Distributors and middlepersons

Interesting discussion here at BGDF about distribution, fulfillment services, pricing, and the overall economics of game sales.  The takeaway: In order to make a profit publishing games, you need to be producing your products at 20-25% of the cost of their eventual retail price.  For a game like mine, I think I'd end up at about $15 retail, which means I need to get it produced for under $4.00 a game.

For the curious, "gameprinter" on BGDF is Ben Clark of Imagigrafx, a game manufacturing company.  He also co-hosts the Paper Money podcast, which is a really neat insider's look at the game industry.  "dobnarr" on BGDF is me.

A Funding Model?

Interesting article about an independent game designer/publisher here (via Boardgame News).  That sounds like a good model - pre-sell to raise capital, then ship once you've got the games printed and ready.  But even here, you still end up with the pile of unsold games in the attic, waiting for a distributor to pick it up, and you have to have enough customers willing to pay you for a product that doesn't exist yet to make it work.  The P500 model I've seen in a couple places (e.g. here, at Lock 'n Load Publishing), where you wait to print until you've got enough orders lined up, seems like another similar idea.  I imagine there's a significant loss converting people who say they'll buy a game to actual sales, too - there's probably a good deal of melt involved.

I have a few people ready to buy my game, but nowhere near enough to fund the manufacturing (like two orders of magnitude too few).  I don't think that would be a viable route for me - I don't know enough people, and given that my game isn't a party/parlor game, it's not as conducive to big group events.  The P500 model or something like it might be viable for a second release, once I'm established and have a customer base.

My plan is to make the initial investment to print the games, then pull out the full advertising blitz once I have products to sell - Facebook, web ads, e-mail, hitting nearby stores, and whatever else I can think of.  That model requires a serious investment up front, though, and I may still end up with a pile of games sitting in my basement.

Now, that sounds completely pie-in-the-sky, "if you build it they will come" thinking, which would be dangerous for any business.  Normally, I wouldn't make the investment.  The saving grace here is that I'm planning to advertise the game to the audience of existing Snood customers I've got available.  If they've had a good experience with the computer game, there is a chance they'd be willing to try my card game, Diggity.

More on the economics of publishing in an upcoming post.

Not great news

Jackson Pope over at Reiver Games has an interesting and somewhat disheartening post on his blog, in which he indicates he's not making enough money to run his game company full time, and might be considering cutting back or shutting down.

I've been reading Jackson's blog for some time, and he's an intelligent, dedicated guy who seems to be thinking everything through and making reasoned, smart decisions. I know that most start-ups fail, and that the game market is a tough one to break into, but it's still sad to see that even a careful, clever guy is having trouble making a go of it.

It's not exactly parallel to my situation, since I don't have any intention of giving up my real job, and I'm not looking for another career, but it would be nice if there was a chance there to make some money.

Food for thought, anyway, and not very tasty food.

TheGameCrafter.com

I've used TheGameCrafter.com to create copies of all of my recent game projects. They also have a sales option, so they can sell whatever you create there. It's a very neat service, very cool for independent game designers, where you can get professional-quality components for very small print runs. It's a little expensive per copy, and the packaging is not up to the standards of the rest of the components, but it's well-run, very flexible, and is something I've been looking for for a long time. They seem to be evolving quickly, and they're generally quite responsive to customer/designer requests and ideas.

I wrote a full review/testimonial on their site.

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.

Who I am

The basics - I'm Dave Dobson. I turned 40 in 2009. My real job is teaching (mostly geology) at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina.

With regard to games, I've been playing and designing games since I was a kid. My family still remembers one of my early works, the Roy Rogers Game, a roll-and-move game which was nearly impossible to finish. There was a part of the board where it went something like you had to roll a three, then a six, in order to avoid being sent back to the ranch (the start). As a result, you got sent back to the ranch, a lot. We gave up on it after about a half hour of repeated ranch visiting. My room, desk and attic were full of game ideas, index cards, paper cutouts, and all manner of little bits.

I also loved video games, and I grew up in the golden age of arcades, Atari, and the rise of home computers. Once my family got a computer, I started doing a lot of game programming. I filled many a 5.25" floppy disk (and later, many a 3.5" HD disk, and then hard drives, and now several webservers and cloud space) with computer game projects. Eventually, that led to a series of shareware releases, the most famous of which was Snood, first released in 1996. Snood has been played by millions of people, which is cool and still a surprise to me, who remembers it as an early Mac programming project for me in graduate school in 1996.

I've been publishing shareware games for the past fifteen years, but I've always kept up my interest in board games and board game design, coming up with a bunch of ideas and designs through the years. I've pondered trying to get some of them published, or with publishing them myself, but I was really busy with Snood and with my day job (teaching college). Also, it never seemed like the economics would work out - the games were too complex, with too many parts, and maybe with too limited an appeal, to seek a publisher or to publish on my own.

A couple of things have changed recently. One is that my role with Snood has been reduced. This gives me a little more free time and free brain-space to take on some other projects. Another is, I've come up with a couple of new game designs that are easier to publish - they've got fewer parts and I hope some broader potential appeal.

So, this blog, connected to my new company (Plankton Games), exists to chronicle my thinking, my experiences, and my attempts to get some of my games to market. I hope that readers (if there ever are any) will be able to use what's here to inform their design and publishing experience. Thanks for coming along.

Is this thing on?

I'm hoping to use this blog to record the steps I'm going through to go from a game design to a printed and published final product.