Making and Marketing Your Game

Part 7: Marketing: The Vital Factor

by Steve Peek

When I created my first game, I was too filled with the excitement of seeing it in print to worry about marketing. I labored under the naive belief that if I built a better mouse trap people would soon beat a path to my door. It never occurred to me that all the work I had put into designing the game, then nursing it bit by bit through the art, printing, and fabrication stages was but a brief holiday compared to the effort necessary to get and keep the game in the market.

In short, my marketing plans were sketchy at best. Fortunately, I had lived a clean life and Providence came to my rescue. I can think of no other reason for Providence taking a hand. Based on everything I've learned since those early days, there is no denying that divine intervention came between me and total ruin.

My first game went against all the rules. Only a thousand copies had been produced, creating a cost per unit that prohibited the game from being competitive in stores and limiting me to a direct mail market. But I didn't care; I wanted my game done. Its theme was The Seven Days Battles, an obscure campaign from the American Civil War, creating a limited interest item in a narrow market. But I didn't care. It was a good game and I knew I would soon become rich.

It was titled The Seven Days Battles, a piece of originality I had come up with in three seconds when the artist asked me what to put on the box. The box was a bland mix of a black line drawing from a 100-year-old magazine and an unexciting cream colored background. In short, everything about the game was wrong, but I didn't know it then, and I wouldn't have cared if I had.

I had done it the hard way, managing and coordinating each component. Consequently the printed box top label did not fit properly on the box top, the game board was just a hair too large for the box bottom, about a quarter of the die-cutting had to be thrown out because I had not left enough tolerance, and the bargain dice I had found tended to soften and melt in temperatures over eighty degrees. But my hopes were not dimmed. It was still a good game and soon, very soon, people would be flocking to my garage door to buy a copy of the game they had heard about.

Being too impatient to wait for the first printed copies (the world had a right to know about this great new item), I had taken a photograph of my prototype and made up a quarter-page ad, which I sent with a check to the Civil War Times Illustrated magazine. (Sound familiar?) Because of the long lead time the ad did not appear for three months, but as things turned out, it was for the best. The boxes, boards, and playing pieces, which were being made by three different vendors, were almost three months late, and were delivered two days after I received my copy of the magazine with the advertisement buried ninety pages into it.

I frantically began assembling games and packing them for mailing. I knew the post office box would start to bulge with orders. I even contemplated getting a bigger post office box. When the orders did start arriving, I was elated. Every day I went to the post office, picked up ten or more envelopes containing checks, went home and shipped the lucky people their games. I had other ads scheduled to appear in various magazines, but none of them were out yet. I couldn't wait! If this was any indication, I'd hit pay dirt, the mother lode, the glory hole, my own bonanza!

Before any of the other ads appeared (most of them were late) I'd sold nearly four hundred copies of the game through the one ad, and I was seriously considering reprinting to ensure I could fill all the coming orders. It was thrilling to have discovered such an easy and exciting way to make money.

When the other ads finally started appearing, the orders fell far short of my expectations. In fact, they fell far short of reaching the lowest level of my worst fears. I discovered later that I was getting what is considered normal response to mail order ads. my first ad had pulled enormous results because of blind luck. The issue of Civil War Times in which it appeared carried several lengthy, well-written, and exciting articles on the Seven Days Battles campaign and the readers, apparently inspired by all that excellent writing, had ordered my game almost by default.

Had it not been for that monumental stroke of luck, I most probably would not have gotten into the game business. As it was, fate, the cruel mistress who tricks us into believing we are doing the right thing, took a hand. Rather than let me fail and get out of the game business, she lured me into it on a fulltime basis so I might always be plagued with the frustrations and disappointments of an overly competitive, fickle market.

The point of all this is that I was very lucky. I did nearly everything wrong, though at the time I would have told anyone how brilliant I was, paid virtually no attention to what advice was given me, and still managed to break into the game business. if you heed the advice in only one section of this book, it should be this one.

From these naive beginnings, I have learned that the key to success in the game business is marketing. It's not just the key, it's the only thing that matters. I have seen incredibly great games, produced by individuals or small companies, come into the market and vanish without a trace because their creators believed as I did that making the game was the big job and that sales would take care of themselves. I have seen the most mediocre game, produced by a marketeer with endurance, cut a permanent niche in the marketplace simply because someone knew how and where to sell the game. I hope I will be able to pass on some of the knowledge I have gained.

I hope to be able to lay a foundation from which you can begin to build a gaming empire. But to accomplish this, I have to assume you are the kind of person who doesn't give up easily, who can persevere and endure frustration piled upon disappointment and rejection heaped on insult. If, however, you are unable to get out every day and hustle, if you are unwilling to persist against merchants who keep saying they don't want your game, if you don't enjoy laying awake at night trying to develop the next marketing scheme, then the odds are, sorry to say, that you are going to have one of those games that comes and goes in a flash. So for all you hearty souls who still believe in your games, yourselves, and your ability to sell them in a market which thinks it doesn't need them, here goes.

Before selling a game, you've got to estimate the retail price. Before that, you've got to know how much it is going to cost you. Let's take a hypothetical game from start to finish to get an idea of what we're dealing with-but first, let's discuss a fairly recent development in the game market itself.

The popularity of home video and computer games has made a major impact on the sales of board games. At first, the impact was negative. Everyone was spending his money on the cute little games with lit -up monsters eating their way across a screen. As the novelty wore off, people began returning to more traditional games, and the video game boom went into a rapid decline, leaving in its wake a very positive aspect. When video games were the rage they weren't cheap, sometimes costing more than forty dollars. Video games raised the perceived value of games in the eyes of consumers.

Before the fad, game manufacturers believed a price barrier existed and no game would sell in the general market for over ten dollars. Today, as proved by Trivial Pursuit, a well made, high quality game can sell for as much as the video games cost. The only catch is that I'm talking top quality-the kind of package and presentation that someone would buy as a gift for hard-to- shop-for people.

These factors have made it easier for people with a good game and money to produce it to get into the game business. But make no mistake, if a game sells for thirty dollars but looks like it should sell for fifteen, it's going to fall flat.

OK, back to the hypothetical game. Look at that beauty! Good looking game board, great looking box! Say, this is pretty good art; who's the artist? Well, it really doesn't matter now. What does matter are all the art and typesetting costs: at least $1,500. (This figure assumes you shopped around, found a starving graphic artist, and then beat his price down around his ears.)

The next step is to get the four-color separations made, then everything stripped up and ready to be put on the press. LeCs see, that'll come to about $ 1,000 for the seps and another $1,200 for the stripping. It looks like $3,700 has been invested already and still not a single copy produced. These charges are called set-up or prep costs. Some game companies amortize them over the initial print run, others spread them out over subsequent print runs, and still others don't amortize them at all, but carry them on their books as an asset. To get a realistic picture of what the games are actually costing, it's best to include preparation costs in your initial print run. And your initial print run is the million dollar question.

How many units should be made? Make too many and you might wind up eating them with ketchup. Make too few and the cost per game will be so high that the game won't make a profit unless it sells for a little less than a new car. This is a big decision, worth spending time considering.

The basic marketing strategy will evolve from this decision, thus the future Of your gaming empire is at stake already. But don't panic, I'm going to hail you out again. One of the first questions asked at each printing interview is, "How many do you want made?" A question you answer quickly by saying, "I'd like a quote on 2,500, 5,000, and 10,000, with a reprint price for the five thousand."

What you so glibly requested was a quote on three quantities on the initial run, and a quote for reprinting 5,000 copies eliminating any prep or set-up charges. You also just made yourself a little more credible. The reason those numbers were picked is simple.

Unless you have a windfall, or a very rich relative ready to depart on the next flight to paradise, you are not likely to be able to afford more than 10,600 copies of the game. At 10,000, we're talking a minimum of $30,000, and that's assuming the game has few components. Going down the scale, 5,000 copies of the game should cost $22,000, which will make the retail price a hit high, but you still might make a wee profit.

At the bottom of the scale, 2,500 copies will cost somewhere around $16,000, which means that if you are going to try to wholesale the game to retailers, it's going to be very difficult to make anything worthwhile on this run. So why would anyone bother with producing so small a quantity? Because of the options it offers. For the sake of this example, we'll assume twenty-five hundred is the quantity selected.

We've got to assign a retail price to the item high enough to ensure recovery of cost and expenses, yet low enough to make it palatable to interested consumers. First find out what the raw cost per unit is. In this case, it's $7.88 per game if we include the $3,700 spent on art work-already over the retail of some of the cheaper versions of mass market, popular sellers. Well, we'll just have to do our best.

Steve Peek is president of Yaquinto Publications, Dallas, Texas. He has designed, developed or produced over 100 games.

More Making and Marketing Your Game

Back to Table of Contents -- Game News #10
To Game News List of Issues
To MagWeb Master Magazine List
© Copyright 1985 by Dana Lombardy.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com