Game Price?

I didn't notice any mistakes, but I did want to note that the numbers I hear much more commonly are 6x to 10x production costs.

If you look at 6x, the lowest end of that, and you're going through a distributor, where you as the publisher are getting 40% of cover. That leaves you with 2.4x. Subtract the manufacturing cost and you've got 1.4x.

Now pay for:

1. Shipping to the distributor (it's on TOP of their cut).

2. Any fixed costs -- your home office or warehouse space or what have you.

3. Any non-manufacturing production costs, like artwork, copywriting, etc.

4. Any advertising or marketing you pay for.

5. Any trips you take to go out and promote your game, be it gas to the local retailers or airfare to a gaming convention, or airfare and hotel and all that for a game show like the GAMA Trade Show (where you actually got the distributor to pick up your game and got some retailers interested).

6. A bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting or omitting.

At this point you've paid for your very base expenses. If you had a 1,000 copy print run and they cost $2 each (cheap game), then the retail is $12, you got $4,800 from the distributor (in the ideal but totally unrealistic world where he bought them all at once). Subtract items 1-6. My estimate, for most folks, is you'll end up with less than $1,000 remaining. You may well be negative at this point.

6. Taxes on your remaining profit, likely including self-employment tax, for a small publisher, making it at least 40%.

Now you've got $600, in what I'd say was a best case scenario.

Likely, the distributor would buy maybe 200 copies to start with. If you don't get rid of them within a year, you'll be paying tax on that unsold inventory, too.

Yet if you sell tham at 10x, who will pay that much?

New publishers tend to succeed only when, as far as I can see (in part because this is true of almost all business), they produce their third or fourth game, and name recognition, getting their manufacturing channels set up, a good distributor and retailer network, learning "the hard way" a bunch of times, etc. have all ben ironed out. That means losing money on the first game, and the second, and maybe, if you're lucky, breaking even on the third, etc. And still dealing with the odd utter failure here and there.

There's a reason they say the way to make a small fortune in the gaming business is to start with a large one. It's a tough, tough biz. Hopefully new American interest in boardgames can start making up for sluggish interest elsewhere (like Germany), and keep this puppy floating.

Oh, and good luck with your game! ;)

-- Matthew

Another thing to consider - regardless of what cost-plus multiplier or profit margin you think you'd like to get from each sale, you should not ignore what other similar games sell for. Certainly, you'll want to make a profit, but when you calculate all your costs, if that means you'll have to sell your game for significantly more than other similar games, beware. Likewise, just because you could produce your game for a few cents each, doesn't mean you should sell it for $1, even if that resulted in a huge profit margin for you - you may be leaving money on the table.

Bill

yea you sell it for $20, and lower the price when all .75 mil bought it, lol...

Right. Not so much LOL, as that's how you have to price things in a retail market. It may well be, if you position yourself correctly, that you can sell 300 of them at $10,000 each!