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.