track sales from Google via their analytics, and I also know nothing much is happening from those because I haven't sold a game through my website in two weeks. It is possible the ads led people to an Amazon purchase, but that's about the only way it could have been worth it, and even then I'd have had to sell 11 or more that way to cover the cost of the two ad campaigns. I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

I have had a positive review from Boardgamecapital.com, and a positive tweet and email feedback from The Opinionated Gamers, with a review hopefully coming soon. There are three positive reviews on Amazon, two from purchasers and one from a person who got a free copy in advance, none solicited. So, I've got a small but growing number of uniformly positive reviews, which is good. I still have seven or so copies out for review to various reviewers and influencers.

Here are the finances thus far. I'm still in the hole by a lot, but I'm gradually making headway. Here's revenues vs. expenses over time (note the dates aren't evenly spaced - just whenever I do an update):

And here is the bottom line (expense minus revenue), with a regular time axis this time. Starting to cut the corner off that block of losses, but still a ways to go until profitability.

Another positive review for Doctor Esker's Notebook

I got another positive review for the game here:

Board Game Capital Doctor Esker's Notebook Review

It sounds like they got stuck pretty hard but enjoyed it nonetheless.

Sources of orders

I've been selling Doctor Esker's Notebook for a couple of weeks now. I've paid for a little advertising on Facebook and Google, but most of my customer traffic has been via Facebook, where I've posted general announcements on my feed and also posted to my very active college class page (Harvard-Radcliffe 1991). So far, the HR91 folks have come through in a very big way and represent nearly half of my sales. Here's the distribution, classified by segments of my life:

Those folks who have no connection to me, the purple wedge representing ten orders, are the group that needs to grow if I'm going to expand sales very much. I only have so many affinity groups that I can go to personally. The question is how best to reach outside those groups to people who would just take a chance on the game without a personal connection to me.

I would imagine this is what most boardgame Kickstarter campaigns look like, at least in the early stages, so even though I've already printed, this is probably parallel in terms of audience.

Woohoo!

This is cool...

Just played an awesome puzzle game, Doctor Esker's Notebook from Plankton Games . Full review to come soon. You can find it here. https://t.co/xotXbuT120 pic.twitter.com/BLADPOAmje

— Opinionated Gamers (@OpinionatedGmrs) February 14, 2019

On the efficacy of Facebook ads

Here are the results from my ad campaign. It ran for about ten days.

So, did it work? Well, assuming Facebook isn't just making up numbers, they showed my ads 129,118 times to 31,662 people. Some people must have seen them a lot more than once, so I guess I'm kind of the MeUndies of puzzle card games. That's a lot of potential views. However, there were only 37 clicks on the ad, which is a fraction of a percent of the people who saw it.

Was it worth it? Well, I spent a little over $50, which means that I need to sell six games to cover the costs. I likely didn't. At this point, I have sold about eight games to people to whom I don't have a known personal connection. All but one of those were on Amazon, which wasn't where Facebook pointed. So, I can't possibly have made back my investment, unless all eight of these sales came from Facebook click-throughs that somehow ended up on Amazon, which is really unlikely. It's far more likely that I have zero sales from Facebook. My Google Analytics aren't really robust enough to track sales yet, because I handle the transactions on my site through PayPal, and I lose the thread of connectivity once they go shopping. I'm working on that, but it isn't really an issue with only one PayPal sale so far that I don't know the source for.

Caveats:

• People may have seen the ad, become interested, but intend to buy later.
• People may have seen the ad, stored a scrap of brand awareness in their subconscious memories, and have a vague positive association if they encounter it later.

Conclusion: 

For me, Facebook ads seem to have a return on investment value near zero.

Jury's still out on Google ads (the numbers are a lot lower), but I suspect it's similar. My guess at this point is that most of the sales for which I don't know the origin come from Amazon searches.

Fixing errors

Here's what fixing a printing error looks like. This is four cases of 11 games each laid out with the eleven cards I needed to replace in each box next to them. This set took me about an hour and fifteen minutes. I did 12 cases total today (132 games) for a total of about four hours work. The hardest task is cutting the shrinkwrap carefully on each box, although opening each box and finding and replacing the badly printed cards takes some time too. I elected not to invest the time or money in re-shrinkwrapping. No complaints so far, but I imagine if I sold in game stores I might need to rewrap them.

I really wish I didn't face this problem, but it's not insurmountable. In about four hours work today, I fixed about 12% of my print run. I have 79% of the print run (860 games) left to fix, so another 27 or so hours of boring labor to get them all done.

Esker net revenue so far

I'm going to add a graph here for folks interested in the business of self-publishing a game. I'll update this over the next year or so as the project continues.

The graph here shows all my expenses to date (all the stuff below zero) and all my net revenue from sales (the stuff above zero). The sales income already has the fees deducted (for sales on my site, that's credit card processing and shipping; for sales on Amazon, that's their fees). I'll break even when the stuff above the line matches the stuff below the line.

Note that the dates here aren't evenly spaced, so while time advances to the right, its speed isn't even. The net revenue (income minus expenses) figure now is -$3,109, so I have a lot of ground to cover to break even. Here's a representation of that.

At my current price of $14.99, which is the same on my site and on Amazon, I net the following:

PlanktonGames.com: about $10.99
Amazon.com: $9.54

In both places, the shipping is free to customers, meaning that I pay for it. Initially, I was going to charge shipping on my site, but I changed it once I learned that even non-Prime Amazon sales had shipping included when you do fulfillment by Amazon. I thought (a) people might resent the extra shipping charge, since folks are getting used to free shipping, and (b) it was nice to have the same price on my site and Amazon.

At those prices, I'll need to sell a bit more than 300 more games to break even, although I'll obviously incur more expenses as I go if I continue to do advertising, send out review copies, and run into other stuff such as NC sales tax.

Board Game Geek Listing for Dr. Esker's Notebook

I got approved and listed on Boardgamegeek.com:

Doctor Esker's Notebook on BGG

Still waiting on approval for the game images, although they've approved one of my videos. Getting there.

I also listed the game on the Geek Market within BGG - we'll see if that goes anywhere.

Videos for Doctor Esker's Notebook

I've created two short videos showing the game. That was fun - lots of filming and editing and learning new software.

The first video here is a sample puzzle (not one from the game, just one that's similar to the game's puzzles to show how it works).

I did that one straight and to the point. I worry that it might be a little dull, but it definitely shows what the game is like.

The other one I did more creatively. I imagined two game podcasters, both aliens, doing an unboxing video for my game. I really don't know if this is a good idea, but I had a lot of fun with it.

Doctor Esker's Notebook: One week in

OK, I've had a published game out there for one week. Yay! Here are some numbers:

• I started with 1080 copies; I've sold 24. 
• After shipping (which I'm offering free and covering from sales revenue) and payment processing fees, I've cleared about $220 in net revenue. I'll owe a little bit of North Carolina sales tax on in-state sales.
• Of the 24 sales, at least 22 are to people who have a personal connection to me. One of them I don't have a name for yet, and one of them (purchased on Amazon) seems to have found me in another way, but I don't know how. 
• I really need to expand my sales beyond just people who know me, because I don't have 1080 friends.
• I've spent about $3300 on this so far, as broken down in the chart here:
• That comes to about $3 per game in costs. After the selling and fulfillment fees on Amazon (I'm having them ship the product), I clear about $7.50 per game. For the ones I've sold on my site via PayPal and shipped myself, I clear a little under $10 per game. So, I have to sell somewhere between 500-700 of my print run to make back what I've spent so far. 
• I've done small ad campaigns with Facebook affinity ads and Google search ads directed to my site. They've both produced about the same (small) number of clicks, but Facebook has about 400 times the impressions (showings) as Google. That suggests that Google search results are much more efficient (i.e. clickable) than  Facebook ads. Neither of them have (as far as I can tell) resulted in any sales. Not sure I'll continue with those.
• Board Game Geek's minimum ad package is $500, which would mean it would have to produce at least 50 sales to pay for itself. If reports from Kickstarter campaigns (which don't even have real games yet) who've advertised on BGG can be believed, that might be possible.
• I do have a bit of a secret weapon, although I have no idea how strong it is. Although I no longer have an ownership stake in the Snood corporation, my partner there has said he would be amenable to advertising Doctor Esker's Notebook to their mailing list. The audience between Snood and a puzzle card game probably doesn't have a strong overlap, but it might have some, and there may be some residual Snood customer goodwill there.
• I've sent the game out to several reviewers. I'm hoping to get some reviews up, either from those review sites, or from Amazon customers, or Board Game Geek users, before I do too much more marketing, because right now, there is no way for a potential buyer to know if the game is any good or not.

I'll update more later, but it's been a really exciting week.

Amazon product titles

I visited Board Game Geek to see if they'd approved my listing request for Doctor Esker's Notebook, and I was excited to see an Amazon ad for it. I hope that other folks are seeing the ad, as I don't need to buy a copy myself, but it was still cool to see it.

I noticed that the other products have long names that include descriptive text, and I thought that might be a good thing to try. In an ad like this, people wouldn't really know what the game was. So, I changed the name on Amazon to "Doctor Esker's Notebook, a Puzzle Card Game in The Style of Escape Rooms." I hope that will give people a better idea of what they're looking at, and it might make the game's discovery via search a little better too.

Doctor Esker's Notebook - released now!

I've got my new puzzle card game, Doctor Esker's Notebook, printed and ready to sell (well, I already sold the first copy). It's up on my website above and also on Amazon, which is really neat to see. I shipped them 44 copies, and they went live on Sunday night. Come have a look!

Spider-Man for PS4

Here's my nickel review of Spider-Man for PS4. My Spider-Man is seen here overlooking Washington Square Park, near where my son Nick goes to school. Here's my nickel review of Spider-Man for PS4. My Spider-Man is seen here overlooking Washington Square Park, near where my son Nick goes to school. I generally don't like superhero stories much, unless they're played for laughs and acknowledge how ridiculous the situations are (c.f. Deadpool, Guardians, Avengers I, Thor: Ragnarok). I haven't found their stories compelling, their settings or cultures realistic, or their heroes human and interesting, and I have come to hate that they nearly all end with one side with arbitrary superpowers battling another side with arbitrary superpowers, leading to an arbitrary-squared resolution that I really don't care much about. I love video games, but I don't see them usually as a great way to tell stories. There are some exceptions (e.g. Mass Effect I, Gone Home), but most of the stories, even the engaging ones, are pretty bland. So, my expectations for a superhero videogame were pretty low, so much so that I wasn't even going to buy it. But the reviews were good, and I'm on sabbatical, so it seemed like I had time to try it. In a word, wow. The gameplay is enjoyable. It's really fun swinging around, and the fighting and the powers and gadgets are fun, if a little repetitive. I'm not terribly familiar with the Spiderverse, although I know the main players well enough to recognize most of them in broad strokes (e.g. I'd never heard of most of the supervillains). New York City is presented at a condensed but real-seeming scale, and with many places I've been to represented with great geometric precision. What elevates the game way above this is the story and the voice acting. It's far beyond the cardboardy quest-chain stuff of most games. Peter is human, funny, sincere, and a good soul. His human counterparts are deeply constructed and well-portrayed. You get to play as some of them, as a brave but normal person, for many parts of the game, which is great as a change of perspective and character. The plot is tainted by the usual super-silliness, but the non-silly parts are really, really well done, and even the silly parts are good. Definitely worth a look. Even if you think superheroes are dumb and played out, which I totally still do. I really liked this one.

Doctor Esker's Notebook is on the way to being real

I just took a huge step on what's been a slow, twisty, often stalled journey toward publishing a game. I sent art for my puzzle card game, Doctor Esker's Notebook, to a printer.

I'll talk more as I get up and running with sales about the finances that went into this and the process of starting up this venture, but for now, it's just exciting.

Esker card game quotes and pricing

Getting some quotes back from manufacturers. A big variety in price points and discounts. The game is at a minimum 72 cards in a tuckbox, although I have considered extras like a two-piece box and an instructions sheet. I already have an instructions card, but it might be cool to have that be more obvious.

Here's what I have so far for quotes.  Tuck = tuckbox, 2P = two-piece box, I = small instructions sheet.

Some notes:

• Ace (aka PlayingCardsIndia) is coming in at the most economical. They only bid for one print run, so they may have even steeper discounts at higher orders - I just extended their line so that I could see them relative to others. 
• A two-piece box is way more (+$1-2) for some companies and not much more (+$0.50) for others. 
• At a potential retail price point of $12 or $13, assuming I use my own art and don't get it redone, I'd probably be able to cover other costs (advertising, equipment, my time) at the Ace bid, but not necessarily too far above that. I don't want to order too many to start, because it's an unproven product in an industry that I know well as a customer but in which I have very limited experience as a seller. 
• I've checked into selling at Amazon, and for something like this, they'd take about a $3.40 commission per order for just providing a purchase link and collecting orders for me to fulfill, and $7.00 if I have them do the whole fulfillment thing (they warehouse and ship the game, including via Amazon Prime). I'd like a presence on Amazon, but I don't know which option to go with. If I'm paying $5 per game to print, there's almost no margin for the Amazon fulfillment, but if I'm at $2 per game, then I could still make a few bucks that way. If I do the packing and shipping, then the margin is considerably larger, but I lose the Amazon Prime advantage and have to do the work myself, which may include equipment and will include my time (though not likely too much).

New Puzzle Game - Dr. Esker's Notebook

I've been working on a new puzzle card game over the summer. It's modeled after an escape room experience, but based in a deck of cards. The cards have a series of puzzles to solve, each with differing mechanics. It's been a fun time, and I've tested it with a lot of folks, including family and friends. I also sent some copies to volunteers my college class, which I figured would have some puzzle enthusiasts.

Anyway, it's been a fun project. So fun that I've made up another two puzzle decks. The thing is called Doctor Esker's Notebook, and the conceit is that a mysterious professor has left behind a puzzle-filled notebook. The game cards are scans of pages from this notebook (which I actually made in real life with, like, glue and stuff).

Website is here: http://planktongames.com/esker

I'm wondering if this is something I could print and sell - got bitten by that bug again. Might go through with it this time.

Ludum Dare #41: Mortal Keybat

I didn't post about this back when I wrote it, but I did an entry for Ludum Dare #41. The theme was "Combine Two Incompatible Genres," so I did a Karate Champ style fighting game with a typing tutor. I did pretty well in some categories of the judging, and it was a fun time.

The game page is here, with a link to the playable game.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/mortal-keybat

Ludum Dare game - Tycoon

I completed my fifth entry in the Ludum Dare game competition last weekend. I wasn't sure about how fun it was at first, but it seems to be garnering a mostly positive reception. Either that, or the LD judges are just being kind, which I think sometimes happens. Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Battling the final opponent, Vladimir

Play Tycoon Here (HTML5 in browser)

Ludum Dare judging page

My first new boardgame design in a while is in production at TheGameCrafter.com. Very cool feeling!  It's a worker placement game set at the end of the world. Tentatitve title: Wrath.

We'll see how fun it is (and how completely unbalanced, like nearly all prototypes) in about a week's time.

Results over Four Ludum Dare competitions

I just got the ratings for my Ludum Dare competition game, Domain, written from scratch in 48 hours last month. They were good - this is the second-best finish for me in the ratings, I think. I was curious how I compared, so I did some graphs with my four entries over the past few years. The competition is rated in eight categories, with "Overall" being the most important. My four games were as follows:

• Teeming (LD 23) 
• Evo (LD 24)
• Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (LD 26)
• Domain (LD 37)

Here are the results for those four games, first by percentile (vs. other games in the competition), then by overall rating (1-5 stars). In each graph, the categories are sorted by my average performance for all four games.

Apparently, Audio and Graphics are my weakest categories, which isn't that surprising. Theme and Innovation seem to be my strong suits. Teeming (blue line, my first entry) was clearly my worst showing in nearly all categories, and Evo (red line) my best (by percentiles), but Domain (purple line, most recent entry) actually was rated higher in terms of stars. I wonder if the judging has gotten easier over time? Or the games better? Hard to say. Anyway, I seem to be improving as I do these, which is cool. I'm hardly going to sprout an artistic sense in my late 40's, but it's fun to do these, and I still get some props for innovative, so that's OK by me. 

Ludum Dare 37 - Domain

I competed in Ludum Dare #37 in December, where you create a game from scratch in 48 hours. This was a rough one - it came right at the end of the semester, which is tricky, and it was also happening right after my wife had surgery, so I was focused on her needs first. The theme was one I'd voted against - "One Room." Many creators just ignored the theme, or made whatever game they wanted as long as it nominally fit in one space. Only a few really integrated it. That made for a lot of similar games, all limited in scope. So, not the greatest competition topic, I think.

I had a hard time figuring out a concept, but I ended up making a game which was a tank game, but in a weird world where you're trapped in a room and just shoot the walls, not at other tanks. I thought it came out OK, although I didn't have much time for polish. I did it using Unity, which I've been experimenting with for a few years, as opposed to CraftyJS, which I used for my previous three games. I turned it in a few hours early, actually, so it's not as polished as I could have gotten if I'd ignored the rest of my life, but that wasn't in the cards.

The game, called Domain, is playable on the web here. Let me know what you think. I did OK on the ratings - made the top 100 games, sitting at about the 90th percentile of the 901 games submitted for the single-author competition. My competition page (with rankings) is here.

Aaaand we're back...

Wow, it's been a long time. But I'm back, and let's kick the dust off this blog. I've been working this summer on a project I first started way back in 2006 or so, which is a word game based on anagrams. It's been through several iterations, first as one of quite a few puzzles in a multi-puzzle game kind of like the old Fool's Errand game. That one I never finished, but I kept this idea around and developed a Flash version in 2009. It's here. I also never took that anywhere, but it still seemed fun, so I kept the idea around.

I worked on it some a couple of years ago as I was getting up to speed in Unity, and I realized it would probably work as a mobile game. This summer, I got back into it and finished it up. So, later today, I'm going to launch it (as a public beta at first) for Android phones, with an iPhone version coming soon. It's my first foray into mobile gaming (although I consulted on early pre-smartphone versions of Snood for mobile). Here are some screenshots:

PlayStore link is here - should be live soon. Let me know what you think!

Scoring Tracks

Here's an interesting post by a fellow game designer (and one-time fellow improv comedian) Nick Bentley on scoring tracks in games.  I think he makes some great points about the pros and cons of scoring tracks.  As a designer, I've used them a lot in my more complex games. I think they can be useful and fun, especially if scoring is constant and in small intervals, or episodic (e.g. scoring rounds) and needs to be shown to let players know where they stand.

I have to say, though, when I open a game that has a scoring track, it always gives me a little twinge of dismay.  This comes from several places.  One is, a game with a scoring track is often a game that gets bumped into the "too complicated" category, where I'll have trouble convincing people (at least the people around me) to play it.  There are exceptions, of course, one of which is Ticket To Ride, which my non-gamer friends and family enjoy (as do I).

Another source of dismay is that the track always takes up a lot of the gameboard, often with fiddly little stuff that doesn't deserve that much table space and is easily knocked out of place.

A final source of dismay is that it's much cooler to have the game objectives be more obvious, more visceral, than mere points scored.  Think of a Risk board covered with your little armies, or a mass of cards on display in Seven Wonders - cool, obvious indications of success.  Of course, Seven Wonders uses points at the end - the only small clumsiness in a very elegant game, but a necessary one.  In Diggity, I have cards (gold nuggets) that represent their score, so there's no need to mark it separately, and in Horde, I have a limited number of scoring tokens that people collect as the game progresses, both of which methods I like better than a scoring track.


That said, I played Tikal with my son and my dad last week, and had a great time (even as I lost in pathetic fashion).  It's a complicated game, and it has scoring rounds, so the good parts of the scoring track are there - you can see who's ahead, and by how much.  There are only two ways to score, though, so I think it avoids Nick's critique of the track, which is really more of a warning to designers than anything players should worry about.

Ludum Dare 26 Results

Here are my results from the Ludum Dare competition this time around.  Not as good as the last time, but better than my first entry.  My audio didn't work on Firefox for the first period of the judging, so that may have hurt me a little bit (probably not much, since Chrome is more common for LD users and only about half the ratings came in while it was broken).

Some of the games in this competition were really great, and it seemed like fewer of them were terrible than in earlier sessions.  The theme was a challenge; obviously, if you're going for minimalism, it's hard to shine in some areas (particularly sound and graphics, but also depth and complexity of gameplay).  Art's not what I'm good at anyway (see above), so Minimalism should maybe have helped me out :-).