Today's post is about the publishing strategy we've adopted for 2024. Specifically, we're focused on publishing new editions of existing games. Here's why:
Three facts about board game publishing:
- 5000 tabletop games are published each year.
- Less than one half of one percent of those are hits.
- Because it’s not a high-margin business, we need hits to avoid busting.
Right now we have one hit: Trekking the National Parks. If sales of that game collapse, we’re in trouble. Here are the lifetime sales of our main games:
So: we need a second hit, and that begs the question: how does a game become a hit?
The short answer: it needs to be unusually good, and marketed unusually well.
How to make an unusually good game?
There are a couple of different ways, but all are hard and various mistakes can prevent it. It’s like nailing 20 moving targets with one arrow, while avoiding civilian bystanders.
Critically, when a game misses targets, we don’t find out which until after it’s published.
That’s because we get MUCH more and better feedback after a game is published than before. After publication, thousands of ratings and comments accumulate online, spelling out every error in kaleidoscopic detail. And they’re from folks outside our playtester networks, so the feedback is less biased.
So, if we want to create a game that ticks enough boxes to be a hit, how do we do it? Two approaches:
- Make a brand new game, relying on lessons learned from already-published games. We’ve done a lot of that. The main problem with this is we’re always starting from zero.
- Start with an already-good game and try to make it great using all that feedback. Then we’re starting far from zero. This also allows us to earn more name recognition for a game that already has some, which helps market it. In many product categories, this is the standard approach. For example, legendary product designer Tony Fadell (iPhone, Nest Thermostat) has said your design isn't mature until the third edition.
So this year - 2024 - is the year of choosing that 2nd option.
The risk of a new edition: we don’t actually improve the game
Remember I said we don’t find out what targets we’ve missed until after publication? That applies to new editions too. So we have to be careful not to send a new edition to print that isn’t actually better than the old. This is hard. Paranoia is a valuable trait for a game designer. Let’s see how we do.
We don't plan to do this with all of our games
Our overall goal is to create an exceptional game the first time. For example, the reception to the gameplay of Trekking through History suggests that game is unusually good, so we have no plans to make a new edition of it.
But we also want to set our standards high enough that sometimes we won't be able to meet them. Our reach should exceed our grasp, sometimes.