Another good session

I got a chance to play Diggity with another set of new players - friends who live down the street from us.  We had eight people, and the game only really works with 4-5, so we took the unusual step of going with partners - four teams of two.  That's not something we ever did in my family, but it actually went pretty well here; I'd have thought there wasn't enough to plan to give two people enough to do, but it actually worked OK.  The game went well, too - some interesting strategic miner and tool choices, some brother-sister rivalries kicking in with tool-stealing, and an exciting finish where one player ended up kingmaking to finish it off.  They went with a coin flip rather than actively selecting who to make win.  That kind of situation is not ideal, but on the other hand, it was good that the game ended up close enough that there was no clear winner until the very last gold card was revealed.

As with other plays of the game with new folks, the rules are different enough from a standard card game that it takes a little bit until people are familiar with what's going on.  The family we played with here are experienced game players, so that helped, and we had my family around as well, so the teaching was a little easier there.  By the end, they'd figured out a lot of the strategy and were making some interesting choices.  The game drags a bit with new players (and goes slower with four regardless) - something I'll have to look out for, since first impressions are so important with games.

It was fun to see it work again, and to see new people enjoying it.  With friends playing, you're less likely to hear any strong criticism, and it was late enough that the kids were getting a little silly, but I think everybody had a good time.

Indie game publishing costs, or the grim reality of game economics

Today, I'd like to share my thinking with regard to the economic viability of publishing games with relatively small print runs. This would cover either small game companies or self-publishing - whatever you want to call it, that's what I'm looking to do.

To get started, I've solicited manufacturing cost estimates from a number of manufacturers both in the U.S. and overseas. There is less difference there than I'd thought, although overseas sourcing is a bit cheaper at most production run sizes. That's before factoring in the hassles of additional shipping, customs, transport, etc., which (along with a general preference for U.S. production) may well be enough to move me back to a U.S. printer. Regardless, I've compiled and graphed my various estimates for Diggity, a card game with 96 cards and a box. Some estimates are higher, and some are lower, but they generally fall along the curve I show here (click on all the graphs to see a larger version):

So, you can see there's a big economy of scale at work, with a run of 2000-3000 games being necessary to get to where the pricing is a good deal cheaper, and a run of 5000 or so to get down to about $2.50 a game.

Knowing how much you can make the games for is only half of the information you need to figure out if this is going to be a profitable venture. You also need to figure out how much you can sell them for. That's tricky - there are a lot of mass-produced card games that are somewhat like Diggity. The GameWright card games retail for about $8-$12. They have a big box, lots of art, and they obviously benefit from a big print run. They usually have fewer cards than my game. Set retails for $12-$14 - also a big, popular game. Fluxx, which is probably more parallel to what I'm doing, retails for more like $15-$16, although it now has a bigger box than I'm including in my estimates here. 

Even so, that sounds great - I can make the game for $3-$4, and then sell it for $12, or even $16! Profit! But that's not how it works. The $12 or $16 is the retail price, and other than customers to whom I sell directly, I'm not likely to get the retail price. If I sell directly to a game store, they're going to want to buy it at maybe half of retail, so that they can make a profit. Worse, if I sell through a distributor, the distributor is going to want to buy it from me for maybe 40% of the final retail price, since they need to mark up when they sell to retailers.

Let's make some conservative assumptions. Suppose I'm only able to get a retail price in line with my cheaper competitors, like the GameWright card games. Even if mine's better, and has more cards. Suppose I can get $10 retail for it. That means, if I'm going to sell through distributors, I need to assume I'm only going to get $4 a game for my product. That means I can modify my graph to show where I'm profitable and where I'm not as follows:

On the graph above, I'm only making money on my games if I can get them produced for less than $4, which is only true if I'm in the blue zone. Which means I need to print over 2,000 games just to get to the point where I could possibly make any money. And these are just the production costs - they don't count advertising, legwork, artwork, web design, office supplies, Internet costs, web hosting, shipping costs, transaction fees, returns, spoiled or damaged products, non-payment or outright theft, and on and on. 

The above also makes the rosy assumption that I'll sell all the games I make in a reasonable amount of time. It's possible that sales will go very slowly, and even if I'm potentially profitable long-run, I'll have to make a really big initial payment and then wait a long time (years) before I see any return on my investment. Worse, there may not be that many customers out there for my game (although my shareware experience has taught me that the web, and the world, are pretty dang huge). Suppose, though, that the limits of the exposure I can get and the interest of consumers are such that I can only ever expect to sell about 4,000 copies of my game. That's not a conservative estimate - lots of companies go with smaller print runs, and many many games sell less than that number. But even so, that limits my potential profits as shown below:

My blue field of happiness and profitability has gotten a lot smaller. Not looking too good.

Another concern is how big that initial investment has to be. As you can see above, the cost per game decreases significantly the more you buy. The counterpart to that, though, is that the amount you have to invest increases, because you have to buy each of those games to reduce the per-unit cost. The green line shows the total up-front manufacturing cost (marked on the right side of the graph) that I'd have to shell out to get the game printed.

To even get to the blue zone, I'm looking at a significant initial investment just to get started. Here's an example of how that can be pretty grim. Suppose I really want to publish my game, and I want to make a profit doing so. But I only have $9,000 to spare to get started (call that my Investment Limit). If I spend all of that on printing, at the prices above, I can only print about 2400 games (call that my Production Limit) at a cost of about $3.75 a game - barely below the $4 price I can get from the distributors. That's shown here:

My profitable zone has shrunk to a tiny triangle, almost definitely not enough to cover my other expenses, and my business is doomed before it starts.

Depressing, eh? Well, you have to be realistic. But what are some ways that I could push against this inconvenient truth, and actually make a self-publishing or indie company economically viable? Here are a few:

• Put in a lot of money - Suppose you can put in more personal funds, or you can raise money from investors. If you make a bigger initial investment, you'll have lower costs of production, and you'll make more money with every sale. You'll have a lot of products to sell, so you'll want to do a lot of advertising and promoting to get your game noticed by potential customers. But if your game is just not that good, or not that marketable, and you do run into a finite market for your game, you'll just have spent (and lost) more money, and you'll have a lot of sad stacks of little cardboard boxes in your basement.
• Charge a higher price - if you can get people to pay a higher price for your game, then you move the red 40% of retail bar in my graphs upward, and your profitability increases a lot. Given the way the production line is curved, you'll also be able to stay profitable at smaller print runs. Having a higher price than competing games will of course lose you some purchases, but if your game is good enough, and especially if it has some kind of draw, interest, or unique feature that others don't have, you can still sell out. Remember, the benefit of indie publishing is that you need to sell out, but your print runs are pretty small. It's a lot easier to get rid of a couple thousand games than it is to get rid of 10,000 or 20,000.
• Sell direct - This is a big one, and maybe the best option here. If you can sell your games direct to consumers, then you don't have to weather the discounts that distributors and retailers expect - you get the full purchase price, which means your margin is a lot higher. There are a bunch of easy-access ways to do this - through your own website, through eBay, through Amazon - but the challenge is getting noticed. If your game is sold only on the Internet, you've got to be visible to lots of people in places they go to look for games. That's a big challenge. It's possible that you can sell in a variety of ways, too - get your games out to distributors and retailers as best you can, but also sell in person, over the web, at conventions, by the side of the road - anywhere you can find where people are willing to buy.

There are some other ways I think you can get around this perplexing economic model, and I'll discuss them in future posts. But, like any business venture, self-publishing a game or starting a small indie game company is a big gamble, and not a particularly good one. You shouldn't do it with money you can't afford to lose, and you shouldn't stake your career (or your family's future) on succeeding.

Diggity works, again!

I had another four-player game of my game, Diggity, with the lunchtime gaming group at Guilford College last Friday.  It went well, I thought.  The four-player version has been tricky for me - under my original rules, the game got bogged down with four players, because people felt like they had too little control over scoring, so they tended to just play it safe, just stalling, playing to collect tools rather than score points.  I addressed that by reducing the hand size from five cards to three cards for four players (it's still five cards for two players and three cards for three).  That seems like it would add a lot more luck to the game, and I think it does add some, but it also forces players sometimes to take some risks that they'd otherwise prefer to avoid.  It definitely plays better and finishes faster, and it doesn't seem to hinder the game experience much if at all, which is cool.

The play this time was a little slower than other groups I've played with, and I think it dragged just a tad at times when people took a really long time to choose a play, but there was more strategizing and complex, careful play than I've seen before, too.  This round of play certainly had the most psychological analysis and warfare I'd seen going on - I thought the game had the potential for it from the design, but these players were laying it on pretty thick, gambling on how the others would respond when they chose to mine gold, spending some of their lower-ranked tool cards to try to entice others to blow theirs, and generally thinking hard (sometimes over-thinking!) about what to do.

Neat to see it working well, and being enjoyed - there's no greater reward in game design.

Diggity Design

The game I'm initially trying to publish is my card game, Diggity (see Diggity on the main Plankton Games site). Here's the design process.

First Prototype:

I made the game on some half-size index cards (A8 paper size, about 2"x3") I could get in Germany, where I was living for the second half of 2009. Nothing fancy - just ballpoint pen on tiny little cards. The game was fun - I played it with the family on some of our train trips, and then we tested it some more in our apartment. I changed some of the rules and added new ones, and together we got it into playable shape.

Design Prototype:

For the next phase, I made up computer art for the cards and got the game printed up through TheGameCrafter.com, a print-on-demand (POD) service that's been really helpful for me in getting nice-looking versions of my games printed up for not too much money. More on POD and TheGameCrafter.com later. I ordered a copy for myself and was able to get it brought to me in Germany thanks to a visit from my mother-in-law. It was really neat to see it in print. The cards were poker-size, which initially seemed very big compared to the half-index cards, but they are also a more traditional size and feel like real cards.

Playtesting and Refining:

I played the game with whomever was willing, and I sent copies to some friends. This was really useful - each group came up with different questions about the rules, and I don't think any of them got everything correct. I used their problems and suggestions to refine the rules to be more thorough, including more examples and pictures. I haven't had a chance to do much blind playtesting yet, and none with people who aren't my friends or at least acquaintances. The Yachting Club at Guilford College has been very helpful - they've been willing to play a number of my games.

Initial Release:

I released Diggity on TheGameCrafter.com (it's listed here) after getting back from Germany. I sold a copy almost immediately; I still don't know who bought it, since TGC fulfills the orders. A few days later, I sold another copy, and I think this one was bought by one of the GameCrafter employees, since he reviewed it (see the complete Diggity Review). So, my first completely independent blind playtest by somebody I didn't know was actually by one of my first two customers, which isn't ideal. However, I'd done enough testing with different groups by that point that I was comfortable releasing it, and the positive review indicates it was probably OK to have done so.

Future Plans:

I haven't sold any more copies in the couple of months since the release, although some of my friends have expressed a willingness to buy copies if I had any to sell. TheGameCrafter is a great service with quality products, but it's expensive (as you'd expect from a print-on-demand shop). I've set the price for the game low enough that I only make a dollar or two per game, and the shipping is expensive. I've tried to get some more copies printed through SuperiorPOD.com, which would be a little cheaper, but so far, that's been a black hole - I made the art to their specs, submitted the art and my payment, and have heard nothing for three weeks, despite e-mailing and calling repeatedly.


I've also been looking into actually publishing the game, either by submitting it to an established game company or by self-publishing. That journey I'll describe in more detail later.