Musing on Crowdfunding
The last crowdfunded project I developed was almost 5 years ago, and now I'm in the process of organising another.
Bug Hunt has been giving me a lot of thought recently, particularly regarding costs, value for money, and ensuring I have the funds to actually send the relevant perks to everyone. I've been doing my research, and the $50US price point seems pretty common. My manufacturing costs for the game come in at about two-thirds of that for a one-off POD product, and at the best bulk levels through The Game Crafter (TGC) they come in at about half of that. I've received my prototype from TGC and I'm happy with it. I could possibly get a cheaper product from a certain supplier in China, but I haven't dealt with them before.
For the moment though, I'm looking at value for money for anyone who moght buy the game. It's certainly got replay potential in it, it can also be expanded relatively easily (as I've shown by using tthe same game for two differrent uni assignments, once in it's raw form and now submitting the game with an expansion as a second assignment). I look at games on the shelves of department stores, toy stores, pop-culture stores, and specialist gaming retailers. Department stores have the old traditional games like Monopoly™ for $20+, ranging up to pop-culture stores selling versions of Settlers of Catan™ for $80-100. So $50 doesn't seem to bad...it's the postage that kills it.
Luckily, production in the US (where most of my readers, and most of the purchasers of my last project come from) means cheaper postage there which will be absorbed into the base costs, similarly, for my Sydney-region based purchasers it would literally be cheaper and more reliable for me to drop off a few games at various local-bame stores or game-playing groups (offering a demo game in the process, and maybe selling a few extra copies while I'm there), it's other parts of the world that I'm worried about.
My massive, accidentally deleted, post from yesterday went into this in a lot more depth, comparing value for money going to the cinema to gaming products (both board games and RPG books)... then also comparing them and justifying the expense with regards to eating or paying rent. I'm not in the mood to retype that one.
Now I might be missing-in-action for a little while, I've got some demo videos to shoot.
Bug Hunt has been giving me a lot of thought recently, particularly regarding costs, value for money, and ensuring I have the funds to actually send the relevant perks to everyone. I've been doing my research, and the $50US price point seems pretty common. My manufacturing costs for the game come in at about two-thirds of that for a one-off POD product, and at the best bulk levels through The Game Crafter (TGC) they come in at about half of that. I've received my prototype from TGC and I'm happy with it. I could possibly get a cheaper product from a certain supplier in China, but I haven't dealt with them before.
For the moment though, I'm looking at value for money for anyone who moght buy the game. It's certainly got replay potential in it, it can also be expanded relatively easily (as I've shown by using tthe same game for two differrent uni assignments, once in it's raw form and now submitting the game with an expansion as a second assignment). I look at games on the shelves of department stores, toy stores, pop-culture stores, and specialist gaming retailers. Department stores have the old traditional games like Monopoly™ for $20+, ranging up to pop-culture stores selling versions of Settlers of Catan™ for $80-100. So $50 doesn't seem to bad...it's the postage that kills it.
Luckily, production in the US (where most of my readers, and most of the purchasers of my last project come from) means cheaper postage there which will be absorbed into the base costs, similarly, for my Sydney-region based purchasers it would literally be cheaper and more reliable for me to drop off a few games at various local-bame stores or game-playing groups (offering a demo game in the process, and maybe selling a few extra copies while I'm there), it's other parts of the world that I'm worried about.
My massive, accidentally deleted, post from yesterday went into this in a lot more depth, comparing value for money going to the cinema to gaming products (both board games and RPG books)... then also comparing them and justifying the expense with regards to eating or paying rent. I'm not in the mood to retype that one.
Now I might be missing-in-action for a little while, I've got some demo videos to shoot.
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