Kickstarter manufacturing and pricing: A VERY behind the scenes look (part 1)
The more units you manufacture, the cheaper each is. Duh. But how do game studios and Kickstarter projects decide how to price their games? What’s it actually look like to budget for a board game Kickstarter?
How much does the whole process actually cost the studio?
I figured I’d offer a rare behind-the-scenes look at the comparative costs and decisions involved in pricing a Kickstarter for my game Inventures
Process and Fixed Costs Overview
Below is a process overview. In RED, to the right of each step, are costs I’ve incurred in that step. (There’s no way to know, relative to other board games coming to Kickstarter, whether I’ve spent more or less than average.)
Designing a game & commissioning artwork, $1200
Printing prototypes $920
Getting manufacturing quotes
Deciding on print volume (covered in part 2)
Picking a manufacturer (covered in part 2)
Getting print proofs $500 (covered in part 2)
Setting pricing (covered in part 3)
Community building, marketing, and commitments $2700 (covered in part 4)
Design and Artwork
I’m a designer but not an artist; after trying my hand (and failing masterfully) at doing the art for Inventure’s cards, I decided to hire an artist.
In terms of commissioned art: Inventures has 72 original illustrations for cards, 7 illustrated characters, as well a box.
Inventures is a storytelling game where players use symbol cards to guide the story, so it’s nimble thematically; many games have even more original artwork.
The total here is $1200, and I got lucky to find an extremely talented artist named Paul Yvan who lives in Cameroon.
In this gallery are some of the art pieces.
2. Prototyping: $920
When you’re making a board game, playtesting and iterating is your frickin’ religion.
And although you can playtest with paper prototypes printed at home, strangers who see a paper prototype often can’t imagine that what they’re playing is more than an amateur’s hobby; I wrote earlier about why board games are like balloons, and how real the challenge is of getting people to see what you see: a professional game in the making.
That’s why good prototypes really matter. They ensure playtesters are able to interact with the game as if it were printed and manufactured. They take the work out of imagination.
However, it’s expensive.
PrintPlayGames.com is my go-to prototype printer, and I feel they’re quite reasonable, all things considered. Here’s a breakdown of what I spent on printing prototypes for Inventures. Those costs go to printing cards, boards, components, boxes, etc.
3. Manufacturing quotes
Getting manufacturing quotes is a crazy process. First of all, it’s when it really hits home for you that you can actually do this. Your game can actually get made, in large enough quantities to impact many people.
At this point, you’ve taken off your game designer hat, and have replaced it with the producer hat— a role that deals with economics and making things happen.
So you gather loads of quotes from different game printers (I compared 5 Chinese printers and 3 American ones). One of the mistakes I made with Inventures’ original failed Kickstarter was to only get quotes from US manufacturers. I assumed Chinese manufacturing would be ~70% the cost. But no…
Below is a sample of per-unit costs from a Chinese manufacturer (left) and American manufacturer (right). In general, Chinese manufacturers are roughly 1/3 the cost, usually even less.
$9.27 per unit to print 1,000 units
$33.63 per unit to print 1,000 units
Next week…. I’ll cover picking a manufacturer, and even more important, deciding how many units you’ll aim to print. I’ll also talk about the process of getting printed samples from manufacturers.