Several have asked about reprints of older, out-of-print, titles. Presumably they were unable to get a copy when the game was in print (didn't know we existed or whatever) and now cannot find a copy on the used market (or don't want a used one). Some have gone as far as suggest we adopt something akin to GMT's P500 program to handle these... the theory being to collect up orders until we hit 500 and then reprint an old game.

That, however, does not do the trick. The lowest economically feasible print-run we can do is 2,000, which will cost the company something like $15-$18,000 in production bills. As these reprints are limited sales items, struggling to get to 500 to be printed at all (and unlikely to accrue much more sales as straight reprints), that would mean I'd have to charge $36 each to have the same cash position I'd have if I'd done nothing at all. Plus, we have to pay for warehousing 1,500 unsold games. Not a slick move financially at all -- we recoup the printing bills, get nothing at all to keep the company running, and add a bit to our existing storage bills.

In short, we end up worse off than when we started.

Add to this the fact that every one of the older titles that could be slated for such a reprint is very much out of date in terms of artwork, series rules edition, and (most especially) diecutting layout. That means that each "reprint" would need to be heavily reworked in design, and completely redone in artwork. What that means is that I'll need to sink several months of work into each such reprint -- time which will have to come from other, newer, more profitable, projects. Doubling the projected price above might be able to pay for my time in design and artwork and the office staff hours needed to keep track of all of this... Now, who really wants a $72 reprint of Barren Victory? Since both Dave Powell and I feel that would be unreasonable, it does not make sense to hang the company's future on doing this.

Finally, if you add those who complain because we'd do a reprint rather than a new game, you end up with my reasoning as to why we don't generally do them.

You may wonder how it is GMT can make ends meet doing their P500 stuff; while I'm not so sure they have been able to do so, I can say their situation is different in two ways. First, they are taking this approach with new game releases, not reprints; therefore they can expect more sales than just those who sign up early. Second, the 500 they are looking at are essentially pre-pub purchases for a game going into general distribution anyway. So, they are getting the 500 direct purchases with the potential of also selling an unknown number to distribution. I won't claim knowledge of how things are going in distribution these days, but two years ago when we punched out of the system, we couldn't expect much better than 1,000 copies sold to distributors. I suspect GMT has (or had?) similar figures. At any rate, that still totals 1,500 units, rather than the 500 we'd be looking at. Given the 40% return on those distributor copies, that would give GMT roughly 900 units of cash value. If distributor sales continued to decline after we left the system (I think they did stabilize at a lower level, but have not yet rebounded), GMT might only be looking at 820 or so units of cash value... perhaps even less (once one accounts for discounts and such).

For us, we look for 1,000 essentially full-value sales in the first few months of a game's life, plus an unknown number of "tack on" sales. These extra sales are things like copies of older titles, mag subs, tweezers, ADC disks, Gettysburg Magazine, empty boxes, spare parts and so on. To date (well, for two years now anyway), this plan has worked remarkably well. All game releases have done their part or more so (DAK more than any of them to be sure... which makes up for the weaker links in the chain and then some). Plus we have come a long way in eliminating our long-term debt load built up during the last few years in distribution.

Our sales last year went a long way toward reducing excess inventory. I still have just too many copies of some older titles left on hand, but the new ones are all in the quantities I want them to be. Building up extra slow-moving inventory would be exactly the wrong path for me to take (heck, buying the current inventory is what got us into hot water in the first place). I agree you have to spend money to make money -- but investing in extra inventory we cannot turn around makes little sense to me.