P 500 for the hobby game designer

I think one of the big things you would have to do would maintain some relatively high editorial standards for the site. Make sure that all the games listed are ready for the press, and have accurate quotes. Perhaps even require all the designers to use a particular fulfillment house as well. So that when someone puts in a preorder they can be pretty sure that if the game reaches 500 they will get their product.

You would have to spend some money on the website.

Be ready to process credit card orders, since most hobby designers won't be able to.

Jpwoo makes some good points about quality control and liability. Still all businesses have to face these issues and a Hobby Game 500 is an untapped market that I have heard spoken of before. I guess it’s a matter of who gets there first and does it right. Having a system like this would reduce the risk for independents which would be great for the BGDF members that can’t afford the price tag even for a short run.

The ransom model is, more or less, the p500 model. Sit around and wait until the income crosses a certain threshold before the game is released. If it never crosses; the money is returned.

The ecomony of scale is sort of interesting in the current implementation of the p500 system. There are apparently enough historical wargamers (at least 500) who are willing to put up some large amount of money ($70 in some cases).

It's interesting from a statistical point of view in that economy of scale doesn't matter too much is you can find the correct market size of people who are willing to pay anything for a game they want. It's the wonderful world of
the Long Tail.

I don't know how well this would work coming from a relatively unknown independant designer of board games; GMT apparently has a very good reputation for wargame; with some well known designers in a niche with VERY hardcore gamers. I don't know how well that would work as the gaem designs would move closer to Euro/Family Strategy styled game. It would be a very interesting experiment to watch, however, to see what kind of games that format of selling would bear.

From a first time designer I think this type of system would NOT work, realistically, on a sight unseen game. That said, I think if you produced your game as a PDF and then ransom system was used to go to print, then people MIGHT pay for a game to get it to go to print after they've played the PDF version.

The problem is, that people aren't going to let an unknown designer hold onto their money for a year at a time. Greg Stolze's ransom model is over a few months (I think) and it works at that speed because Greg is a known designer.

What probably makes more sense is to get people to answer the question, "would you be interested in buying a copy of this game for $30.00 if it goes to print", following up with those people when enough people have answered in the affirmative. And then setting up the cash intake system using the same website Stolze uses to take preorders.

I don't think you can get people to commit cash for an indefinite period of time if you are an unknown quantity.

By the way, I followed the meaning, but what is "p500".

p500 stands for Project500. It is a system of pre-selling a game that GMT uses that is very similar to the ransom model.

Click here for details.

From what I'm able to gather, if you are interested in a game, they put you on the list (with some amount of discount of the future price to produce). When they get 500 interested buyers, they tell you that they are ready to order the parts, and ask for your money to purchase the game. At this point, they wait for at least for 500 REAL orders. Then they print to demand, and alter the cost of the game based on the print run.

Again, this works for them because they are a well known supplier to a niche market that knows pretty much exactly what they are getting. I don't know what the market would be for something like this with a relative unknown designer/publisher going after the "wide net" of Euro/Designer themes and mechanics. But it obviously CAN work under the right circumstances.

I think with enough support visible on the site you might overcome this. For example posting the rule books, showing graphics etc...

Being able to demonstrate that you have a real professional product to sell is going to be a key element especially until credibility can be built up through a series of quality runs.

Just to get things rolling it might be worth doing a very small print run for a game a P100 or 250. This is not likely to make a profit since the cost per until will be very high but it will be easier to get enough people signed up to cover the bills and if the game is both good and well made the word will spread.

All pretty expensive for a 'hobby site'

Web sites hosting and registration is actually very cheap and its not that hard to design a web site especially if you have good GUI to work with. The cost for a secure credit card system is another matter, I use paypal myself so I don’t know that much about it. Mastercard has some detail on how to set it up at

http://www.mastercard.com/us/merchant/security/what_can_do/SecureCode/in...

I think the reasoning behind 500 at least for GMT was with that amount of preorder they could cover the costs of a full print run.(1000? 5000?) I don't know how big their runs are.

I could see this scaled back for a smaller print run.

I just read about this....

Some group is putting together a print run of Die Macher, and it looks like they are trying a variation of the p500 system.

Read about it here.

Basically, they are trying to get 750 pre-orders, which, I assume is the cost to make their initial print run, whatever that may be.

Anyway, for those who are wondering if people would do this for a German/designer/euro game, this is a pretty good metric to go by. Die Macher is considered one of the best games ever made (though, it appears to be quite a long game). And, as of now, they are up to 300 pre-orders. I don't know how long their website has been up.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that they are fairly unknown. But this is what an unknown designer would have to face initally. Additionally, this is pre-ordering one of the highest rated games of all time (by boardgamegeek standards); so I imagine that an unknown game by an unknown designer would rate a many fewer pre-orders.

It will be intersting to see how their progress, well, progresses.

(And now I have to decide if I want to get in on the pre-order!!)