Publishing The Massive Vs. The Masses - Part 2 of a Cautionary Tale on Breaking Into the Games Industry

Continued from Part 1- Designing The Massive Vs. The Masses.

As discussed in the last part of this story, a few years of dedicated testing and development went into The Massive Vs. The Masses before I even considered publishing it. Once I got that idea into my head I beefed up the quality of my prototypes, with big stiff color boards, painted wooden or sculpy pieces, and at one point, my friend Susan offered to illustrate the cards. She really did an outstanding job, especially considering that I had no way of paying her for all this work if things didn't pan out nicely. This got things to the point where I was seriously hunting for publishers.

Before even reaching that point, a semi-interested small local publisher said he'd publish it if it came down to it, but there was likely a better fit. Everyone's main suggestion of the best fit (and I agreed) was Steve Jackson. Unfortunately, that particular year was more or less the start of the "nothing but GURPS and Munchkin" era, as those started turning into serious cash cows (well, Munchkin was, GURPS has always done well), and they had a whole bunch of more varied games flop. So they were publicly announcing to anyone looking to them as a publisher that they weren't looking for any sort of board games, card games, or minis based games... and MvM pretty much counts as all of the above. Tried anyway, no luck there.

Next on the list, Mayfair, the people who do Catan in the U.S. This also seemed promising. They're set up for doing games with a lot of components, and, as it turned out, were looking into publishing something besides German imports as a change of pace. I pitched the game to them, briefly, they loved it. I went on to explain the added perk of additional stand-alone-but-compatible sets down the road... and they dropped it like it was radioactive. Evidently they, even in the long term, didn't want to give me more than one shelf-slot, and I'm fairly sure I somehow managed to set off their "Collect'em all!" alarm by their wording.

Around this time, I'd caught the eye of a couple of people who run game stores, one of whom also has some first hand experience in these sort of things, being one of the people behind Axis & Allies. He suggested I go to the GAMA (Game Manufacturers Association, don't know where the other A comes from) Trade Show and shop it around there. So I did. This proved to be a miserable experience for me, as yon trade show is held in Nevada, and due to my home construction nightmare leaving me without a roof, I was getting over a bout of pneumonia. There's an interesting story there too, but let's not get into it now. So... I'm running around hunting a publisher, sweating constantly and literally coughing up blood all week long. A couple good things came out of it though.

Firstly, trade shows aren't REALLY a place you go to hassle publishers. They're a place for publishers to hit up retailers trying to get them to carry their stuff. So I literally had people hurling giant bags of random stuff at me (RPG source books, pewter minis, wood-carved oddities. I had to buy more luggage to get it all home). I also spent some time talking to enough people to get a third good potential publisher match. Eagle Games, the people who made the board game version of Civilization (and were doing testing on one based on Age of Empires... darn loosely, played more like Puerto Rico). So I hung out with their rep for a while, showed him the game, and he dug it quite a bit. Said to get in touch with them in a couple months, since they were about to put out an open call for new game submissions, and I was pretty much a lock. Great. Huge numbers of roving retailers also saw my prototypes and seemed darn interested in it.

Then I go home, in good spirits, and shortly thereafter learn that Eagle Games in that short period has come into immense financial troubles (from another deal made at the show oddly enough), filed for bankruptcy, and more or less went completely belly-up. So that's strike 3. Of course, I now have two local stores willing to carry it when I get it published, and a general vibe of "that looks cool" from a broad cross-section of store owners, which, coupled with not really wanting to sign away intellectual property rights and creative control of all this, I decide to form my own company to publish it. Doing this causes credit card applications to start flooding my mailbox, giving me a means to order everything. Great. It also turns out I have a lot of friends of friends in industries that should help me get discounts on the important bits.

So, step 1- Work out a budget. I figured, based on the precedent of other games out there, that I was shooting for a $40 retail price. I've seen other games with the sort of components I'm going with selling for $50 or even more. I want to undercut that because I'm the new company in town, and besides, I have way less overhead I'm sure. All the profits are getting split 4 ways between me (the game's designer), Susan (who did all this artwork for me), my cousin (for doing a lot of heavy testing, and that whole Java bit), and an advertising budget which I'm sure won't stretch too far. Of course, aside from needing to get the game paid for with that $40, there's also the cut the retailer gets out of it. Which, evidently, is 50-60% depending who you're dealing with. So at this point, we have a $40 game I really only get to sell for $20. If I have a budget of $10 for the actual production costs, that leaves $10 of profit, getting split 4 ways, and I actually see $2.50 a copy. 50 cents more than I'd get if I sold the rights off and sold my friends down the river. Credit cards give me about $10,000 to work with, so I can afford to make 1000 copies of the game as an initial print run. I've heard from a few dozen people that that's WAY too many to try and sell for my first foray into self-publishing, but it's also the minimum order for most of the companies I'm having to work with.

So, $10,000 to make 1000 copies of the game. I got prices up front on cards ($2800 basically), I figure maybe $1000 for boxes and instructions. That gives me about $6000 left for boards and pieces. Fortunately, I have ins with those, in theory. A friend of a friend runs a company that makes jigsaw puzzles, and someone who runs a rapid-prototyping company is local. I tell them what I need. With the boards, the e-mail goes to a random employee, with the pieces, I get to meet the person in person.

He is, mildly put, very eager to work with me, and very... creative. The fact that I'm not trying to pitch this game to a larger publisher refuses to sink in, so I keep having to shoot down things like encasing every piece in a clear plastic cylinder. He also kept wanting to make arbitrary changes to a game I'd spent years fine-tuning the balance of, many of which were just plain unworkable. "OK, you know how these boards have hexagonal spaces? You know what would be really cool? If they were all octagons!" Well, aside from having to rework how half these cards work, there's the little problem that octagons don't tessellate. The biggest problem though was that the tight budget angle didn't sink in.

Meanwhile, I get a price back on boards, and it's significantly more than I can afford. The friend of a friend had earlier said he could probably swing a discount (being an owner of the company), so I ask about that... and I'm met with him stalling and putting me off for six freaking months. During this time I find (in theory) sources for everything else. Eventually, I get this here e-mail from him, which I am quoting in full, because it's amusing.

"Hi Jake,
You should always get competitive bids, and have an alternate source.

I've been in the Toy and game business for 25 years and your odds of inventing a game and making any money on it is 1 in 100. However to make 1000 of these games your looking at spending between 15 and 20 thousand. Please let talk you out of this. Why don't you try selling your idea to Hasbro."

Now again, I have already priced everything else at this point, and was just waiting to hear from this guy because he is a friend of a friend, and I'm inclined to work with people I know (or know by extension) if it's likely to work out. I point this out, and Board Production Option A basically gets embarrassed that I called his bluff and I never hear from him again. So evidently, while the friend of my friend is not my enemy per se, he is a huge jerk with no clue what he's doing. The next 3 people I ask about boards give me a flat out "can't do that in your budget" but eventually I find one who says they can, but "that'd probably be too expensive for die cutting, mind if we do it with lasers instead?" Mind? Heck no! Lasers are inherently awesome! Rather embarrassing that that's my line of thought when dealing with serious business matters, but honestly, does anyone deny the inherent awesomeness of lasers?

OK. It is now late October of 2006, I have a price and a time estimate for just about everyone (boards are still "waiting on a quote for the cutting" but seem quite positive). It looks like everything should arrive about a week before NonCon if I time my orders right, and so I do.

The cards are easy enough to work out, but on closer inspection of the art work on high quality card stock, my artist says she can do better, and wants to do some retouching. By the end of it she's put another few hours of fine detailing into every single card, most of which nobody's likely to look close enough to see, but considering that one of the main things she gets out of this is exposure, I'm all for going the extra mile there. This leads to some extra delays there due to a series of disasters, including a hard drive corruption. The dream of having every single piece be a custom sculpted little mini dies, because inquiries into the cost of doing this didn't even yield prohibitively high numbers. People just flat out weren't willing to take on the job. Gamorzilla gets a custom sculpted metal piece because, quite frankly, that bit's non-negotiable here. The army gets little plastic pawns with labels for the most part, but I'm lucky enough for the same company to already have a standard mold that's absolutely perfect for the planes. The Gammy piece is a custom job, so I order those in early November, the rest a bit down the road.

Skipping ahead to late February, I should now have everything. What I actually have is some board samples for quality (amazing) and 60,000 little plastic pieces for the army's set. Cards are taking a bit longer than anticipated, I still don't even have a final price on the boards, and perhaps most distressingly, I haven't even seen a sample of how the Gamorzilla pieces are coming along (turns out a lot of e-mails were getting lost on that front). There goes release date A. The only things I'm not just waiting on though are the optimistic board pricing, stickers to label these pieces with (I have a dozen people quoting 1 week turnarounds, so I've been procrastinating that to keep credit payments down), and the instructions and boxes (also a fast turnaround, and I'd like to have photos of the other things to slap on). Still, it all seems like it's just a matter of time, so I set a new release date for mid-April and passed out coupons for the NonCon people instead.

Shortly thereafter, I check in with everyone to see what's holding up what. Cards are just about on track (it's now April 15th, release date B, and while they aren't here, that's just standard shipping delays). The same, I believe, goes for the Gamorzilla pieces. With the plastic ones here, that just leaves boards, stickers for the plastic pieces, and boxes. So, what's up with the boards? "Well, the lowest cost we've been able to get so far is $9000." Now, they're doing a lot of haggling with other people over cutting what I have them print, so hopefully that'll come down next time I ask, but still, it seems like I'll have to get some more money funnelled towards them. This means budget cuts elsewhere. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure I over-budgetted for stickers and boxes and such.

Or so I thought. Initially low prices there were the result of people misunderstanding what I wanted. One of the lowest quotes I've gotten was $1500... which is actually more than I paid for all 60,000 of these little plastic pieces in need of labelling. So recently I've been doing a lot of haggling and shopping around there.

In theory, I have now gotten the budget under control again (although if the board cost stays as crazy high as it is, I might have to bite the bullet, upping my budget, charging $45 or $50 for the final game, and somehow pulling another $5000 out of the ether for the production costs, but here's hoping it's all good). So now all that needs to be done is some double checking with people about schedules, and hopefully, the third time will be the charm release date wise (May 15th).

Skipping ahead to May 15th, the cards have arrived, and masters of the metal pieces, both looking darn nice. Boards are still in limbo, stickers for the plastic pieces are still rather over-budget, but there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, there also seems to be a toll booth at the end of the tunnel requiring me to pitch in an extra $10,000, but I'll mix that metaphor when I come to it.

The next two or three months are all about hunting for lower prices. They don't exist. Not only do they not exist, but a lot of the prices I originally balked at were overly-generous estimates. That $1500 for stickers? That's on the assumption that they're all identical, not a variety of images. Just the cost of printing the artwork on the boards somehow comes to twice what I was planning to spend on them altogether. The boxes I'd been procrastinating? That's another $2000 and change. Of course, on the bright side, I have my online store up and running by the time these bombshells finish dropping, so I have a few pre-orders wanting to be filled.

OK, it is now Difficult Decision Time. If I cut every possible corner left to cut, use Cheapass Games level production values on everything which has yet to come in (except the stickers, where I simply have to haggle down to something reasonable), I can presumably get back within striking distance of my original budget. Alternatively, I can raise the retail price up to $60, and just concentrate on making sure the production values are as high as humanly possible. Fortunately, a new batch of credit card applications have now come in, actually putting this second option on the table, and buying more time for the 0% interest cards whose year of grace has now run out.

Susan by this time has also, conveniently enough, made it a personal goal to make sure this is the best looking game released this year, if not ever. The same amount of effort that went into retouching the cards is now being devoted to the boards. They go out to be printed for a sizable amount of money on the nice shiny extra-durable hardboard, as was the plan, then shipped to some people whose primary business is making custom wooden GM shields and so forth to be cut at a price I can actually manage. This process takes quite some time, the bulk of the shipment not arriving until some time around Thanksgiving. The price of stickers I manage to haggle down to a manageable point too.

After all the work that went into the cards and boards, I try to take on the burden of the box and sticker art myself, cropping and arranging components of the card art for a busy looking box, and extreme closeups on the pieces. The results of this... look absolutely terrible and she ends up doing them anyway. Eventually, it seems everything is finally coming together for an October release, but with a surprising 3 week turn around on box art, and everything else taking even longer, it isn't possible to feature a nice photo of the contents on the back. Still, while it cost twice as much as I'd hoped and left me with a horrifying set of debts to pay off, it's finally ready to ship out. Now it's just a question of getting it out on the market.

The Horrors Continue in... Marketing The Massive Vs. The Masses - Part 3 of a Cautionary Tale on Breaking Into the Games Industry
- Jake Alley

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