I was wondering how difficult and costly it actually is to self-produce and market a game.
Take for example my civ game. I think this is a game that is rather simple to produce with only a few components (no more elaborate than say Carcassonne).
The finished product would consist of:
- Around 70 triangular carboard tiles.
- 30 pawns in 5 different colors (6 per color)
- Rulebook
- Box
To produce this game you would need to:
- Get an artist to do the art for the tiles. There are 5 different tiles and 4 different symbols. The art can be really simple. I think an artist could do it all in 2 days or so. How much would this cost?
- Digitalize the art and make the tiles in digital format. I could do this myself in Photoshop and would take me a day or two.
- Get a printing company to print the triangular tiles on heavy cardboard. Can this be done in small printruns? How much would it cost?
- Order 30 pawns (per game, which is 90.000 for a printrun of 3000 copies!) from somewhere.
- Get a company to make/print the box
- Get a company to make/print the rulebook
- Putting all the components in the box (could do this myself I guess) and shrink-wrap it.
If I wanted to make, say, around 3000 copies, how much would this all cost? What if I made 1000 copies? Or 5000?
Then, of course, the game must be sold, but that
Quote:
14-04-2003 at 06:22, Krakit wrote:
Figure that producing below 5000 copies is between $1 and $3 per copy (with a 1000 unit min).
Carl
Really? 30 pawns alone already cost about $1 per game. And I would think printing the tiles on cardboard would be the most expensive part of the production proces.