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Nathan McNair
United States
Austin
Texas
Check out Pandasaurus Games at www.pandasaurusgames.com
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My first Blog post on BGG!
Over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to be documenting the design process of my first published game, Roller Coaster Rush, and the process that I’ve taken to self-publish and form my company, Pandasaurus Games.
Today I’m going to be focusing on the perils and pitfalls that you can run into going the self-publishing route.
I'm waiting on some artwork right now from the game’s artist, so it's not really "ready for prime time" yet, but more information will be coming out on the game shortly. You can check out a brief description of the game on its page here at BGG.
The first thing I want to make very clear: self-publishing is not an easy process. It’s complicated and there are legal and tax implications involved in going this route. So please don’t take anything that I say in this blog post as legal or tax advice.
That said, the first mistake that I made was thinking that this would be a relatively simple process. Create a game, get some art, put the game on Kickstarter and get the game published. We’ve all seen the games that are success stories on Kickstarer. Carnival, Eminent Domain, Alien Frontiers. Huge successes, bringing in a lot of funding and not only making it to market, but getting massive name recognition for these titles.
The thing that goes unseen in all of this is the games that don’t make funding goals, or make funding goals and run into problems on the back-end. Not raising enough capital, hidden costs, production problems, and other nightmare scenarios that all keep the game from getting to market. There is a ton that goes into this process, so I want to start off with a couple of simple steps that may get passed over, and I want to go over a few of the early publishing pitfalls that I’ve made or seen made.
1. Form an entity. This is going to be absolutely critical for contract negotiation, as well as giving you some liability protection (see the thing above about legal advice). Working with individuals (artists) was pretty easy prior to forming my LLC. Working with companies was impossible. No one wanted to take a guy with an idea seriously. Using my gmail address wasn’t impressing anyone either. So, I registered a couple of domains, formed an LLC and all of the sudden I was getting responses from people who had heretofore ignored my requests for manufacturing quotes or distribution deals.
2. Which brings me to point 2. GET QUOTES. Not 1 quote, a ton of quotes. I know this seems really obvious, but if you don’t know what it is going to produce the game, ship the game to the US, warehouse the game and eventually ship the game either to stores or your backers on Kickstarter you don’t know what to charge for the game. You need to think through the entire process of making this game. If it’s being made in Germany or China you’ll need to figure out how the game is going to get to the States. A lot of game manufacturers will do this for you, but they are going to charge a mark-up. You need to decide if it’s worth the headache to find a shipping company in china or Germany that can move freight to the US. You could save some money, but it’s going to be pretty hard for you to know how reputable a company you are dealing with unless you have boots on the ground.
3. When selecting a games manufacturer, price is not king. You don’t need to look any further than some of the issues that Tasty Minstrel ran into in their first run of games to know that going with the best quote is not always the best option and won’t necessarily save you money. There are shady manufacturers out there. Find out who has used a company before, check out the games that they have made, reach out to the publishers and ask them if they would recommend using them. See if the quality is up to the level that you expect out of a game. Is it something you would be happy putting your name on? Your company’s name on? Remember, if you go the self-publishing route, as much as anything else you are building a brand here. A couple of missteps and you could find yourself the target of ire in the board game community and have a hard time digging yourself out of the bad PR whole that a few cents a copy saved you.
4. Be open to changing your design. No one wants to pay 70 dollars for a game from an unknown designer. The community is really open and giving to start-up games that seem to have quality components and good game design. But you need to realize it’s much easier for someone to justify spending 30 or 40 dollars on a game than 70 or 80. Once you’ve gotten your quotes back from the manufacturers, work with them. Ask them if you can change your box size to a smaller size. They will know what size boxes you will need. Off the shelf parts are always going to be cheaper than custom produced sizes for chits or pieces. Can you streamline your design down? This is certainly something I ran into. My game design initially had a board to play pieces on, and my quotes came back at a price that was going to necessitate a big price tag. Then I sat down and really thought about the gameplay and realized that with a few very small changed the board and cardboard could be replaced by cards and the game played exactly the same, but cut my price nearly in half. It was an easy decision for me to make to go with cards instead of a board. Obviously some calls will be harder to make than my change, but be open minded and flexible with your games production
5. Distribution may be one of the most overlooked parts of this process. Once these games are made, they need to go somewhere, and your garage is probably not the best idea for them. Do you really have the time it’s going to take to ship off even a small print run of 500 copies? That is a lot of time and effort, and you aren’t going to have the efficiency of scale to get good rates from a domestic shipping company. You could eat up what little profit you have shipping the games out.
Then there is the issue of getting the games into the retail chain. You could sell the game directly only, but you are going to limit your potential sales significantly. You are going to need to work with the distribution chain to get the games into stores, because they are not going to buy from you directly. It’s a hassle for the stores to order from you, and they already have contracts in place with their distribution centers. The really bad news is you probably aren’t going to be worth a distribution centers time either. You are small-fry in the grand scheme of things, so you’re going to need to work with a middle man called a fulfillment specialist. The fulfillment specialist works with a lot of smaller developers so that they have a little more weight to throw around with the distributors than you would alone.
6. Pricing. The final and hardest part. Everyone I mentioned is going to need to make a profit in this chain. The retailer needs to sell at a 40-50% markup. The distributor is going to want a 10-20% markup, the fulfillment specialist is going to need to make money on the game and the producer is going to get their profit as well. A good rule of thumb is to charge 6x your manufacturing cost for the game, sell it to the distributor at 40% of MSRP who will then sell it to retail at 50-60% of MSRP. Being a small developer might mean your margins get shifted since you need the distribution chain much more than they need you. Somewhere in that margin of 16% (cost to develop) and the 40% (cost to the distributor) is your profit. You need to be able to pay the fulfillment specialist, artist, kickstarter and anyone else in there out of this pool of money.
The overall message here is simple: Do the math. Check it again. And again after that. You need to be sure that your funding goal is going to be enough to produce the game, get it to the US and ship it to your backers. Or at least enough to cover enough costs where you can reasonably afford to pick up the slack of any difference. You don’t want to get stuck with a funded project and no way to actually pay to get it to market.
Most of all.. don’t spend money you can’t lose on this. You aren’t likely to get rich doing this, and breaking even will be no small task with a self-published game.
Next week I’ll write something up about the marketing process, with my fiancé as a special guest blogger since she is the marketing whiz behind Pandasaurus games.
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Check out Pandasaurus Games at www.pandasaurusgames.com
