Getting games to distributors

James at MinionGames.com recommends Impressions Advertising (http://www.impressionsadv.net) as both a stepping stone to distributors and a fulfillment service.  I'll have to look into it more closely when I get nearer to having a product, but it looks like it could well be worth it.  I've looked around for fees, and they appear to charge a $250 setup fee plus 18% of net revenue from distributors.

That sounds like a big chunk, but remember that you're getting 50% of retail from distributors, so 18% of that 50% is really only 9% of the purchase price, so you're really getting 41% from them.  If that makes any sense.

If I'm able to get my game produced for $3-4, and the MSRP is $16-20, then I'd get 41% from Impressions, or in the neighborhood of $6.50 to $8.00 a game.  With advertising, setup, and other costs, that's enough to break even if I can sell out my print run, although not enough to make much money doing this.  If they've got a reasonable record getting stuff placed with distributors, then it could well be worth it.  Especially if they've got connections in other countries.

Getting into stores

This is a little ways down the road, but I found myself at our local Hobby Lobby, and I got to talking with the manager there.  I asked him how they get the games they carry (which included a lot of games similar to those I'd be competing with).  He said they are ordered mostly by the national office in Nebraska, but that they sometimes took products from local folks if they thought they'd be able to sell them.

Fluxx was there, at a $16.00 price - that's maybe the closest to what my game will be, since Fluxx is cards only and includes 100 cards.  I think I can make this work at a $16 MSRP, so hopefully that'll work.

Lots of the games had the European CE mark, which I've now figured out what is.  I have to figure out if I can qualify for that, and what it means.

Promotional copies

An interesting thread over at BGDF about places to advertise your game, with a list of five on-line boardgame reviewers.  I think it will likely be worth sending out some promo copies to people if they actually come through with a review or commentary.  And it would be better, of course, if it is positive.  The promos are relatively inexpensive - if I get my printing costs down to $3-4 per game, and I can ship for maybe $4, then I could send out 10-12 promotional copies for under $100 - those are some workable numbers, but I'd have to limit it to sites with an appreciable readership, of which there are few.

Another indie publisher

I've run across a guy, Johnny Wahl, who's farther along than I am self-publishing his own game, called Conquer the Kings. It's a chess variant that supports up to four players on a new board, with piece placement up to the players. Looks like an interesting game, although I'm not enough of a chess player to know how it would go.

More interesting to me is the production and marketing. He's gone pretty high-end with the board and box, printed in the U.S., and he's ordered standard chess pieces from China. The artwork is neat. He's got pictures of the production run, which is really interesting. It looks like (from one of his picture captions) his initial print run was 500 games, and I bet they cost him a lot with those numbers and parts - probably at least $15 a copy, maybe more, which would make the game very difficult to sell through distributors at his $34.95 retail price. But chess is a huge market, and he might find enough folks to buy up those 500 directly without having to go through distribution.

The website and publishing project comes across very much as a labor of love, which is neat. He's living the dream, as I hope to do, although I'd like to do so in a way that has at least a chance of financial success. Wahl has also got an interesting post up on his testimonials page - basically a kindly-worded rejection letter from John McCallion, boardgames editor for Games magazine. That piqued my interest, because Matt Worden (of MWGames.com) recently got a mention from John for his game Jump Gate, sold through TheGameCrafter.com, but with far better artwork and game design than other games available at TGC.

I wonder if I can get my games reviewed in Games? Sounds like great publicity, and it sounds from both of these tidbits that Mr. McCallion actually does take the time to look at the things he gets sent, even if they're not in professional packaging or available in retail stores. Intriguing.

Tasty Minstrel

Michael Mindes over at Tasty Minstrel games posted an interesting defense of a decision to sell one of TM's products, Terra Prime, at half-price through a game enthusiast site called Tanga.  I hadn't heard of Tanga before, but I've looked into it just a little bit, and it sounds like an interesting idea - kind of a Home Shopping Network for games and related stuff along with a community component.

I'd suspected that Terra Prime wasn't doing as well as Tasty Minstrel's other release, Homesteaders, because Michael has started giving out only Terra Prime, not Homesteaders, for his free game Friday giveaway.  He confirms this in his post, indicating he's still sitting on 800-1000 units in inventory with very slow sales.  I'm not sure how many he ordered to start, or what his cost structure looks like.  I know he used Xinghui for manufacturing, which produced cheap but apparently flawed products, and for a game like that to make economic sense, he'd have to have made at least a couple thousand of them.  The print run was 2,000 for Homesteaders, so it's probably the same for Terra Prime, although I can't find where Michael's mentioned the figure specifically.

This was both disheartening and inspiring. Disheartening in that he seems to be living one of my worst fears with this, which is having a significant portion of his product currently unsold and selling very slowly.  Inspiring in that he actually has moved maybe 1000 or more copies, half of those through distribution, within half a year.  That's pretty great, although it would be better were it to continue.

I'm guessing he doesn't suffer as big a markup through Tanga as through retail, although I haven't found anything with their terms yet.  Regardless, at some point, it's going to be worth it to move/liquidate some stock and recoup some of the investment, and the exposure from Tanga may (as Michael guesses) move sales elsewhere as more games get out in the hands of players.

Food for thought, and thanks to Michael for being willing to discuss his business openly.

More GTS09 talk notes - Self Publishing

Here are my notes from listening to another talk from GTS 2009 - this one called Publishing Your Game Yourself (mp3 link here)

The speakers are from Bucephalus Games:
- Anthony Gallela
- Dan Tibbles

Here are my notes:

Opening comments

• Very difficult to sell your own game
• Design, production, manufacturing are easy
• Selling is far harder than all of these
• Important to figure out who target audience is - there's a risk that the game is unsellable
• 75% of new games are essentially unsellable, or they don't sell through their print run

Designing a marketable product

• What's the key to your game?
• Theme?  If so, then the game must pursue the theme at the expense of all other parts
• Mechanics?  If so, then nothing else can get in the way
• Listen to testers - be willing to change the game - don't be too invested
• 1st 3,000 copies are sold based on appearance and artwork - NOT on theme or gameplay
• Shelf appeal is therefore key
• The box should reveal what the game is like - no surprises, no hidden stuff
• Refining a game is key - it often involves removal of features and rules, boiling it down to the central, pure elements
• Blind playtesting - very important; creates a much better rulebook
• Should you be in the room?
• Anthony says yes; your observations will let you see what assumptions they made when there were rules gaps or problems
• Some say no; reasons cited are that the players won't be honest
• Consult retailers and distributors - they are your initial direct customers
• GAMA has free focus groups at the conferences
• Talking to others is key

Selling to a publisher

• Very unlikely to happen
• Game design is easy; everybody has one, so they're cheap and readily available - it's the marketing and selling that's harder and much more expensive
• Game companies don't want to work with you
• They'll often prefer to work with in-house designs, or they're small, and are actually publishing the owner/operator's design
• The numbers for this happening are a fraction of a percent chance - a few games are printed out of thousands of submissions
• To do this, you'll need to do all the development ahead of time - the testing, the rules, the layout, the winnowing out of rules
• Might be worth doing, but expect rejection
• If you're going to do it, look hard for submission guidelines, and then follow them
• Show them a good prototype - they can imagine it better, but you need to make it look good, and make it look how you want it to
• Royalties - no advance, probably 3-10%, average of 5%
• Make sure you retain rights, and you get the rights back after 18-24 months out of print
• 3,000 to 5,000 copies is a good run in the hobby market

Self-publishing

• Don't publish with money you can't lose all of
• Don't start with a big print run - go with 3,000 max
• You'll always find flaws
• You're probably blowing your money
• Maybe 30% of games can sell 3000 copies
• Maybe 2% of games can sell 5000 copies
• Nearly nobody sells more than that on a first game
• There are 1,000 new games published every year - most of them don't get much distribution, don't get sold
• Companies are usually willing to share their sources for production in Asia
• Designers are often blind to flaws - missing words, missing typos, etc.

[Dan Echoed a bunch of the China sourcing talk here]

Distribution

• Game stores nearly always buy from distributors - there are only a few of these
• Toy stores don't use distributors - instead, they'll order directly or from sales reps
• GAMA is a good way to meet up with distributors
• Reps might also be an option if you can interest them
• Market is multi-level
• Distributor
• Retailer
• Customer
• You should talk to each of these folks to gauge marketability
• Alliance would be a good source to talk to; building a relationship with them (and listening to their feedback) is very useful, since they're so big

Post-Talk Q&A Session

• Majority of new game companies fail - 90% of them fail
• Breaking even is success
• Art costs - can be a couple thousand dollars even for simple games
• Might be worth it, but only if you're definitely self-publishing, and even then probably not
• Art schools, commissions are ways around the costs
• Why do game companies fail? 
• It takes lots of work, and you may not be able or willing to put in that effort
• Unreasonable expectations
• Very limited return, and gets frustrating on all the work
• Lack of preparation - getting the design, production, or marketing wrong
• Patents are silly
• Game designs are very difficult to steal, and also very difficult to protect
• Stealing isn't worth it
• Ideas are duplicated

---

This was also good stuff - not quite as new to me or as insider-y as the Chinese manufacturing talk, but good to hear lots of my suspicions and intuitions confirmed.

Trade shows and hawking one's wares

An interesting article over at the Living Dice blog that gives a clue as to what goes on at the GAMA trade show recently completed in Las Vegas.  They've had a series of articles on their time at GAMA before that, and although they've been quite interesting, I've had a little trouble imagining what it's like - you don't get a sense of scale from their pictures.  I have only been to a couple of business trade shows, and those were focused on children's books for some reason.  I've been to the exhibit hall at several academic conferences, and I've talked to a number of commercial folks running booths at those, but I imagine it's not really the same.  GAMA sounds like the real thing, where publishers try to find retailers and hawk their products, and business deals happen everywhere.

I imagine I'll need to consider going to GAMA once I've got a product to sell, although having a booth with only one product to show doesn't sound so great.  I hear that sometimes you can share booth space from a distributor or make arrangements like that, so maybe that will be an option while I'm still small-time with only one or two products.  Or maybe I can just go and buttonhole people in elevators, bars, and men's rooms, but that sounds like a skill I don't have yet.  Anyway, I'll need to figure out a promotional strategy at some point, and GAMA and other conferences may be part of that.