Hi!
I've created a specialty tabletop game for wine consumers, to help them understand wine ratings, wine reviews, and wines gone bad. It is a disruptive, market-making game. I have focused all of my efforts so far on the wine industry, but I am now looking at the game industry for new contacts and new ideas for how to get TYT produced.
To Your Taste! Wine Party Kit www.ToYourTaste.com is a very specialized game for a niche market. I have done all the work, including focus groups, pilots, industry input and advice, pre-marketing, trademarking and copyrighting. After three iterations, the final prototype is ready to go into production.
I have tried all of the following to finance the production: Friends and family, private placement offering, a crowdfunding campaign (on Fundable; Kickstarted rejected my application), offering a finder's fee for successful brokerage of the deal, and direct contact with likely prospects.
I have letters of intent from wineries, wine retailers, and wine accessories catalogues. Wine Enthusiast Catalog has asked for a sample. Total Wine & More has asked for a sample. Epicureanist has asked for a sample. I cannot send them a sample because I only have two prototypes (FedEx lost my third one!), and each prototype costs over $300 to produce, and requires many hours of hand work.
I am looking for investors to fund the production of the game, as I don't think there are any game publishers that would be interested in such a specialized game. I would love to hear from anybody about their thoughts and ideas. Many thanks!
Comments
kickstarter "rejected?"
Hi -
You've clearly done a lot of upfront work, and for a niche, industry oriented game that's probably the best path. The question I have is, why would investors help produce this game?
You've already tried the usual investment funds (including friends and families), and you've tried to use a couple crowd-sourcing campaigns. If I was investing, i'd want to know, why was the project rejected from Kickstarter? The only reasons they would do so is if the project doesn't meet their rules, which are quite low level.
That seems to be the kind of red-flag I'd see as a potential investor that the project is set-up for failure, regardless of how good the product itself actually is. Can you address this first?
Hmm
It looks like your numbers are really rather large: if I read your plan correctly you seem to need nearly $200k just to fund your initial print run! And with $195 MSRP you would have a big sales challenge ahead of you given that the market seems to be quite niche -- are you sure you can sell ~80000 units over 5 years? That's an awful lot!
But you weren't asking for that sort of feedback...
I think you are probably right that specialist game publishers wouldn't be likely to go for this sort of game (very high cost and the market would be very different to the core games market), so maybe you need to approach this from the other end: how about the wine distribution clubs out there? You may be able to work with one of them on this sort of product -- though it might be helpful if you could find a way to reduce your unit cost.