@|<+;o(\) Games Blog: April 2016

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Lessons Learned around estimating production costs

For Treasure or Treachery, we've made dozens of prototypes and have quotes from several manufacturers to produce the final game. There are several companies that will produce the whole boxed game for you. This can be a good path, especially for new designers, as the manufacturer will handle things like assembly and shrink wrapping you may otherwise need to arrange yourself. You can also get parts made individually and this may save you a little money but may cause you much more aggravation in the process. Its good to get perspective from both sides in estimating your costs.

During this process I've learned a few things about estimating costs that I'd like to share. I keep a couple of spreadsheets to compare costs and track checklists and options. There are sometimes dramatic differences in the costs of a part from source to source. Of course, the closer you get to the actual manufacturer of a part the less expensive it will be, but there are other costs to consider as well, such as tooling costs, assembly, quality assurance, and dealing with losses or delays.

Pirate Figures From Treasure or Treachery

Make sure you know what you need exactly and be clear about your targets and goals.
Get at least 3 quotes. Getting 5 quotes is better.
Get samples if possible, even if you must purchase example product either from the manufacturer or at retail.
Create a spec and be very specific. Panda games has a good online submission process and you can learn a lot from their forms.

Color Coded Dice from Treasure or Treachery

Try to quote out parts on your own, don’t forget to factor in final assembly costs. This can be an informative exercise even if you plan to use a single manufacturer for the game and it can really help when it comes to negotiating with manufacturers through comparison shopping. Alibaba is a great resource for this.
Be patient with the sales staff and answer any questions they have thoroughly. The more detail you provide, the more accurate the quote will be.
Get quotes early, and give yourself at 60-90 days just to gather quotes.
Don’t neglect storage, fulfillment, and shipping costs in your final estimates.
Do plan to have a place to store your games that is climate controlled and secure. Make sure you account for this cost in your final estimates.

Some Pirate Swag
Don’t neglect marketing costs, those should be factored into your per unit cost too.
Take a look at other crowdfunding campaigns and other games of similar complexity and quality to determine your final reward tier and retail costs. A rule of thumb is that your retail price should be 3-5 times your actual cost.
If you have extras or different tiers for a crowdfunding campaign, don't forget to project your costs for these as well. You may need to use different sources for some rewards. This also adds complexity to your risk and cost structures. Take some extra time to consider if this is really boosting your campaign or just diluting it.
Have a plan ready for your goals, moderate success, and run-away success and understand how this impacts your costs and timelines.
Give yourself time to complete fulfillment and make sure you leave extra lead time for manufacturing. A good rule of thumb is to add 30% to your estimate to account for delays and unknowns.

Do you have any tips to share? Did I get anything wrong? Let me know in the comments!

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Friday, April 29, 2016

Our First Kickstarter... cancelled! - What went wrong?

So we launched a Kickstarter for "Treasure or Treachery", something I've been thinking about and planning for years. Less than halfway into it we've decided to cancel the funding, we are not getting the conversion rate we expected. Rather than spend our money and time on this iteration we've decided to re-tool and re-launch again later this year. Our presentation, pricing, and marketing plan are out of sync with the current reality of launching on Kickstarter. We need to re-examine our strategy, and improve our execution on a number of fronts if we are going to be successful here and get our first game out.

Launching a Kickstarter is like putting your baby in the oven

To be frank the decision to try Kickstarting Treasure or Treachery came rather quickly after we had initially dismissed the idea to focus on developing out another game and making that our first Kickstarter instead. We reasoned this other game, which is Match Kingdom by the way, would be less costly for us to produce and we could start with a lower goal. In the end we decided there were a few problems with this and came back around to pursuing Treasure or Treachery since the game is ready for publication.

We set our goal at 25k because that would give us some additional funds to accelerate development of our next 2 games as well as market and sell the remaining stock from the Kickstarter print run, assuming we didn't sell everything out during the campaign (ha ha).

We set our timeline at 45 days because this would give us a couple weeks to tune things up and experiment with some different marketing methods, before we made a big push for the last 30 days of the campaign.

We made a video, collected some graphics, came up with some bonuses, reward tiers, even some stretch goals, just in case... Throw it in the pot, mix it up, launch and let the world know so they can beat a path to your door... annnnnd.... well mostly crickets. What happened?

A friendly message from Kickstarter reminds you of your failure

We made a few big mistakes:

We did not develop an audience first and we don't have a large budget for marketing; in other words, our marketing plan was not great. We did have a few tricks up our sleeve to get publicity, I can't talk about them now, and we did not deploy them, but in our estimation given the initial response they would not be most effective without fixing a few other things first...
We did not have a sufficient presentation on Kickstarter, and both our game presentation and reward tier pricing were out of sync with expectations and our potential audience. To simplify this: we need a better prototype and need to be able to show a high quality end product and be priced in parity with similar offerings.
We thought it would be easier to get fewer backers at a higher price point, reasoning that some extras, exclusivity, and the Kickstarter community would be enough. Well, this might have worked if we had a top notch presentation with a lot of cool parts and some brand recognition. Hubris! We don't have all the cool parts, we are new and have no brand recognition, nobody knows who we are yet.
Our funding goal was too high and our stretch goals were tacked on. We need to perform some deeper analysis here and align our goals and expectations with what's reasonably achievable for us at this stage. We've got some great feedback from friends, family, and strangers and are incorporating that into our efforts.

Had to draw a Fate card!

So what's next? Well a few things...

We are working on re-tooling the whole thing so we can re-launch later this year. New artwork, a better final product, and a Kickstarter campaign that is in sync with similar games being successfully funded. We will continue to develop new games: I Bet You Can't, and Match Kingdom being the current ones but we've got a bunch more in the lab.

I'm going to keep blogging here about what we are doing, our successes, failures, stuff we are planning, things we suck at, things we do great at, and game development in general. We'll be posting on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and working on connecting with fans of pirates, board games, party games, kids games, and video games and hopefully some game developers, manufacturers, publishers, guilds, hobby stores, cafes, etc. etc...

We are also working on additional marketing and a better marketing strategy and execution to build awareness and drive backers to our next campaign.

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Did you know? Aktion Games can produce graphics, video, and sound for your game. Contact us today to get more info: info@aktiongames.com

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

To our Kickstarter backers & fans...

To our Kickstarter backers & fans... I want to say a heartfelt thank you! Your support means the world to us and we are so happy you chose to back us. We feel lucky to have such great family and friends and even luckier to have convinced some strangers to take a risk on us. We will eventually deliver this game to market, unfortunately for right now we are not attracting enough backers to meet our goal. Our conversion rate is dismal and we have decided to cancel this Kickstarter... This way we can focus our energies in the short term on fixing what we did wrong and returning in a short while with a better presentation, price points, and marketing campaign. We launched too soon without the right kind of preparation. In some ways we were aware of our shortcomings but our eagerness to bring this to market overcame our reservations and we leaped off the cliff. Hit the rocks. Ouch.

In the immortal words of Chumbawumba: “I get knocked down, but I get up again!”. This is not the end but the beginning! We hope you’ll join us on the second leg of our journey, when we take another shot at getting the funds to produce the game. Here’s the plan at a high-level:

We are cancelling funding for the current Kickstarter. :-(
We will be taking a few weeks to re-tool, in that time we are going to bring our "A-game" to bear for a follow-up attempt:

We are going to improve the game artwork, quality, and presentation including a better presentation on Kickstarter.
We are going to produce some compelling special game elements for the Kickstarter edition.
We are going to fix our pricing and reward tiers to offer better options, including a game-only option at a much lower price point.

We are going to work on building our audience and reach through marketing, social media, and other means.

We will be announcing our launch here, if you’d like to keep engaged with us in the meantime, we’d love to hear from you:

Sign up for our e-blast: http://eepurl.com/bR3K2f

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