Last week I came across this article about board games and Apple’s new iPad device.  It was reporting comments from (amongst other) EA, whose VP of worldwide development was speculating on using the iPad as a way of playing board games. I tweeted about it, but I’ve been giving it a bit more thought and maybe it deserves a bit more than 140 characters.

He described Scrabble, and how the larger screen has the potential to be a new way to enjoy boardgames: the iPad laid down on a table with family and friends.

The idea seems to be that the iPad owner will install a number of games on the device.  When you want to play, say, Trivial Pursuit, you can lay the device down flat on the table, everyone can gather around, and play around it as though it were a traditional board.  And if you don’t fancy Trivial Pursuit, you can dismiss it and just push a button to play Monopoly, or Boggle, or whatever.

EA Mobile produces several traditional games on mobile devices, including Scrabble, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit and Boggle, so it’s not unreasonable for EA to talk about one of those, but I do get the feeling that Apple have thrown this device out into the world and now everyone is trying to figure out how it applies to their own business and products.  Newspaper publishers are figuring out how to get newspapers onto it, TV companies are looking at it as a TV device, and people who own board game properties working on ways of using it for board games.

The board game people are following the same logic, basically, that the music industry applied to the iPod and that book publishers applied to the Kindle: you can now carry hundreds of movies, albums, books around with you in a convenient object, and I guess the idea is that you’ll do the same with board games.  One problem that I see as we move along this path (movies -> albums -> books -> board games) is that the connection between the physical object and the experience becomes more important.

• We’ve never been particularly bothered about the physical object used to deliver our films, probably because we’re just as used to seeing moving pictures on broadcast television or in a cinema as we are via a physical object like a DVD.
• We somewhat fetishise the physical CD (or vinyl album), but portable media players are gradually getting away from that.
• Some people (early adopter types, for the most part) do like consuming books through their e-readers, but for most practical purposes, paper is still preferred.  The experience is just plain nicer.

And then we come to board games…

iPad - do you want to play Monopoly on a board that big?

The iPad screen size is less than 8 inches by 6 inches, which makes it about half and inch wider and deeper than a DVD case.  Even in purely practical terms, it’s difficult to imagine a pleasant game of Monopoly or Scrabble for two or more people on a board this small.

The experience of actually holding and moving physical objects shouldn’t be underestimated either.  Monopoly players love amassing the physical cards and the physical banknotes - expanding your assets is a satisfying way of lording it over your opponents.  In Trivial Pursuit, pulling the question cards out and asking the questions is as much part of the social side of the game as answering the questions.  And when you start to think it through, some of the industry’s most popular properties don’t even work as iPad replacements for their traditional versions.  Scrabble, for example, simply doesn’t lend itself to this format, because you can’t hide the contents of your letter rack from your opponents.

I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence or not, but most of the board games that you imagine working best on an iPad laid flat between people are the ones that don’t belong to anyone.  I imagine that chess, backgammon and draughts would work very well, but no-one’s going to make a lot of money out of those…

A lot of the “owned” properties will continue to work just fine on the iPad, but only in the way that they already do on iPods and personal computers - playing against the machine or multi-player online.  Replacing physical games, even as a portable option, seems like a big ask.  I expect that the comments from the game industry are just very early reactions to the device, and these people are well aware of the issues that they face in terms of making use of their board games on the iPad.  There’s definitely room for some bright person to come up with a way of using the device that is truly innovative, rather than just mimicking the physical games.

Nice to see ToyNews magazine featuring Army Of Zero in its September issue.  ToyNews tends to have themed issues, and September’s had a whole section on Games and Puzzles.  The item is reproduced on the left - but then you can see that!

(Sorry it’s a scan - you can usually find a good quality reproduction online but for some reason it wasn’t on the ToyNews site when I went looking for it.)

Not a week goes by, it seems, without someone suggesting putting a playable version of Army Of Zero on the website - either someone wants to play against a computer, or they want to help out by writing a program for us.  Technically, it’s absolutely do-able.  You might remember from an earlier post that we used a computer program during the play-testing, to simulate a lot of games and make sure that the balance works, so it wouldn’t take a lot to adapt that, along with some nice graphics, into something we could put on the website.

Unfortunately, it’s there are other complications, related to the Army Of Zero trademark, and I’ll tell you all about it.  By the way, this all happened about nearly a year ago, and it’s probably worth making the point that we’re not upset about it: it’s just the way the intellectual property world works, and it was ineresting to see it in action.

We chose the name Army Of Zero because (a) the number “zero” is significant to both the gameplay and the prize puzzle competition, (b) there are a lot of warrior-type characters and (c) it references the well-known expression Army Of One.  It’s a good idea to get a trademark registered, partly to make sure that no-one pinches your brand name and partly to make sure that you’re not going to get into trouble by inadvertently pinching someone else’s.

In the UK, you apply for a trademark via the Intellectual Property Office.  You can do it yourself, but it’s one of those jobs that’s probably best left to a specialist, so we employed an Intellectual Property Attorney.  She began by carrying out an initial search for existing trademarks in the same market - toys and games - that might clash with Army Of Zero.  It’s a good idea to do this so that you maximise your chance of getting your own application accepted.  The only thing she found that she thought might be a problem was a game called Army Of Frogs, but she thought it would probably be OK.

We decided to carry on with the application.  With the IPO’s process, you get an initial response in a few weeks stating whether the application has been accepted, and in our case it was, so that was good.  You can then put TM on your stuff, indicating that the trademark has been accepted by the IPO, but then there’s a three-month period during which other trademark holders can raise objections if they feel that their own IP is being infringed upon.

Fortunately the three month period passed without objection, and we became entitled to change the TM to an (R).  It was a long wait, because we didn’t want to go to manufacturing until the whole process was done with.  Apparently people sometimes do decide to do this, if they think they need to get to market fast, but it’s a risk.  We waited, and were pretty relieved when the process had run its course.

Literally a couple of days after the trademark was awarded, we got a very polite letter from Electronic Arts’ legal representatives in California, saying that they’d noticed our trademark application, and pointing out that they had a (computer) game called Army Of Two.  They told us that they wouldn’t object to a card game called Army Of Zero, but that they would get legal on us if we started doing computer games, including web-based games.  They didn’t want people to think that Army Of Zero was in any way related to Army Of Two.

At this point, we had three paths open to us.

First of all, and probably silliest, we could take issue with the EA legal team and see them in court if they felt like being litigious. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that EA have bigger, more expensive lawyers than we can afford, and consequently it doesn’t really matter who’s in the right: whatever the outcome, we don’t really want a drawn out legal battle.

Secondly, we could choose a different name for the game, but we didn’t want to do that because we’d just waited three months for the application to run its course, and didn’t want t owait three more months. And there was no guarantee that at the end of it we wouldn’t have someone else kicking up a fuss.

Thirdly, we could accept EA’s position and agree not to develop computerised versions of Army Of Zero.  Which was what we did - it seemed, and still seems, the least bad option.  I’m sure EA knew we’d see things that way too, and probably that’s why they wrote to us directly after the trademark application was over, rather submitting an objection during the process.  And although it was kind of annoying, it’s probably better for us too that they let things pan out the way they did, otherwise we’d have had to think up a new name and go through the trademark application at least one more time.

Except that we can’t do an online version of Army Of Zero, and now you know why.

This post is aimed at those game designers amongst you who are considering going down the self-publishing route.  It’s a few of the lessons we’ve learned about putting together that initial order.

I know a lot of people have a hard time deciding how many copies of their game to order from the printer.  It’s a significant decision, because usually the printer will quote you a range of unit prices, and the more you order, the lower the unit price.

If you have any kind of business head on you, you’ll then put the a range of volumes and corresponding into a spreadsheet and work out the various different options.  You’ll estimate your trade and/or retail selling prices, and maybe what the mix between the two might be.  Then you’ll crunch the numbers.

Of course, the costs that you need to recoup aren’t just the production costs.  You’ve probably got some fixed costs too - in our case, these were mainly for professional fees and artwork.  Plus it would be nice to pay yourself, wouldn’t it?  So you factor those in too, and you find out that you need to shift a heck of a lot of units…

At this point, you may be tempted to over-order, just to get the lowest possible unit price from the printers.  Our advice is to think twice.  We can’t tell you how many copies you’re going to sell per year, but somewhere in the low thousands for a new player is a very respectable number.  If you need to sell more than that to break even, you might want to think again about pricing, costs, or whether it’s even a viable product - no matter how much you love the game yourself.

If you’re in doubt, consider starting off with a much smaller initial run, with the option to reorder from the printers.  The unit price on the first run would be high, but you should be able to negotiate a nice low unit price for future runs, since a lot of the printer’s initialisation and set-up costs would have been absorbed into the first run.  (Negotiate reprint prices with the manufacturers before getting the first run done, and be prepared to haggle - they’re struggling for business at the moment just like everyone else.)  Hopefully you’ll sell out, and can go back for reprints, and it’s a terrific feeling to be able to go and do that.  If you don’t manage to sell out, just think of the money you’ve saved on not ordering those extra copies!

Also, getting your units manufactured in smaller runs should help you keep your inventory down, so you might save on storage costs.

One last consideration: if you do multiple smaller runs, you have the option of making changes to your packaging (or anything else in the game, come to that).  It’s likely that you’ll make your packaging decisions and at some point after it’s all been made up you’ll think, “yeah, it’s OK, but I wish I’d used a different font”, or “the colours were a bit off on that print run” or “the box should have been a different shape” - something that’s not worth trashing the whole production run for, but you’d just change if you had the chance.  Possibly there’ll be an additional cost involved, but at least you’d have the option.

P.S. For a different approach, and non-variable unit production costs, see this post from last week.

This looks interesting: a site for self-publishing games.  At Game Crafter, you can create an account and then upload your artwork for cards, boards and rule booklets, then add dice, play money, tokens, and so on and so forth.  In fact there’s a ridiculous number of bits and bobs available.  Then they’ll put everything into a box and post it to you, plus they’ll offer it for sale on their site, on your behalf.

I did some quick calculations, and it wouldn’t be worth me using it for Army Of Zero, partly because the unit cost would be too high, and partly because the packaging is a bit basic, but your situation and requirements might well be different.  But you can order as few copies as you like, so it looks like a great option for producing quality prototypes and proofs-of-concept, even if shipping from the US might introduce a bit of a time delay.

Just got back from Toy Fair, and I’m actually surprisingly chipper, considering I’ve been on my feet for four days.  Spoke to a lot of interesting people, and got a lot out of it, and there should be some progress on getting the game into retail outlets before too long, if the reaction was anything to go by.  There was a lot of positive response to the combination of game and puzzle: many a time I saw the moment when the light went on as I explained the puzzle concept, and that was always a total buzz.

So I had some good conversations with various buyers, and also got to talk with other suppliers, and plenty of other small game designers and independent publishers, as well as press people.  Tuesday was the press day, and was reasonably busy, but it really got going on Wednesday and Thursday.  Friday got quieter, particularly in the afternoon, and the Saturday was easily the quietest day inside the hall, although it was infinitely livened up outside by the queue for the Big Brother auditions.

Lots of following up to do this week!

Oh, and I do want to say hello and thanks to my neighbours, particularly Ian from Art Meets Matter, Lynne and Suzie from 1745 Trading Company, Jason and Sean from Ecoboo and Susan and Guy from Just Pals, all of whom were full of bonhomie and support throughout the event.

According to Toy News, Mintel is about to release the results of a new study into the state of the UK Toy Industry.  You can read about it at the Toy News web site, but here are some interesting things I’ve particularly taken note of:

• The UK market for toys and games is large and robust, estimated to be worth nearly £2.2 billion in 2007, which is up by 22% in real terms on 2003. Nevertheless, Mintel has estimated a year-on-year drop to £2.1 billion for 2008.
• New product introductions have been a vital component in growth.
• Overall, the strongest-performing sectors are construction toys, games and puzzles, vehicles and action figures, while arts and crafts and outdoor games are holding steady. Again, perceived good value may well play a part here.
• The internet brings opportunities to small manufacturers and retailers to grow their sales.
• [The internet's] very convenience may also bring incremental growth to the market as a whole.
• There are too many positives for this not to be a strong and enduring market, most importantly the fun of toys, kids’ urge to collect and parents’ desire to give their children pleasure and help them learn, all reinforced with the major influence of licensed characters.
• The market faces challenges – most immediately from tougher economic conditions, and secondly from competitors for kids’ time like console games and social networking. Manufacturers need to promise and deliver good lasting value as a priority in their product development and promotion.