I had an idea that could be an alternative to raising funds through kick starter or pre-order and I wanted some comments. In the example below, I am using arbitrary number so the calculations might not be exact.
Let say I have a complete game: The game is working, the artwork is done, etc. I first try to make a small print run of 150 copies and also publish it as Print and play.
Considering I am only printing 150 copies, the price per copy should be higher. Lets asume it's 10$ per copy, that will mean it will cost me 1500$ from my pocket.
If I sell the game myself in my local area and through internet (+shipping fee), all the money would go to to me since there is no distributor and retailer. If let say I sell the game at 3 times the price 30$. That means that I need to sell 50 games to reach break even and that selling all games would earn me 4500$.
If the game took a lot of time to sell or received a lot of bad reviews, I could stop there. Else, if I consider that a lot more people are invested in the game, I could now make a 2nd print run.
Let say that for he second print run, I print 1000 games which each now have a print cost of 5$ each for a total cost of 5000$. Since I have accumulated 4500$ from the first run, I could use that money, add 500$ from my pocket to make the second print run that will now pass through a distributor and retailer since I cannot possibly sell 1000 copies by my self.
Let say the game is sold at 10$ to the distributor. Since my total investment is 2000$, I would need to sell 200 copies to be able to make the break even. If I sell them all, I would get 10000$ at the end.
Does that make sense?
I think the main reason why people are raising fund is to be able to finance artwork for their game. So this kind of publishing could only work if you can manage to make the whole game by yourself by using public domain art or pictures for example.
More work is always a problem because the time spent there could have been placed on designing other games instead.