Cardboard Architects Interview #12 Randy Hoyt
I joined the Cardboard Architects to talk about the development and publishing side of making board games.
I joined the Cardboard Architects to talk about the development and publishing side of making board games.
[This is the result of a 30-minute writing study. Some version of this will probably end up being the opening of an article two or three times as long.]
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If you have been around the board game industry for any time at all, you’ve probably heard that a game’s MSRP should be five times (5×) it’s manufacturing cost. Yes, five times! I heard this when I first started, but I couldn’t really understand how that could be necessary. (I wasn’t making board games to get rich or anything!) I still hear from many Kickstarter project creators who question this multiplier. I think I finally have a good grasp on why this number is essential. Here’s how I would state it:
If you plan to sell your game through distribution and if you hope to sell out of your first printing and do a second one, your MSRP must be 5× your landed costs.
The best way for me to communicate this is to walk through an example. Imagine with me the following:
I set my MSRP at $40, which is 5×$8. I spend my $16,000 and (after several months) receive 2,000 copies of the game into my warehouse. If things go well, distributors will buy the games from me. They will buy the games from me for roughly $16 each (60% off MSRP) and I will have to pay to ship the games to them. (They will be buying a large quantity, so it won’t cost toomuch per copy. Let’s say roughly 50¢ a copy.)
In the first few months, let’s say I sell 1,000 games; that’s half of my inventory. I receive $16,000 from distributors, and I spend $500 shipping the games to them. Overall, I have recouped almost all of my initial $16,000 I spent. Note this carefully: if your MSRP is 5× your landed costs, you have to sell more than half of your print run just to break even.
In the next few months, let’s say I sell the other 1,000 games; that’s the rest of my inventory. I receive another $16,000 from distributors, and I spend another $500 shipping the games to them. I have now recouped my initial $16,000 and made another $15,000, which is great! (If it took less than a year from placing the order to selling through that first print run, I’ll be happy.) But note this carefully: I still haven’t made enough profit to print a second run! Even if your MSRP is 5× your landed cost, all the profits from your first printing will go towards your second printing.
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[This is the result of a 30-minute writing study. Some version of this will probably end up being the opening of an article two or three times as long. What questions or feedback do you have so far?]
On Reddit, someone asked me this:
Hi Randy. If you don’t mind, could you elucidate on how you found yourself as a game publisher? Do you enjoy your work? How hands-on do you get in the game selection process?
This post is my response.
A few years ago, the board game scene on Kickstarter was just heating up. A friend sent me a link to Dice Hate Me Games’ campaign for Carnival, and I backed it; that was my first campaign to back. Being a part of that campaign really inspired me to take indie game design seriously and consider self-publishing a game I designed. The next year, my brother (an artist/graphic designer by trade) and I came up with a concept for a game that excited us both and that we thought could do well on Kickstarter: he would do the artwork, and I would design the game.
We wanted to self-publish the game for a few reasons:
The next year, we started a company and ran a Kickstarter campaign for Relic Expedition. It funded, and we worked the rest of the year to produce the game and deliver rewards to backers. Publishing required an astonishing amount of work and stress — more than I had imagined. Everything also ended up costing more than we expected (for a number of different reasons), and I had to spend a significant amount of money out of my own pocket to get everything finished. But we had 900 copies left in inventory and were able to get some of the remaining inventory into limited distribution.
I did a lot of soul searching as I waited for the games to cross the ocean by freight. I had lost money, but I had learned a lot. I was glad I had the opportunity to take a game design beyond just playtesting to funding and production. But I was burned out creatively. I tried to design some other games in that time, but I felt pretty drained. I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do next in the industry (if anything). Perhaps designing and publishing a game was really too much work for me to do in addition to a full-time job and a family?
As I reflected on it, the part of the process I really enjoyed (more than I expected I would) was the “product design” or the “experience design” part: taking a fun game and figuring out how to make it a good product and experience for the market. That includes art direction, rulebook writing, components (e.g., should this be a deck of cards or a bag of tokens?), usability (lots of user testing), and all the little details. I enjoyed that part of Relic Expedition just as much as the actual game design! That’s typically the part of the process that a publisher does, so I decided to focus my efforts on finding a game to publish.
This was just over two years ago. I had already been looking at games, though I wasn’t really sure how I would know if a game was one I should to publish. But when I first played the prototype that would become Lanterns, I knew. I worked for about six months with the designer (Christopher Chung) to re-theme the game and develop the game mechanics, and I worked with the artist (Beth Sobel) to create the artwork. I just had so much fun. I have worked on a wide variety of creative projects in my life, and making games has been the most satisfying for me.
Lanterns did well on Kickstarter and has done even better in retail, so the company is doing well financially. We’ll be delivering World’s Fair 1893 to backers in a few months. I currently do all the game selection, though I have a handful of trusted game developers and friends whose opinion I seek. I am considering a number of games right now, and I’m still on the lookout for more.
I really like writing, and good things have always happened when I spent time writing. My blog posts for Foxtrot Games have been well received, and I havereally enjoyed writing all the historical updates for the World’s Fair 1893Kickstarter campaign. As a liberal arts major in college, I have done a lot of writing and value good writing. I even coached other students how to improve their writing, which prompted me to think a lot about writing.
But I write really slowly. I’d like to think a big part of my slowness is that I have a high quality bar and that you can’t rush quality. I’m sure that’s true, but I also believe that focused practice with an emphasis on speed could help improve the time. I’m not really aiming to run a blog with a large audience or anything, but I want to write more for practice. I would like to learn to write faster — of course without losing my high quality bar.
I have been really inspired watching artist Beth Sobel’s “one hour studies.” (Beth is an amazing artist that I’ve been incredibly blessed to work with on my last two board games.) She spends one hour creating an illustration as part of her professional practice, and she can do some amazing work in just one hour! Here’s an example:
Beth Sobel: 1 Hour Study
https://www.facebook.com/beth.sobel/videos/10155210462990191/
This year, I will spend more time practicing my writing. Inspired by Beth’s technique, I will do 30-minute studies for writing practice this year, picking a topic and writing what I can in 30 minutes. (This is the first one of those!) I have no intention of doing it every day, but I’m currently planning to do it once or twice a week.
Time’s up! Time to publish!
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