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Cost of printing a game

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songbird
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Joined: 12/31/1969

I'm sure similar questions have been asked before (and in fact I have already browsed through several dozen threads with similiar titles), but I'd like to take a specific published game and get some solid estimates from those who have printed games before on how much it would cost to make such a game.

The game for this exercise is For Sale by Uberplay. This game includes the following components:

60 high quality full-color poker-sized cards with coating
72 full-color cardboard money tokens
Rules booklet
Plastic tray insert
Sturdy full-color box

The game has MSRP of $19.95, so I'm guessing it's costing them under $5 to print it, but would love to hear more details on which items are driving the cost up or down and what some real numbers would be. For the sake of argument, let's assume I want to do a 5K unit run.

VeritasGames
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Joined: 08/01/2008
Cost of printing a game

Back of the napkin calculations: probably $20,000.

Somebody may come up with a more precise calculation. And a lot of this depends on how thick and how high quality the components are going to be.

Emphyrio
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Joined: 02/10/2010
Cost of printing a game

Delano has sample breakdowns by component and volume for a "Monopoly" type game and a "Trivia" type game which I found helpful -- they'll email them to you if you ask, or I can send them. Unfortunately they don't include all the components you mention, but here are some roughly comparable figures (based on 5000 units):

Game box - $1.33 - $1.37
Rules - $0.13 - $0.18
Assembly - $0.70 - $0.79
Deed cards (Monopoly) - $0.60
450 Clue cards (Trivia) - $3.58

I'm not sure how much a plastic tray would be -- let's say 50 cents. 60 cards prorated would be about 48 cents, but I think it would be more than that for poker-type cards, and 60 is probably an odd number, so let's say $1 for the cards.

That gives a total of about $4.50. Then there are fixed costs for plates, dies, etc. -- probably another $2500, or 50 cents per unit, so a ballpark figure of $5 sounds reasonable. You could probably get it even lower using an overseas manufacturer.

songbird
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Joined: 12/31/1969
Cost of printing a game

Thanks for the quick feedback, I appreciate it. If anyone else has experiences or numbers to throw in, please do so.

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