"Can you make much money at this?" Topic

How much can be made in making games?

How do Board Games and Miniatures Rules differ in their income generation?

"Can you make much money at this?"

No.

How do Board Games and Miniatures Rules differ in their income generation?

They don't. Well, probably board games are worse than miniatures rules because of the higher production costs.

Board games sell more volume, but have a higher production cost as MajorB states. Making money, well, you're not going to make much. I make enough to cover the cost of new moulds and convention attendance……sometimes. In other words, you had better go into this for the enjoyment, not for the profits.

B

I've never made any money our of wargames. Some people do, but it is generally better if you don't give up your day job:)

I write rules because I enjoy doing it, not to get rich.

Bung out a PDF rule set for a fiver and you'll get some beer money in, but probably not much.

It is an interesting question. However if that is the first question you are asking then you are going to be disappointed. The first question should be do I want to create a board game or miniature game set of rules? If the first question is more important to you than the second question then you need to put your entrepreneurial efforts into something else.

I will not fully agree with MajorB's answer as one then has to define what we mean can you make money making games. In the broadest sense of the query the answer is yes. More specifically can you make lots of money and retire to a home on the Rivera? Well then the answer is probably not.

I've had the privilege to have worked on a number of minature game rules as either a play tester or as the illustrator for said rules. In some cases doing both. I have also designed miniatures. In all of those cases I made money doing the design and artwork but not enough to make any kind of significant dent in expanding my personal wealth. Yet I enjoyed the work and it was always engaging.

By extension I know personally a number of miniature game rules creators. For most this is a side business done more out of love than for money; a few of them have not done badly by their endeavors. But again none of them are looking at real estate along the Rivera.

Well maybe that scoundrel Mexican Jack Squint but I think he may be involved in other nefarious schemes.

Someone once told me that the way to make a small fortune in games was to start with a large fortune.

I've been publishing wargames stuff for close on thirty years. It's no way to make a living, but it's always paid the car insurance. Some years it pays for a nice trip abroad.

I'm expanding into more general, very silly, card games right now.

to have a million dollars in gaming, start with two and work your ass off for a year, then you will have one.

IF you are a Euro (board game) designer you can make TONNES of Money…like 50k on your first game and if the design is popular/works…you're well on your way to making a million.

Of course, you have to have the right formula, but it happens more often than not.

Get thee to Liepzig!

'It happens more often than not'
It happens, but not often.

Can I make money? Apparently not. Well, actually I make enough to support my gaming habit, and that includes business expenses going to cons to run games(advertise)/sell stuff.

Can people in general make money. It's pretty much like any other entrepreneurial endavour. You work hard, and you can succeed.

The art of gaming is an art.
The business of gaming is a business.

I had a friend who owned a gaming/hobby store. I asked him one time what he would do if he won the lottery. He said, "Put it into the business until it's gone."

(Good one, Al.)

NO!

Is there a place to find out how many copies of a particular game sells?

Some obviously do, but most don't.

always been said……"how do you make $1 USDM in the hobby as a business?……."Start with $10 USDThe Lost SoulSouthernPhantom

As a college student, I provide a lot of my spending money through sales of rules and Shapeways miniatures. Is it much in the grand scheme of things? No, not really.

Sure you can.
TSR did (till the business was taken over by incompetents who ran it into the ground).
Wizards of the Coast did, and still does.
Games Workshop did and still does.
Steve Jackson Games did and still does.
Fantasy Flight Games did and still does.
Hasbro does.
Etc..
Anybody who thinks you can't make money creating and selling games or even just miniatures games either has sour grapes or hasn't been paying attention.

BUT…

You can't run it as a hobby.
You can't do it by yourself.
You can't just willy-nilly shluff off a game with a yawn and a roll-over-and-hit-snooze approach.
And you can't do it without putting some real money into it, or following by0-the-book, hard-nosed, no frills, no fudging business practices and principles into it.
And lots and lots and lots of shoe leather.
Design the game. Pay a professional editor to edit the rules (meaning, tell you what they understand, what they don't, and what NOBODY is going to understand, and suggest how you can change your text for the better). Pay a professional copy editor to catch all your inevitable grammar and punctuation mistakes. Pay an honest-to-god good artist to create your rules art and components art. Pay a graphic designer and layout expert to design the rules and components. Pay to have several full-sized, full-blown mockups made. Gather playtesters and have them use the mockups and tell you what sucks. Then change the game and do all of the above over again. Repeat until it's great.
BEFORE all of that, research your market. Get a feel for if all of the above is even worth it. Will your game actually sell? Are there competitors out there with popular games, or simply games people might flock to more than yours? (Hint: If you're just recreating D&D or 40K or something like them, the answer is "yes, they're there, and they'll eat you for breakfast.")
And that means also run the numbers. What's the cost to develop? What's the cost to produce? What's the cost to warehouse it? What's the cost and how will you distribute it? What's the cost for marketing and advertising?
Where are you going to get that money? What's your ideal price with a good margin? etc., etc..

IF you can do all the above, and do it for several years whike earning peanuts, then yes, eventually you can make a lot of money in this business.
But the number of people who can meet that IF is obviously very small.
And most of them aren't on this forum.

You can make a few dollars without huge effort. My sale of rules, pieces of terrain, and occassional commissions funds my hobby and generates enough extra money to help a bit with other real life purchases or expenses.

Huge money can be made – example GW. Or that Conan Kickstarter – surely that'll turn a handsome profit.

But…for every GW there are several hundred who will be in the "break even or make a small loss or make a big loss and go out of business" category.

From my own experience, don't quit your day job.

I would take Parzival's post to heart.

With the right product and enough business sense to calculate and protect your margins you can make a living.

With rules this advice is especially important:

Pay a professional editor to edit the rules (meaning, tell you what they understand, what they don't, and what NOBODY is going to understand, and suggest how you can change your text for the better). Pay a professional copy editor to catch all your inevitable grammar and punctuation mistakes.

Otherwise your product will be little different from the mass of free "product" out there and will not last long.

I have edited a number of commercial rule sets and can add that you need to set aside a decent amount of money for this as the work involved is considerable. Oh and be prepared to "park" your ego once you hand the work over.

Finally, good luck with your venture.

--
Martin Stephenson
Vexillia: Wargames Miniatures & Accessories
Shop | Rules | eBay | Twitter

You can't run it as a hobby.
You can't do it by yourself.

And therein lies the rub …

I know Clash of Arms and GMT games are always considering design submittals. However, be prepared to give up a lot of your ideas for the final publishing.

The game companies will want you to do all of the art work and graphics. These companies are publishers, not really game companies.

I have a friend that has a successful game publishing company and four successful Kickstarter projects. He said there is no money in writing rule books. The money is in the play aids and cool graphic components. That's where quality and graphics comes in. Everything Parzival said is correct.

You can do it low cost and have someone like Lulu do the publishing and shipping for you.

Another way for sales is to recruit resellers or affiliate partners that can tell people about the game and when someone purchases it through a website they get a % and you handle all of the shipping.

Hobby stores are not going to stock a little known war game so don't expect a lot there.

To keep the system alive you need to have a pipeline of new products or add ons every 6 months or so to keep interest up.

I'd have to say great graphics and eye candy are going to be most important along with the quality of the product. If the system has some type of a hook or new idea, especially using play aids will help too.

GMT uses a system where they try to pre-sell at least 500 copies of a board game before they put it into production. I guess this is similar to crowd funding.

If crowd funding it helps to partner with a company that has a complimentary product like terrain, buildings or models that they'll offer as incentives and discounted to people that sponsor your project.

Wolfhag

No.

Just doing some basic math indicates that Yes, you can.

I read a few years ago that Slitherine sold nearly 40,000 copies of their original "Field of Glory" book. When you print that many books, the cost per unit is very, very low, probably about £1.00 GBP Double that to account for the cost of fulfillment, storage, delivery, and so on. Even if those were all sold at a deep discount to distributors, say, no more than £10.00 GBP each, that's a profit of £8.00 GBP X 40,000.

I make that out to be a profit of about a third of a million pounds. And that's assuming the worst, in terms of no direct retail sales. And that's just one product.

The many iterations of Traveller are proof you don't need an editor, or even someone that can create a table of contents for your publication, though I'd recommend you use one anyway.

As a game designer, you are unlikely to make any real money.

As a businessman whose business is games, you >might< have a hope.

Understanding and accepting the difference between the two will largely determine how successful you might be.

Many designers are tinkers who earn a buck or two here and then and are happy to do so because they treat their design endeavors as a hobby. They don't expect to make real money. Other designers treat the business as a hobby but hope that it will make a lot of money and are shocked when they fail. Then there's the tiny proportion of people who are good at design but treat their efforts as a real business and some of them actually succeed.

Ian Livingstone, who founded Games Workshop, started out selling games from his van. He's no longer with Games Workshop (he sold his interests and moved onward and upward), and he IS a gamer, but he never treated his business as a hobby.

I read a few years ago that Slitherine sold nearly 40,000 copies of their original "Field of Glory" book. When you print that many books, the cost per unit is very, very low, probably about £1.00 GBP

Yes, but where are you going to find £40,000.00 GBP up front to pay for the printing? To say nothing of the delivery, storage and distribution costs you will incur before you sell any copies?

You can make a decent income from games publishing, but the real demand is in boardgames and family games. Wargaming is a far smaller market than general games however. Look at Steve Jackson Games, Munchkin stuff outsells everything else they produce by a significant margin.

Yes you can make money and make a living from Wargaming. A number of us do….

If you couldn't you wouldn't have a wargames industry just a bunch of cranky amateurs in basements.. (Oh, wait… :-). )

Mike

Yes you can make money and make a living from Wargaming. A number of us do….

Yes, Mike, and yours is a very good small business. But that is the point. The people making a living from Wargaming are running businesses. In other words, doing far more than just (in the words of the OP)

"making games"

And you will run into a lot of cranky tightwads who think you ought to give it away, or run in the red "for good will".

Dear Winston

That has been my experience. I once (back in the early 1970's) did cast a few miniatures. All the people in my group who wanted them thought it was outrageous that I wanted to charge them for the base cost of the lead.

I remember when one guy who was a very good painter was chagrined, I offered to trade him two figures for one paint job. He wanted to be paid.

He wanted the soldiers for free, but he insisted on getting paid instead.

Bung out a PDF rule set for a fiver and you'll get some beer money in, but probably not much.

If it hasn't cost anything to produce, and you sell a decent number of copies (say 1000) then it's more than just beer money. It may not be enough to live on, but it can be a decent amount of extra money.

Design the game. Pay a professional editor to edit the rules (meaning, tell you what they understand, what they don't, and what NOBODY is going to understand, and suggest how you can change your text for the better). Pay a professional copy editor to catch all your inevitable grammar and punctuation mistakes. Pay an honest-to-god good artist to create your rules art and components art. Pay a graphic designer and layout expert to design the rules and components. Pay to have several full-sized, full-blown mockups made.

Does anyone actually do that when writing wargames rules ? If you have to pay for all of that, you're not going to make much money on the rules.

Marshal Mark,
If you have the money and assets to do all of that you'll most likely have the marketing and distribution taken care of. One part people left out is conducting marketing surveys to see what people are willing to buy and how much they'll pay. These are good business practices that a guy who is a war game junkie and game designer overlooks. He'll think people will buy his product because it is a good set of rules. WRONG!

In case you haven't noticed Americans are used to having inferior products shoved down their throats through slick marketing, eye candy and telling them what they want to hear.

If you wanted to design a game that sells right now design something that has some type of cute "cutting edge" activation system, ideally with cards using nice graphics. The more random and convoluted the "activation" system is the more people will think it is realistic. Everyone knows a real battle is just a cluster of random uncoordinated actions. Sometimes there is a warp in the space time continuum when all of the action just all of a sudden stops and we go to the next turn. How cool is that!

A rule that will force a unit to not activate or move in a turn is good to include in your rules as people seem to like that one. Maybe they froze, got lost or the CO had to stop and take a dump, happens. Be creative.

Be sure to pad at least one third of the rule book with staged pictures of a game with figures painted by professionals that most mortals will never be able to duplicate. Include things like painting instructions and orders of battle because the more pages the more you'll be able to charge. So what if a 10 second search on Google or YouTube will give you the same of better information. It's all about making people feel good.

Also be sure to include information and special rules that "everyone knows is true". Things like a Ronson Rule for Sherman's and rule to make the German SS supermen like we all know they are. You don't want to insult people intelligence or tell them they've got it all wrong.

Whatever you do don't have German Panther and Tiger tanks make a breakdown check every time they move. You can't have the uber tanks breaking down in the middle of combat, that will kill your sales. You'll be insulting people's intelligence if a Tiger does not kill at least five Sherman's in a game.

Take liberty in abstracting reality. There is no need to have a real time scale or historic weapon ranges. So what if a pistol has 50% of the range as a bolt action rifle. Just look at those pretty pictures!

If you are thinking of designing a game that uses real time and distance scales, military nomenclature and terms – dont! It will only intimidate people and scare them away. There is a fairly large percentage of gamers out there that just want to roll dice, blow things up and move their pretty models around to take pictures. Whatever you do don't make it difficult for them to do that or your game won't sell.

I know I probably went a little overboard and have offended some people. However, I think you'll find at least a grain of truth in that. Profit making capitalism demands that you give consumers a product they want, not something you think they need.

Wolfhag
PS – no, I have never worked for Games Workshop or Osprey

From my years in the RPG and Minis hobby, the people that get the most for the least are the artists. (Which may just be sour grapes because I can't draw a circle with a compass and have always worked in the "wordy" side of games).

But really, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then they should be paid $30 USD per illo, not hundreds (at RPG rates of $0.03 USD/word – yes, the same as Pulp Writers used to get "back in the day", when a penny was worth more).

I mentioned this thread to a Well-known Game Designer (TM) today after we'd been playtesting a new set of rules. He doesn't visit TMP anymore.

"So, the usual?" he asked.

"What, a lot of people who don't know anything about it expressing their opinions?"

"Yup."

"Mostly."

Hi

I would add to the title: 'Anymore'?

I wonder if the market is becoming smaller – are there less gamer's than 10 or 20 years ago?

I use software for another 'hobby' and what I have noticed is people tend to always be looking for something new – only the really respected/highly rated stuff seems to generate long term sales.

I always thought that a range of miniatures (across various historical eras) minimally detailed, well sculpted/posed and cast in 15/18mm would do well – not that I have an inclination to sink £50,000.00 GBP into such an en-devour!

no,

My experience has been;

You will spend a LOT of time developing and playtesting and getting ready for print.

You will spend a LOT of time supporting the game and buyers post publication

By comparison you get a small financial reward.

It is a labour of love to the point that the income is incidental. If you want better money, do a sideline job or work overtime.

There are exceptions, but most designers will not be in that top tier of income.

Good luck if you do take your plans forward.

Last year, I made just over 17K US dollars (after the Vault took their cut and before taxes are paid).

So a decent part time job but obviously nothing to live on.

If you broke it down by money per hour worked? Who knows. Some weeks I just tinker a bit, some weeks I work 10 hours a day.

Is that typical? Who knows. I don't do glossy high-production values, I only do PDF by and large and I don't advertise heavily.

On the flip side, I have products that cross-sell each other, I have a loyal, if small, fan-base and I have a high rate of output.

You'll have to juggle how all that fits together, and where you'd fit in each of those categories.

* * * * *

If you are thinking of publishing your own game, do it.
Even if you only ever make beer money (and your first game probably will, unless you're lucky AND good), it's a super rewarding experience and you can make a few hundred. That's nothing to scoff at, if you had fun doing it and I guarantee you'll learn something new along the way.