At a 30% tariff a $60-dollar game likely becomes and $80- or $90-dollar game, and we probably only print 3,000 copies. We likely produce far fewer games than we do now and start looking at creative ways to increase our revenue. My gut tells me a 10% tariff probably makes a $60-dollar game a $70-dollar game. This is based on years of intuition and “feel” for how the industry works, and what sort of risk we would be willing to take.

Maybe it’s a 4,000-copy print run so that we run less risk of losing money. That next 1,000 games for us are what we need to sell in order to “break even”. Its gameplay systems, its artwork, the whole package and we are saying “we are going to do 1,000 copies above our expected sales”.

Adventure

This has not just squeezed our margin; this has substantially increased our risk. Our games are priced because we have decided that we are willing to risk losing money unless our game sells through 80% of its print run.

I’ll be back in a couple of weeks to talk about inventory projections. Why do games sell out, why don’t publishers just print more and other considerations of risk-management in the games industry. I think the increased pressure will really hurt distribution and FLGS. Online sales will probably increase as gamers seek to save more money, and that will hurt the industry as the lifeblood of gaming are our FLGS’. We’re talking to producers in Vietnam, and the US, and Europe, and Taiwan, and Malaysia. We’re going to figure out how to keep bringing you games you love. We will absolutely lose some of the creative minds that bring us some of the best games.

• All Memory Stick PROs larger than 1 GB support this high-speed mode, and High Speed Memory Stick PROs are backwards-compatible with devices that don’t support the high-speed mode.
• Some readers that were not compatible could be upgraded to Memory Stick PRO support via a firmware update.
• Memory Stick PROs have a marginally higher transfer speed and a maximum theoretical capacity of 32 GB, although it appears GB-sized capacities are only available in the PRO Duo form factor.
• Most devices that use the original Memory Sticks support both the original and PRO sticks since both formats have identical form factors.
• High-capacity Memory Sticks such as the 4 GB versions are expensive compared to other types of flash memory such as SD cards and CompactFlash.

These 1,000 copies are much harder to sell than the first 1,000. This is going to sound very simple, but it’s not something a lot of people think about.

Puzzle Rotate

As an established publisher our first 2,000–3,000 copies of every game we print are sold before we even announce the title. This is through years of hard work, and making good games that tend to sell well. We know FLGSs will take a certain number of games, gamers will buy some from us at shows and our website. For more established companies than us, that number is likely higher. For new start-ups that number is much lower—potentially zero “baked in” sales. We’ll eat about an additional $4 Scary Games,700 dollars in taxes to import a game from China. We now must sell an additional 224 games to break even.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 25th, 2020 at 8:55 pm and is filed under Online Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.