UPCs and ISBNs

One of the things I've looked into for self-publishing is getting a UPC (Universal Product Code).  Looking at games already on the market, nearly all of them have both a UPC and also an ISBN (International Standard Book Number).  I'm still working my way through this, but here's what I've found so far:

UPC

These are granted by a group called GS1 (website here).  It looks like you need to pony up at least $750 to get a set of UPC numbers for your use (the price varies a little based on your expected sales and revenues).  For this, you get a prefix for your company and a set of reserved code numbers you can use on your products.  There are different tiers of registration; the price above is for 1-100 different products.  The initial set-up fee lasts for a year; for subsequent years, you need to pay again, in the neighborhood of $150 per year.

If you don't want to go the official route, and you don't need too many different UPCs, you can buy individual UPC numbers from reseller brokers.  Prices for these vary, but they can be a lot less than the fairly steep $750 setup fee to do it the official way.  Some folks seem to think this is fine; others point out that you're relying on the reseller to stay in business, deliver an unused code, and keep all the registration stuff current for you.  Also, if you did get wide distribution in retail, your codes wouldn't map directly back to your company, which might not be ideal.  However, you might be able to get this to work, and for significantly less money.

ISBN

ISBNs seem to work in a similar way.  There is an agency (a government designated private firm, Bowker) which assigns and records ISBNs.  You can buy them singly, or in sets of 10, 100, or 1000.  A single ISBN costs $125; there doesn't seem to be the big initial registration fee that makes the UPC so expensive.  Ten numbers are a significant cost-per-unit savings at $275, a hundred are $995.  I wouldn't expect an indie publisher to need more than 10 initially, and if you've only got one product, you could buy them one at a time.

So, if I've got this right, UPCs are expensive, but you get them in bulk.  You have to renew them each year with an additional smaller payment.  ISBNs have less overhead and can be bought singly, but they're comparable in cost to UPCs in bulk.  I couldn't find anything saying that ISBNs need to be renewed - they seem to be permanent.

Does  an indie publisher need these?  The answer is probably yes if you want to be picked up by any major retail store or distributor.  If you're planning on selling only over the internet, at conventions, or to your local game stores, then you might not need them.  It looks like getting the codes provides yet another cost (and thus yet another barrier to entry) for somebody looking to self-publish.

Caveat:  I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have experience in the retail market.  The above is based on my research, and isn't guaranteed to be correct or accurate.  Do the legwork on your own to be sure.

Funding via Kickstarter.com

One independent game design partnership, creators of Inevitable: The Game, has managed to fund publication of their game through an online donation-collecting site called Kickstarter.com. Their fundraising page is here.

The deal is, they can collect donations of any amount through the Kickstarter project. If they reach their goal over the fund drive period, they get to keep the pledges. If not, then it all just goes away, and they get nothing. They are going to use the money to design and produce a print run of 100 games, which is really small for a game production run. They've promised rewards to donors, such as PDF copies of the game, one of the games from the print run, T-shirts, and other stuff.

It looks from the link as though the Inevitable project reached $3000 in funding already from nearly 30 donors in only eight days. That was their goal, which means they'll get the money. Great for them!

Here's another game project, Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands, also fully funded through Kickstarter. They were looking to print 500 copies for $7600 (about $15 a game), and they've exceeded that goal.

It seems like this might be a way to fund indie game publishing. Donors get a good feeling for donating, and low-cost reward goodies, almost like an NPR fund drive, and the designers get to publish. For many of the donors, this Kickstart thing has been essentially just a way to pre-sell copies of the game, which is great.

However, before using these two data points as proof that the concept is generally workable, I've got a few concerns or questions:

• For Inevitable, $1350 of their contributions are from three people. I'd be interested in knowing if they'd be able to pull this off without these few angel contributors. For Gentlemen, it's not quite as focused on large donors - most of their donors have pledged $26 or $36 to get a copy of the game, while a small number (13) have pledged $150 or more. This small group makes up 25% of the total.
  
• For Inevitable, you have to donate $50 to get a real copy of the game. On a print run that small, with the components visible in the pictures, I doubt the cost of production is lower than $25 or $30 a game, maybe more. With the bigger print run in Gentlemen, they've apparently got lower costs, as you'd expect, but in each case, they don't have much of a margin.
  
• It looks like the Inevitable guys have a fairly active support group (e.g., they have 88 fans on Facebook) and have had a number of playtest events. For Gentlemen, they've gotten some support in the game media and from a faculty member (the creator is a grad student in design). My guess is that for each of these projects, many of their donors are friends and family, rather than random people they didn't know who happened to see the project on Kickstarter. If that's the case, then Kickstarter has provided only a framework for hitting up friends rather than a magical source of independent financing. It might not work if you haven't got friends, or if you don't do the networking legwork before listing on Kickstarter.
  
• As I said above, I don't think there's much of a margin in either of these projects for profit. It looks like the funding collected will go almost directly to manufacturing costs. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, of course - it's great to have your game printed up and played by hundreds of people - but that makes this a means to support a hobby, not a way to support yourself or a family as a "real" job.
  
• It also isn't a clear path to a broader print run or wider distribution. Again, not a problem at all - if your goal is getting some nice copies made, and getting it out there to your friends and acquaintances and maybe a few others, then it's a clear success. Just not a way to found a company. However, these seed projects could allow the authors to prove that their games have a market, and might allow them to recruit bigger investors or get a traditional publisher to pick up the games, or provide a foot in the door to publishing future works.
  

Anyway, a very interesting model, and apparently in these cases a very successful one. Congratulations to both the Inevitable and Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands projects, and good luck.

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.