"How many copies do games sell?" Topic

In the market today versus in the past, how many copies does a set of rules sell?

Has any of the "big boys" in our little cottage industry revealed sales figures?

there is no right answer for this question. Each game is unique and each company has sales at different levels.

big companies have failures, little companies have huge success's and vise versa.

A good question…I've always wondered myself.

My partially educated guess.

Ticket to Ride and add-ons has sold 3+ million units according to the latest box art.
Popular computer games sell in 2-20 millions. The blockbusters like Skyrim do a lot, lot better I believe.

The most popular wargame rules might sell 2-10 thousand. This requires worldwide distribution and several reprints though. A few years ago, the first print run alone of several thousand of one rules set sold out prior to printing.

The easiest way to make money out of rules is online sales via your own website. Production is simpler. Receipts are almost 100% profit. $20 USD for the rules plus $10 USD for each add-on etc. Whereas for a printed rules set costing $60 USD, just $10 USD might go back to the author. Websites also tend to prolong the life of a rules set.

Napthyme – The right answer is the number sold :)

if a basement game sells 100 copies ever and Bolt Action sells 5000, those are what they sold.

In terms of your regular wargames hobby – if you can manage a print run of 2-3,000 you are doing very well. Anything over 1,000 copies is fairly serious in this business.

10,000+ over several years and multiple print runs would be exceptionally good.

Fields of Glory (FoG – published by Osprey)- the designers did a remarkably good job with marketing and presentation – effectively it was designed for a pre-existing and well prepared player base – and I believe the core book sold well over 20,000 copies on release – I don't have access to Osprey sales figures I should point out! You can't count on sales like this – it is a one off.

GW and Battlefront/Flames of War are both different – and in terms of 'big boys' for tabletop wargames that is just about it. GW was printing over 100,000 copies of editions of 40K/WH over the lifetime of each edition – I think it was either 2nd or 3rd edition 40K way back when we printed 40,000 on release – I remember it was 40K of 40K! – there would be non-English editions on top of that. BF probably turn over about 10% of what GW turn over in wargames (not boardgames). BF is a privately owned company so you can't access their turn-over figures… so that is an estimate… but it gives an idea of what print runs might be.

Many have come a cropper printing wargames rules… I always recommend folks go in with as low runs as possible and suffer the loss in margin if they have to reprint – you make less money but you don't end up with a garage full of unsold wargames rules for years and years!

I'd agree with Rick. The biggest initial print run we have ever done was Chain of Command which was 5000 copies. More normally we tend to print about 3000 these days. In the early days of Lard the runs were much smaller. I think the first print run of IABSM was 300 or 500 copies, certainly 500 maximum.

I should stress that we also sell a lot in PDF format, more so than hard copies. Our best seller ever is Sharp Practice which has sold about 8,000 hard copies and 17,000 in PDF. I think that the PDF option means that more people can just dip their toe in if they are interested.

I'll agree with Rich, on principle I buy all the TFL PDF rules, cause I like their style and it's cheap!

On the flip side, I have yet to buy a PDF from another company that sells them at the same price as their printed rules, because they are pricey and I don't know if I like them yet.

I'd like to know how many copies of SOBH has been sold…

My best-selling game is Lasalle, which sold 2000 hardbacks in about five months, and has sold several thousand PDFs since then. My other games are all in the 2000-3000 range.

There are economies of scale in color printing, of course, which mean that the cost of each individual unit drops substantially once you get over 1000 units, and keeps dropping at a decreasing rate thereafter.

That can make for some tough decisions. Do you take a gamble and print too many, and then watch them moulder in storage? Or do you gamble in the other direction, and risk printing too few, and then have to do a very expensive reprint of a small number, because you sold out? (In other words, if you could only have known that you'd sell 4000 copies, you'd have printed 4000 of them initially… rather than doing two much more expensive runs of 2000 each!)

But printing costs are only one bit of the equation. You also have to factor the cost of space for storage, the shipping cost of an overseas printer sending you another thousand books, and so on.

I always manage to get it wrong. I did too few of Lasalle, too many of Maurice, and so on. In the case of Longstreet I printed an equal number of books and cards, since I assumed that each player would want one of each, and then play against his buddy, who had also bought one of each. (In other words, I assumed that people would treat the game gadgets the way they treated their armies: each player brings his "stuff" to the game.) But the way it turned out was that each customer was buying one book and 2-3 sets of cards, because he was providing all the game supplies for his club… so now I'm having to do a reprint of the cards.

The Game Biz is a fickle thing.

This is why Kickstarters in our niche hobby are sometimes a great idea--not for everyone, but for known developers it can be an excellent way to test drive the demand.

As a side question--how does print on demand through Lulu, etc., factor into the equation? Is it cheaper, or at least less dangerous, for the developer to let them handle publication and distribution of the rules?

"how does print on demand through Lulu, etc., factor into the equation?"

Lulu is much more expensive than traditional printing. The last time I did a comparison, it was nearly eight times as expensive for the book I was looking at, than a traditional print run.

People often forget that most game sales are still made via retailers, not direct from the publisher. And a retailer usually gets a 50% discount from the publisher. (Meaning, perversely, that a retailer makes more money off the game, than the publisher does himself, by a large margin.)

Using a service like Lulu makes it impossible to discount the book for a retailer, which would limit you to a smaller number of direct sales, and with a much higher basic cost.

Lulu is a great deal for Lulu. I'm not sure how great a deal it is for the author, though.

There is also the question of topic and the distribution model used. I've always thought the best metaphor is the motion picture industry. You have films made for the mass market, primarily young people, and you have "art house" films made for a very different group of customers. The big movies at the cineplex aim at and need massive sales to make any money, the more modest films are aimed at a much more focused audience demo, and are capable of profit at a much lower level.

The subject of the big movies has to have demonstrated wide appeal, and usually features a LOT of CGI, explosions, monsters, and transparent and easily accessible characters and plots. Of late, that means Sci-fi, comic book characters, or Tolkienesque rip-offs. Their expenses are high, and large box-office is required.

The smaller films can aim for subjects that are less popular, rely on character, tight scripts, and great acting to attract an audience. That audience is much smaller, and usually older. This is where you'll find innovative plots, historically based films, and far less cgi! Their expenses are a fraction of the blockbuster films, but they can show a profit by carefully controlling their cost. They may have fraction of the box office, but don't require 100 million plus to cover their nut.

It is also true that a director can acquire a reputation that will attract certain people to the theater to see any film he makes. That is true for both the extravaganzas and the art house film.

So it is with Wargaming. You find a mix of types at all price points but if you aim at a huge sales then there's no question that fantasy/Sci-fi is the largest target. It has a huge cross-over potential and younger gamers with a lot of discretionary cash. It requires a lot of color graphics, plastic what nots, and is very accessible. A dedicated figure line is another opportunity and cost.

Other than WWII ( and WWII fantasy) historical rules are a much smaller and more difficult target. The market is fractionalized into many discrete and exclusive era "niches". Sure ACW and Napoleonics are a safe bet, but they are a fraction of the larger hobby of wargaming.

Once you wander off into the WSS, 18th century, or ECW, let alone colonials, medieval or ancients, you must realize that the size of that audience is small,(and often exclusively dedicated to that period)and that you would be wise to tailor the print run and your total expenses of distribution carefully.

My largest seller was over 5000 books and supplements, but an initial run by a new author of a historical rule set is best set at no more than 500 copies. As has been said, 1000 is a hit! I suspect that the total potential customer base for historical wargames is less than 50,000, perhaps as few as 35,000. Fantasy/Sci-fi is at least 4-5 times larger with larger turn-over as gamers leave and others join that customer group at a higher rate than found with historicals.

The present distribution model is also a poor one. Print has arguably ceased to be the best model, and PDF printing is taking over. I, for one, think that technology is transitional, and after some thought, think hosting a "print" version on the iPad is also not the long term solution. How rules are taught, and how we sell them to customers, and in what form, is a big issue. It will not be the printed book for much longer.

It is also interesting to note how the hobby has diverged into so many gaming systems, which definitely splits the pie into far more pieces for the game companies to share. When you see that Avalon Hill sold around 250,000 copies of Panzerblitz and now even the best selling titles from GMT may only see a print run of 5,000 copies.

Much thanks to everyone included.

I don't know why so many people rag on printed books. This is by far my preferred format. I can't afford the ink or the professional-grade printer to generate my own pages of a PDF (let along bind it properly). Books are a bargain. Books are portable and shareable and copyable in ways that an electronic file are not. I'm not lugging my laptop around to games. And flipping thru a book to look up something is faster than scrolling thru a PDF, or trying various Searches, for me anyway. Hard copies are made to last. Electronic files can disappear or become corrupted so easily by comparison. (Granted, you don't want to drop either your rulebook or your laptop or eReader in the toilet…)

Honestly, after thousands of years finally leading to plentiful and cheap books and corresponding rises in literacy and education, now people turn their backs on the printed word? No wonder literacy and communication skills are in decline. I worry about the state of liberty in the world when content is controlled by digital overlords.

Yes, the sky IS falling.

The printed word is also in the control of overlords. How many good books were never printed, because no publisher thought it was a safe bet?

With the internet, anyone can write anything and distribute it for free.

I can't tell if Piper was being serious or having a good laugh. After all there is a certain rewarding irony in using an online chat forum in order to complain about everybody using electronic communication.

"I can't afford the ink or the professional-grade printer to generate my own pages of a PDF"

Color printers start at $59. USD Isn't it a weird world we live in, where a color printer costs less than a few dozen miniature soldiers? (I'm pretty sure that my retirement pension includes some Hewlett-Packard stock, so please buy HP.)

"after thousands of years finally leading to plentiful and cheap books and corresponding rises in literacy and education, now people turn their backs on the printed word?"

The printed word is on those PDFs, too.

I can imagine some ancient Mesopotamian with his clay tablet being shown this new invention from Egypt called "paper," and thinking: "Look at this thin, flimsy, trash! Clay tablets have been good since before Hammurabi! Who needs this lightweight crap? No wonder the kids nowadays can't read cuneiform properly anymore!"

" I worry about the state of liberty in the world when content is controlled by digital overlords."

I worry for all those future dictators who won't be able to do book-burnings anymore! There's no satisfaction in having your stormtroopers build a big bonfire and ordering people to toss in their PDFs…

a book burning is called a Purge now, Cntrl-Alt-Del :-)

I'm afraid Piper is expressing the feelings of a lot of people that still live in the land that time forgot. It really doesn't matter what anyone thinks, time has a way of just movin' on down the road, whether you like where it's headed or not.

Certain books will maintain far into the foreseeable future as art and graphics books are always going to be a favored format.

But for written materials? I always get a eBook now if it is available, simply because it is MUCH more convenient and offers many more services and resources at hand than a printed book. It is also cheaper and brings far less clutter into the house.

My wife and I once had a library of over 4,000 books, it is half that now, as we replace classics and reference books with digital versions, or simply use the internet.

Having said all that, I think wargame rules may be poorly served by the printed word, no matter how artfully written or illustrated. I am anticipating releasing my next rules is a FAR different format that will be digital, but not simply an electronic version of written text.

Just as the invention of the written word replaced poetic recitation of memorized sagas, and the printing press replaced handwritten illuminated parchments carefully copied as they gradually fell into disrepair, so the new digital approaches will replace printed books as athe mechanical means of relaying information. A book is just a tool, nothing more, and tools often lose their purpose as new technology appears.

We are living in an era that is one of the biggest transitions in many areas of living in the history of mankind. I guess one can choose to see it as exciting and wonder where the trip may lead, or be petrified and fearful of a changed world where new abilities, skills, and outlooks will be required.

I am choosing to embrace it and look to the future. Others may resist and complain. History, time, and the approaching future really don't care which stance you take-it's happening anyway.

My two cents on printing PDFs:

I printed some ashcans of Starships to sell at a convention. Roughly 70 pages, color printed (some glossy pages), and comb-bound with clear plastic covers. Not counting the printer — which had already been paid for by the wife's webcomic — they cost roughly $10 USD each to create.

The bulk of that was ink.

On the main topic:

I've got a friend who designs board games, and (according to him) a board game will typically sell between 2,000 and 5,000 copies. Games that sell more than that are the superstars.

If I sell that many of mine, I'll be ecstatic.

If you don't mind black and white, buy a nice laser printer and you can knock out your whole PDF collection in an afternoon.

Never again inkjet!

I wish I was half as eloquent as some of you chaps :) all I can say is ditto Repiqueone

Nice little thread this, I feel a little inspired to try writing up my own ruleset which has been bouncing around my head for a few years now.

Irrational Number Line Games .pdfs over the last 2.5 years, according to a WGV query I just ran, sold just shy of 2.5K items (not including free ones, which didn't "sell").

Since that makes no sense outside of a lot of the context many people have been talking about, most of those titles are shorter (20-30 pagers) scenario supplements and selling for $1 USD-$2 each (our base game is free).

The best part about how much of what sells where for us, is our customers have a high recidivism rate … er … that may not be the best phrasing … oh, well … just over 4 of 5 people who have bought something from us have bought something else on a different day.

or be petrified and fearful of a changed world where new abilities, skills, and outlooks will be required.

Well, I've been programming computers for the last 36 years, so I would hazard that I'm not exactly petrified of the technology. Repiqueone, yourself, you point out some advantages of print (and there are many others). As someone who creates, distributes, and assists others in the adoption of digital technology, I agree with the drawbacks Piper mentions, less the one about the sky falling.

In some ways I am thankful for the loss of skills. When my wife had her car broken into in the parking lot of the high school where she worked, another car was stolen the same day. To this day we believe that the third pedal saved us from loosing a car.

On the other hand, I have a couple dozen "hot, young" programmers working for me who can't write a parsing engine without being provided a library of the major components. And all the crap we have decided to transport along with our digital information is not only a drag on the infrastructure, but a massive security vulnerability.

Until it's as easy to "flip through" a digital book as it is to "flip through" the pages of a hard copy, I'll prefer hard copy for books, to include rule books, that I keep referring to.

I now only buy my fiction in digital, and magazines that I would normally read and recycle.