The Goodwill Of Others

Yesterday I posted a Geeklist on BoardGameGeek describing my two years trying to get Reiver Games to the the point where it could support me as a full-time employee who draws a reasonable salary.

I've had to admit in the last couple of weeks that Reiver Games is still a long way from that point and that I need to bring in some money way before Reiver Games reaches that point. So I need to take some form of gainful employment and run Reiver Games in the background. I've really enjoyed running Reiver Games and I want to continue to do so.

What stood out on the Geeklist was the goodwill of several of the commenters. Several people were disappointed that it hadn't worked out for me, several offered their sympathy.

A couple of guys who had visited my stand at Essen felt bad for not buying a copy of Sumeria, despite it not being their sort of game! While that sentiment is nice, I don't want to do well because people feel sorry for me, or because they want me to live my dream. I want people to buy my games of course. But I want them to buy my games because they think the game will provide enough enjoyment to make it worth the cost. I want them to be bought and played until they fall apart, not sit on a collector's shelf as another unplayed game in their collection.

What also stood out was the comment by my friend and playtester Paul:

I'll keep supporting you and sending good wishes your way whatever shape Reiver Games takes - I still believe that if anyone can make it in this industry it's you! And I promise, in public, that I will purchase at least one copy of every Reiver Games publication to do my part to keep you in biccies! Maybe others could do the same ?!? If your next project is the one we've playtested then I AM OFFICIALLY VERY EXCITED!!!! It is an awesome game of much awsomeness! With extra awesome on the side! It will be perfect present material for friends (both gamers and non I think) and has been enjoyed by all the York fraternity who have tried it so far. Good luck! Don't give up!

Paul's pledge is incredibly generous. It's in no small part due to his generosity, his compulsive collecting of games and his friendship and wish for me to succeed. But I like to think it's also because we have a similar taste in games and he figures anything I publish will be to his tastes. Paul is a True Fan.

With 3,000 true fans I'd have sold out of all my games. But that's one in every 2,200,000 people in the world population. Considering most of the world population will never hear of me or my company, and of the proportion that might have a slight chance of stumbling across me most have no interest in board games it's a pretty tall order.

What I need to work out is how to reach those potential true fans and convert them. The games I like are pretty popular - there must be more people out there who would like It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria if they played them. How do I get the games in front of them?

Sumeria Computer Game v0.2

As promised last week, there's a new version of the Sumeria computer game available for download and testing.

This version is a big step up from the last version in that you can actually play the game! However, there's still some functionality missing: noticeably, there's no AI (all human players) and you have to play on a single machine (no play by email/online functionality).

The setup file will run on a windows computer, and requires version 3.5 of the .Net Framework. Please feel free to download and play it and post any feature requests, feedback or bug reports in the comments below.

Comes a Time

I've been running Reiver Games for three and a half years now. For the first year and a half I was running it as a hobby - making the games by hand in my spare time around a full time job in IT. Two years ago, I decided to give it a go running Reiver Games as a full-time career.

After two years I'm now in a position to determine whether or not I've been successful. For the first three years Reiver Games was both profitable and growing (both turnover and profit growing). This year the turnover will be slightly down on last year and I probably won't be profitable. It's clear that even in the good years I'm earning nowhere near enough money to invest in new games and make a living. My games just aren't selling quickly enough.

I've been in the enviable position of not needing to earn a decent wage for a couple of years, but sooner or later I need to start bringing home the bacon. It's clear the Reiver Games is a long way from doing that at the moment.

So now what? I've got a few options, thanks to my IT training, which can earn a decent wage, and the fact that Reiver Games is not really enough work to keep me busy full-time. My options in preference order are:

1. Do some part-time work as an IT consultant through Reiver Games. I keep the company running, continue making games and yet still earn a decent wad of cash.
2. Get a full-time job in IT, working for a company that will let me continue Reiver Games in my spare time. Games production will probably decrease but at least it's still going.
3. Find a business angel who will invest enough cash in Reiver Games that I can draw a salary from the company.
4. Shut Reiver Games down, fire-sell the remaining inventory and get a proper job.

I really want to continue running Reiver Games, so Option 4 is a last ditch that I really don't want to do. Furthermore, to get an IT job I'd need more recent programming experience which I don't have.

Interestingly, I've recently been approached by a former employer to see if I want to do Option 1 with them; and a very famous, very successful web company who were wondering whether I'd like to work with them (Option 2 or 4 - not sure which yet). This company is notoriously difficult to get a job with, so I was flattered to be approached by them, and now have a second interview next week.

To get back into the swing of things I've been doing some online coding exercises at TopCoder and making some progress on the Sumeria computer game. It's almost at the point that you can play it on a single computer (only against human opponents). I'll post when the next version is ready.

Which option will I choose? That depends largely on what opportunities I'm provided with - I'm hoping that one of these two developments comes to fruition, and I can choose Option 1 or 2. Either way I'm going to have to sort something out fairly soon.

If you're disappointed that this sounds like the end of Reiver Games, I certainly hope it won't be - and I hope to be announcing my next game within a month or so.

Promotion Response

Three weeks ago I mentioned that I was trying to set up a promotion to encourage US shops to stock my games, and to help those that already stock my games to sell more.

The deal was that Alliance one of my US distributors, who have my games on consignment would offer my games at a discount price to their retailers. The games would be offered at 25% of US MSRP to shops that buy from Alliance. The restriction was that each shop could only buy at most one copy of each game, for demo purposes only - this wasn't a way for the shops to get cheap copies for resale.

The way my consignment deal works with Alliance is that at the beginning of each month they email me purchase orders for all the copies they've sold during the previous month, and then I invoice them for those sales.

This means I've got a very good idea of how well the deal is going, since I'm told at the end of the month how many copies they've sold. Sales last month were up on January's sales, and I know that in the first two and a half weeks of the deal they've sold 28 copies of It's Alive!, 32 copies of Carpe Astra and 25 copies of Sumeria through the deal. Since I know that each shop can only buy a single copy of each game I know that at least 32 shops have taken advantage of the offer already.

I arranged to offer the promotion for a month, and then we'd check how it was going and work out whether it was worth continuing it. I'll be checking in with my buyer at Alliance in a week or so to work out whether it's worth continuing the promotion.

In the meantime, I'll be able to track over the coming months whether sales seem to have increased (remembering the seasonal dip in sales at this time of year).

One thing I'm still not sure about. Why the differences in sales of the promotional copies? Why has Carpe Astra sold more than the others (considering it's my slowest selling game overall). I'm also wondering whether the total is more than 32 (i.e. did every retailer than bought a cheap copy of It's Alive! and Sumeria also buy Carpe Astra, or are there more than 32 takers?

New Website Feedback

My friend Dunk is trying to get into web design, and as a portfolio project he's giving my website an overhaul. If you've got some spare time I'd appreciate it if you could compare the current website with this version of a new homepage (with no working links) and let me know in the comments what you think.

I'm also interested in what you think the current website is missing, or what cool new stuff you'd like to see.

Hit-Driven Industry

Recently I had some friends round for a day's gaming, and one of them happened to mention that board games must be a hit driven industry, like computer games (one of them works in computer games). He mentioned that most games probably don't make much money, or even make a loss, but this is covered by the hit, which is so wildly successful, that it pays the bills for years to come, and provides plenty of income which can then be risked on another batch of contenders, one of which may also be a hit (but most of which won't).

In the three and a half years that I've been publishing board games, I've read a bunch of things that make me think my friend was correct in his description of the market:

• Wired report that over 15M copies of Settlers of Catan have been sold.
• In 2008, 75% of Steve Jackson Games' nearly $3M turnover came from Munchkin products (7 years after the original Munchkin release).
• Bruno Faidutti, designer of over 50 games was making more money from Citadels than the rest put together in 2004 (several years after Citadels first came out).

If you're going to start a company publishing original games there's two likely ways to succeed doing it:

1. Start with a massive hit, that funds the rest of your product line for a while, until you're established.
2. Start with a massive wad of cash, that allows you to establish yourself with a reasonable product line and gives you time to find your first hit.

Success or failure will rely on a few things: ability to manage your finances, ability to market your games, ability to keep costs down and not least ability to choose successful games.

There's no way to guarantee a game will be a hit. Playtesting helps, but that's not the be all and end all - your playtesters might love it, but be unrepresentative of the market. Gut feel combined with a good knowledge of the market and what's successful helps, so does excellent marketing that makes everyone want a copy before it's released.

It is at least six months since the release of all my games, with none of them selling like hot cakes I realise they are not going to become massive hits. I still hold out hope for them being successful (i.e. profitable), but it's not going to happen overnight. I need a real breakout hit, something that is hugely popular and sells extremely quickly. But how do I convince the designer of such a game to bring it to me rather than the established publishing companies, and will I recognise it if I see it?

Liquid Assets

In the publishing business you want to do two things: make stuff (in my case board games) and make money. If you're honest you're doing thing A to do thing B.

But the whole process is cyclical. You can't make games without some money to buy them (and pay for the artwork and marketing), and you can't make money without games to sell.

Publishing is one of those businesses where you have to shell out a lot of cash up front. I pay my artists before the game has been manufactured. I pay my manufacturer before I've sold more than a handful of copies.

For the last three years my company has been profitable, i.e. it's worth more now than it was last year, and so on. All sounds fantastic doesn't it? The problem is that my assets are mostly stock. Stock is not a liquid asset. What's a liquid asset? According to Wikipedia:

A liquid asset has some or more of the following features. It can be sold rapidly, with minimal loss of value, any time within market hours. The essential characteristic of a liquid market is that there are ready and willing buyers and sellers at all times.

Clearly I can't just sell all my stock instantly at full price, it takes time to sell stock, so stock is not very liquid. Why is this a problem? If I receive an excellent prototype tomorrow that I want to make immediately I need to be able to pay for it. The manufacturer will only accept cash, so I need lots of cash on hand to fund the manufacture of my next game. If all my assets are stock then I can't make another game until I've sold enough to fund the next game.

Of course, the other problem with stock is you don't know how much it's worth. You know what you paid for it. You know what it could be worth if you sold it all at full price, whole sale price or even the average price of your sales to date. But you don't know how many you can sell. You might have sold the last game you will ever sell yesterday and all your stock is all firewood. Or worse: firewood you are paying to warehouse.

What can you do to avoid this problem? Probably the easiest thing is not over-produce. If you order 5,000 games and only sell 1,500 then you're in trouble. If you produce 1,500 and sell 1,500 you're on to a winner. The problem there of course is that the more copies you make the better your profit margins or the cheaper the final product - which could lead to more sales.

Another thing you can do is try to drive sales early. The faster you sell your games the sooner you turn them into cash that can be re-invested into new games. It's probably worth making less money sooner than more money later.

Breaking into Shops

If you take a look at my stockists page on my website, you'll notice that there are almost as many UK stockists of my games (that I know about) as there are American. America however is a much bigger market (I know of 600-odd games stores in the US and Alliance service 2,500 game and comic shops.

So why is my market penetration so much better in the UK despite several US distributors? There are several reasons:

1. UK shops like to carry UK publishers' games: they're local
2. It's easier for me to contact UK shops by phone and in person
3. It's easier for me to organise events in UK shops
4. My games are cheaper in the UK (less shipping)

So what can I do to improve the number of shops in the US (and Canada, Germany and the rest of Europe for that matter) that carry my games?

The first thing I did was to email all the shops I could find an email address (or web form) for, introducing my games and asking them to consider stocking them. That seemed to go pretty well, but several of the shops wanted demo copies of the games, either to see them before deciding whether or not to stock them or to allow demos of store-owned copies to help them sell the stock they have.

It costs me at least £21 to send a set of all three games to the US so it would be a very expensive effort was I to supply copies to all those who wanted them from the UK. However, my US distributors have stock on hand in the US, and can fold demo copies in with the rest of their stocking order to the shop in question, so the shipping is effectively free. So I'm trying to set up a promotion where one of my distributors allows shops in the US they service to buy my games at a reduced price. Apparently some big US publishers offer shops the chance to buy demo copies at 25% of the full retail price - so that's the deal I'm trying to set up.

One of my US distributors currently have my games on consignment: they have a decent amount of stock of all three games, and they just let me know how many they've sold each month and then I invoice them for those sales. Since they haven't already paid me for the stock they've got on hand, it's going to be easier to set up a promotion with them than someone who has already paid me full wholesale price for the stock they are offering at a reduced price.

Obviously the price I've negotiated with the distributors for the ordinary copies is based on them selling the copies at the ordinary price, so I've got to negotiate a new price for each game when sold through the promotion. Also, I don't want each shop to stock up on cheap copies - I want it limited to one copy per game per store, purely for demo purposes. Fortunately, this is something the distributor can organise.

I've gone around the houses a bit trying to find the right person at the distributor to talk to about this, but hopefully it's going to be sorted pretty quickly, now that I'm talking to the right guy. Things are also being slowed down by the time difference - it usually takes 24 hours to get an answer to my questions :(.

The Offer That Will Not Die!

At the beginning of January I offered free worldwide shipping on games bought from my website, as an effort to boost sales and to raise awareness of my games and company.

Due to some technical problems at PayPal, I've been unable to cancel the deal at the end of January like I planned, so it's still running on my website at the moment, and it will remain so until PayPal fix the problem with their buttons feature. I would say that this could be your last chance to take advantage of the offer, but it might finish Monday or it might finish in 2011!

Was the offer successful? I think it was. I sold nearly thirty games that I doubt I would have sold otherwise, either through my website or through retailers and distributors.

My big concern was that the offer would spark a rush of sales from countries where I already had distribution, effectively hurting those retailers and distributors who are already my customers. The good news is that only five of those sales were from countries where I already had distribution (four from the UK and one from Hawaii). The rest came predominantly from Australia (half of all the sales), the Far East and Norway.

One of my other reasons for the offer was that I hoped that getting the games into the hands of gamers would hopefully lead to some more sales - Aaron buys the game and plays it with Bob and Carol, Bob thinks it's okay, but Carol loves it and buys her own copy (which she later plays with Dave and Ellie ...). In one case this definitely happened, which is a great feeling. Aaron (real names have been changed!) bought a copy of Sumeria. A week later he bought another copy - he said he loved it and he was buying a copy for a friend. It's this kind of sale that's the ideal - the game is bought (this applies to all sales by definition), played (some collectors own hundreds of games they've never played), and the people who played it enjoyed it enough to lead to another sale.

In my mind that's a win, now I need to drive more sales, to hopefully lead to more. I'll blog again next week with what my next plan is.

Contacting Shops

Over the last year or so I've managed to pick up twenty distributors for my games. This is obviously a Good Thing(tm), since I can now get my games in more shops and hence more exposure and hopefully more sales to actual customers.

So far, when I bring out a new game I get initial stocking orders from my distributors, and often a restock of the others. Occasionally I get a restock order for one or more of my games out of the blue.

Over the Christmas and New Year period, with no new games released, I've not had many restock orders - most of my distributors still have stock of my games on hand. In an effort to help them sell their stock and encourage them to re-order, I've been contacting shops in the US introducing myself, my company and my games.

I've managed to build a database (read spreadsheet!) of 611 stores in the US, including their location and contact details. That's great - if I could sell two copies of each game to all those stores I'd have sold a huge percentage of my print runs in one fell swoop. Now obviously, lots of those won't want to carry my games because they're not that heavily into board games and they only want to carry the really big names. However, a few of them would want to carry my games, only they've not heard of them - they've slipped under the radar as they receive a welter of information about hundreds of new games.

I think my email marketing campaign has been remarkably successful. I've got to assume a lot of my emails will end up in a spam filter and in many cases won't even be read. However, of the stores I have contacted before today (the ones I contacted today haven't had much of a chance to respond!), 10% have responded to me via email.

That 10% includes 4% who already stock my games, and another 2.5% who have placed orders with their distributors as a result of my emails. Where I've been copied on the emails to their sales contact at the distributor they have usually picked up two or three copies of each game.

What surprised me the most though was the number of stores with no website (not even a Facebook or MySpace page) and the number who don't provide an email address on their website. I can see why they wouldn't want to expose an email address to the world (I get enough spam on mine), but there are ways around it (online email forms, possibly with captchas, obscured email addresses (e.g. jack (at) reivergames (dot) co (dot) uk). I would have thought as a store you would want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to contact you. In total, I couldn't find an email address or form for 113 of the 611 (that's 18%!).

I think this has been a pretty successful effort, I'm just kicking myself that I didn't do it sooner - especially when I had a new game coming out. I'm going to extend my efforts to Canada and then Europe, and possibly other countries where I already have a distributor.

Incentives

In my last quarterly newsletter I did a special deal for subscribers where they got to buy my games at a discount price. There were a few takers, but not a huge number - there's only four hundred or so people on my newsletter mailing list, and most of them already own one or more of my games.

At the moment I'm running another incentive: free shipping on all my games (but not the Sumeria Expansion) when bought from my website - regardless of where I'm shipping the games.

Incentives like these seem pretty harmless - I get a bit less money than selling at full price, and the customer gets it a bit cheaper than full price plus shipping. However, it's not quite that simple.

I've already agreed to sell my games to a bunch of shops and distributors. Those shops and distributors want to sell my games in their backyard, and due to their nature they will be much better at it than I am: A game shop in Lancaster, PA will have a much better idea of who in Lancaster, PA buys board games than I do, and far more people there will know about the local game store than my website. So I want to keep them as customers, and support them however I can.

The shops and distributors that have bought from me have invested their money in buying my games in the hope that they can sell them on at a profit. If I invite a few select people to get the games cheap from me, that's not really any skin off their back - those people were unlikely to buy from them anyway. In fact, as more people get my games and play them, the awareness of my games increases and it might even lead to more people interested in my games and more sales for my stockists.

If, however, I start undercutting them and making a big splash about it, then it might drive some of their customers who would have bought my games from them to buy them from me instead. That's not playing nice. Instead of supporting them in return for buying my stock, I'm hurting them. In that situation they'd be unlikely to buy more of my stock - leading to fewer sales overall.

There are some places in the world where I've got pretty good distribution: the UK, the US, and a chunk of mainland Europe. Similarly, there are a bunch of places where it's really hard to get hold of my games: Australia, New Zealand, Africa and South America. The free shipping deal was designed to help those hard to reach customers, while having minimum impact on my stockists in the well-supplied regions.

So far, it seems to be working, only one of the orders I've received since starting the deal came from a country where I've got good distribution, the rest came from those hard-to-reach countries - people who probably wouldn't have bought my games otherwise.

So I've sold a few extra games to people who were unlikely to get them otherwise; some people who wanted my games but couldn't afford full price plus shipping got them and the shops that stock them didn't get screwed. All sounds good.

The downside is that I really don't make much money on these copies. For example a sale of Sumeria (plus the expansion) to New Zealand gets me £25. £3.72 of that goes to the tax man as VAT. £1.18 goes to PayPal. £8.81 goes to the Post Office. £0.58 goes to Staples for the packaging. I'm left with £10.71. Still, it's more than I'd get selling to a distributor, and it's money I wouldn't have got without the incentive.

Sales Over Time

Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all had a good Christmas (or other appropriate holiday season). I had a proper break for Christmas and New Year - it felt like the first proper break in years, but I'm sure it wasn't.

I read something recently (I think it was on BoardGameGeek but I can't be sure), that said that the vast majority of sales of a game are in the three months after release. I think they even gave a percentage. I can see that for companies with big marketing budgets that would be the case. Before the game is launched lots of money is spent to prime the market to expect and want the game. When the game comes out lots of people will buy the new hot game, but over time there's another new hot game, and then another, so sales tail off. However, I can think of at least two occasions when the front-loaded sales profile is not the case:

The Smash Hit

I've also read that over 15 million copies of The Settlers of Catan have been sold in the 15 years since it was released. Settlers has been a breakout hit, being re-published in tens of languages and becoming a perennial best seller. I can guarantee that most of those 15 million sales weren't in 1995. It's the same for Carcassonne, Magic: The Gathering, Monopoly, Munchkin, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, and any other game that becomes hugely successful. As more people play it, more people buy it and it becomes a juggernaut.

These games sell because people try it, love it, introduce their friends to it, they love it, some of them buy it, they introduce others to it and so on. As time goes on the demand for the game increases - not decreases.

The Sleeper

When the game is unknown and the company is small and has limited marketing budget then it's possible for initial sales to be slow. Distributors and shops don't pick up the game initially, waiting to see if it's got legs before investing in it. Maybe they get demo copies, try it out, like it and get a few copies in. Those copies won't fly off the shelves because no-one's heard of it, but maybe someone takes a chance and tries it out. Things then follow the Smash Hit path but only on a much smaller scale.

Without much of a marketing budget to speak of, I need my games to fall into the Sleeper category. I've not sold the majority of any of my print runs in the first three months. I've sold a decent chunk of my games in their first three months, but not a majority and certainly not 2/3 or 3/4.

How do I intend to do this? Two main strategies. I need to reach new markets where I don't currently have any presence, and improve my market penetration in markets where I do currently have a presence.

For the first point, I'm going to be contacting as many new distributors as I can, focussing on those that have recently expressed an interest in carry my games (particularly those who approached me at Essen) and those in territories where I don't currently have a distributor (notably France and Australia).

For the second part I'm going to continue contacting shops in North America (I'll do Canada once I've finished working through the US States), this seems to be working - several stores are now going to carry my games as a result of me contacting them.

I need sales this year to be at least as good as last year - it's a tall order, but I've got to make it happen. If you've got any ideas on how to boost sales, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

Merry Christmas

Right, I'm clocking off for the holidays now, so thanks to everyone for reading this year and I hope you all have a great Christmas (or other winter holiday) and a fabulous New Year and I'll see you all in 2010.

The Best Laid Plans

Sometimes you have a great plan, and things outside your control throw everything into disarray.

For the last couple of weeks I've been spending a decent chunk of my time email shops in the US, trying to get them to stock my games. It's been pretty successful, so I am keen to continue. This week, I was going to be playtesting on Monday and I had a hospital appointment Tuesday morning, but other than that I planned to spend 3.5 days on the email campaign.

Monday I went playtesting, then to my German lesson on Monday night. Tuesday morning I nipped over to the hospital as planned. So far so good. I got back to my computer on Tuesday afternoon and experienced yet more internet problems, which had been a continuing problem over the last couple of weeks. Webpages were timing out when I tried to view them, emails were repeatedly timing out when I tried to send them. Everything was a bit flaky. I'd checked with my ISP and they weren't reporting any problems, so perhaps it was a local problem. I pinged Google. Very slow with up to 75% packet loss. Not good. I pinged my wireless router. Very slow with up to 75% packet loss. WHAT? This is not a good sign. I rebooted my computer in Windows (it's a dual boot machine) and got the same result, so it's either a problem with my computer or the router. Then I set up The Wife's computer in my office and her computer was fine, 0% packet loss to the router and 2ms response time. So it was my computer, and since I was getting the same problem in Windows and Ubuntu it was a hardware problem.

This could have been a real disaster, but since The Wife has less need of her computer now, she'd already offered to swap with me. She's also got a work laptop she brings home too. I'd started to install stuff on her machine in Windows (Vista :( ) a few weeks ago, but it hadn't been a priority. Now it was. Wednesday I spent all day trying to get Ubuntu onto her machine. She had a single large partition on her hard drive, so I needed to re-size that to make room for a ext4 linux partition. Fortunately, Vista comes with partitioning tools. Unfortunately, there are some problems. You can't shrink a partition if there are files at the end of it. You need to move the files first. Which you can do with a defragment and optimise. But not if the files are immovable. So I needed to reduce the number of immovable files. This was well into Yak-shaving territory by now. I turned off hibernation, deleted the hibernation file, turned off paging and deleted the page file, I turned off system restoration, and deleted most of the restore points. Finally I was able to run defrag and optimise (two hours), shrink the partition, turn everything back on and install Ubuntu. I finished at 11pm on Wednesday.

Thursday morning was spent setting up Ubuntu how I wanted and re-installing my data. The Wife had booked Friday as holiday, but decided to take Thursday afternoon and Friday morning off instead, so I took those off with her.

So I've got a working computer again, and I got my playtesting done, but not a lot else this week. It's frustrating when unexpected circumstances take control, but every now and again it can't be helped :(.

The Links in the Retail Chain

As I've mentioned before, there are basically four links in the retail chain: manufacturer (that's me!), distributor, shop and customer. Ideally what you want is to get your product to the customer as quickly as possible.

It's possible to skip steps, either by selling directly to the customer (via your website or at a convention for example), or directly to shops, but you'll never hit the big time doing that unless you have an extremely popular website.

What you want to do is get your game carried by most shops. Most shops won't want to order enough copies of a game to make it worth your while selling to them directly, in addition, they want the convenience of dealing with a single supplier (or two) for all the products they carry, rather than dealing with hundreds of manufacturers. So you want distributors to carry your products.

Distributors will either pay you when you invoice them for an order or when they sell to a shop (if the games are 'on consignment'). If they pay on invoicing, they won't place another order until they've sold the first order to shops, so you want shops to carry your products.

Similarly, shops will only re-order your games if customers buy them, so you need to get customers to want your games.

You will get a little help from one link to the next (distributors will tell the shops that they are carrying your products, shop staff will tell customers that your games are available), but you really need to get your marketing to work on each link in the chain.

I've got a pretty good network of distributors, some of which I've contacted myself, some of which have contacted me and some of which have been asked by their customers (the shops) to carry my games. I've spent some money on online advertising and I occasionally make a fuss on BoardGameGeek to contact customers. In addition, I attend Essen, several UK conventions and I'm currently doing a tour of UK game shops to promote my games to customers.

So the missing link is clearly the shops. I've been thinking for a while about how I can best contact the US shops (there's at least 2,500 of them!), while spending the least amount of money. I've considered paying my distributors to advertise my products to their customers; getting volunteers to demo games in their local stores and now I'm trying something new: email.

Email has the advantage of being free, and simple to do. The downside is that any email I send is going to be to a public email address from a webpage which is likely to be heavily spammed, so my emails might not get through, and if they do they might themselves be considered spam.

I'm currently sending a brief email to every shop I can find out about, introducing myself, my company and my products and asking the shop to consider stocking them. I ask them to let me know if they will start stocking them (or do already), and give them an incentive to reply by offering to list them on my website as a stockist.

In addition to sending the emails, I'm building up a spreadsheet of all the shops I find out about, including their contact details (phone number if I can't find an email address) and whether or not they've replied and are a stockist. I'm using the FLGS of the USA meta-thread on BGG as a starting point to try to find out about the shops.

So how's it going? I've had nine replies so far from about 100 emails. Most of them already carry at least one of my games, two are going to carry them from now on. That seems a pretty good response rate for an email marketing campaign. I'm going to keep it up for a few weeks, and see if it leads to any re-stock orders from my US distributors.

Hobby Publishing: Less Risky

In my last post I showed you just how scary the figures could be for trying to make games for a living. They weren't actual figures for one of my games, but they were indicative. In the comments Daniel asked what about hobby publishing - how does that compare (I paraphrase!). So here's the answer.

Just over three years ago I decided to make and sell some copies of Border Reivers, a board game I had designed over the preceding five years. With little money to throw at the effort and little faith in my ability to sell a lot of copies I chose to go down the hobby publishing route: I would make a small number of copies, largely by hand to keep costs down.

I worked out that I could make 100 copies for £1,255 plus £376 on overheads (I wasn't paying warehousing costs, or myself any salary, but there were a bunch of tools I needed to make the games. To keep costs down I ordered the wooden and plastic pieces all at once (the more you get the cheaper they are), and did the same with the printing. I got a digital printer to do all the printing for me, just onto SRA3 sheets of paper and thin card. I got them to laminate it all to to make it more durable, but I was going to do all the assembly myself. The total price was £1,631 or £16.31 per copy. To cover my costs (plus the cost of attending various conventions and setting up a website I chose to price the game at £30, less than twice the manufacturing cost. I doubted very much whether anyone would pay more than that for it, especially as the cost of shipping would be on top of that. Obviously I couldn't afford to sell to distributors or shops, so I had to hope that I could win enough people over at conventions and via the internet to cover my costs.

With no fixed overheads (no warehousing, no salary) the time it took me to sell the copies didn't really matter - it just came down to whether or not I could. I needed to sell 55 copies to break even, which considering I had no market presence and no reputation seemed like a lot. If I did sell all 100 copies I would stand to make £3,000, or a £1,369 profit.

In the end I damaged some pieces so I only ended up making 96 out of the 100, and some of those I gave away (or kept), I made £2,600, so just under £1,000 profit. Since all those sales were within the first year I gained 60% on top of my original investment, a far better rate of interest than any other savings investment would have offered!

Boardgame Publishing: Not for the Risk Averse

I get lots of emails from people who are interested in publishing a game of their own design. Some want to start small, like I did with Border Reivers and the limited edition of It's Alive!, others want to jump in at the deep end and get their games manufactured professionally and try to sell to shops.

To do the latter you've got to be prepared to risk a large chunk of money and hence the possibility of failure and the loss of that large chunk (or a proportion of it). I thought I'd give an example here with some numbers, so you can see what I mean. These aren't accurate figures from one of my games, but they are indicative, so not miles out either.

Let's say you're a small publisher (like the now legendary Reiver Games), who want to aim at the smaller, lighter, cheaper end of the market. You've designed a game, and you think it's a winner. You think it would sell well at around £20-25. So the first thing to do is to price up getting it made. The more copies you make the cheaper it will be per copy, but the bigger the risk involved as you will have to invest more money, and sell more copies to break even/make a profit.

To sell to shops and distributors you need to be able to make a profit when selling the games at 40% of retail: i.e. £8-£10. Out of this you need to be able to pay your overheads, wages and marketing, so you really need to be getting the games make for around 20% of retail: £4-5.

You approach a manufacturer and get some manufacturing quotes. Your quotes come back as: £9,000 for 1,000 copies (£9 per copy), £12,000 for 2,000 copies (£6 per copy) or £15,000 for 3,000 copies (£5 per copy).

If you want to only make 1,000 copies you need to either sell it at £45, sell it at £25 with almost no margin, or do something in between. Remember to make a profit you need to sell at least the break even number (if you are selling at £10 to distributors and they cost you £9, you won't break even until you've sold 90%, i.e. 900 copies, and even if you achieve a sell out, you'll only make £1,000 profit, which is probably not enough to cover your overheads, wages and marketing budget). If the market for your game at £25 is only 900 people will buy it then you will at least cover the cost of manufacturing, but you will lose money on overheads, etc.

Making 2,000 copies you need to either sell it at £30, sell it at £25 with a 66% margin, or do something in between. Now the break even number at £25 RRP is a smaller percentage of the print run (60%), but with the bigger print run this means more copies (1,200). If you manage to sell 1,200 you've covered the cost of manufacturing, but not your overheads. If you sell out, you've made £8,000 (minus overheads, wages and marketing budget), but can you sell 2,000 copies? It doesn't sound that many when you consider there are 300 million people in the US and more in Europe, but with your marketing budget what proportion of those people will hear about your games? And what proportion of those who hear about them will be interested? If the market is 900 people you will lose £7,500.

If you go for 3,000 copies then selling at £25 RRP (i.e. £10 to distributors) then you will break even at 1,500 and if you sell out you will make £15,000! Of course, that means selling even more copies. If the market for you game is only 900, then you will lose £10,500.

The million dollar question is how many copies of a game can you sell? It depends on a lot of factors. The quality of the game. The effectiveness of your marketing. The price point you've pitched at (you'll sell more games at £5 than at £50 all other things being equal). When you start out in this business you don't really know what you can achieve, that information comes from experience. If you've never made a game in your life you've no idea how many copies you can sell. If you've sold 20 games, with sales of between 1,200 and 12,000 copies you've got a much better idea of how many copies you can sell of a given game at a given price.

A further spanner in the works comes from the time to sell out. Say you make 2,000 copies and you will sell them all. Great. That's £8,000 in the bank. Minus overheads. Let's say your overheads are £1,500 a month (which includes a modest wage, warehousing and a few other things). If you sell out in a month you've made £20,000, minus the manufacturing cost: £12,000 and one month's overheads: £1,500. So £6,500 of profit. Nice work. But one month seems a little unlikely. Let's say it takes you six months to sell out. Now the overheads are £9,000 and you've lost £1,000. If it takes two years, then you'll lose £28,000!

How on earth can I still be in business I hear you ask? My overheads are extremely low (I'm still not taking a salary), and having multiple games means I've spread the risk. Also the overheads only apply once. My overheads are the same whether I have one game or several, so getting income from multiple games all offset the overheads.

For the record, It's Alive! has been out nearly 15 months and I'm still a good distance away from selling out of it.

Playtesters Chosen

A big thank you to everyone who volunteered to help me test the storytelling card game. In addition to those of my current playtesters who have expressed an interest, I would like to send copies to:

• Skiznills
• FatherPhoenix
• jafrank

Please could you guys email me with your street addresses so I can get copies in the post to you.

The Experience

I've been enjoying the words of wisdom of Brett J. Gilbert recently. One of the things he said recently made me think, and it is the starting point for this blog post. At first I thought it was something he had said in one of his two recent blog posts, but on re-reading them I think it must of come from an email he sent me and a few other UK games designers.

What Brett said was:

... when game players (hopefully) say “I want to play that game again!” what they mean is that they want to repeat the *experience* of playing the game, something that is more than simply the sum of the game’s mechanics.

This is something I've considered in the past when discussing Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game. BSG:TBG is a fairly simple game when you get down to the mechanisms involved, but the experience (when played with the right group of people) is much better than the sum of the mechanics. It's a game of paranoia, suspicion and table talk. Everyone is trying to uncover the hidden traitor, except the hidden traitor who is trying to frame someone else without being too obvious. It's a game where a lot of the fun comes from accusing everyone around you of being a "frakking toaster" (the TV show's TV-friendly swear word, and epithet for the TV show's robotic bad guys who are all chromed up - like a toaster). It's a huge amount of fun.

Why bring this up now? I've been sent a submission fairly recently that's tickled my fancy. In the two months since I received it I've played it with a bunch of people, who have all been entertained by it. Those of you who stalk me on the internet will probably know I've been enquiring about artists for it, and looking for North American playtesters for it.

It's different from the other games I've done. It's a pure card game (no components other than cards) and it's a very simple game, strategically very simple. But the experience makes it something more than the mechanisms would have you believe. It's a story-telling game, driven by your handful of cards. There's no deep, overarching strategy: you play the cards you've got. What makes it so entertaining is the cards themselves. Some of them are sensible, some of them are funny by themselves, but when you combine them in one of the 260,000 possible combinations even the straight ones often end up in hilarious stories.

Is this game going to wow fans of deep strategic eurogames? Probably not. But I think it might sell very well, especially in America (where most of my business is), if I can just get the marketing right. It's a silly, funny game, that could potentially appeal to the legions of Munchkin fans in addition to anyone else with a sense of humour.

It's still early days - I've been constructing playtesting copies to send to my playtesters. I need more feedback. Is it really funny? Could it be funnier? Is it too simple? Too complex? More information will help inform my publishing decision. But at the moment I think I'm onto a winner...

Looking for More Playtesters

It's that time again. I've received a submission that I need to get playtested more widely. In particular I want to find playtesters from North America (the best market for this game, I believe).

The game is a fun, silly, card game for 2-6 players than plays in less than 30 minutes. It's very language dependent (hence I'm not looking for European playtesters, I can't see I'll sell many copies there), since it's a fantasy-themed storytelling game.

If you're up for some light-hearted, simple fun, please post a comment explaining why you'd make an awesome playtester for Reiver Games. I'll pick some people (using my arcane selection criteria) and send them a copy of the game.

All I'm asking from you is that you play the game several times, keeping records of game length, scores, number of players, what everyone thought of the game and any ideas you might have for tweaks to the rules or cards.

Thanks!