Chapter 16: Selling Yourself and Your Ideas to the Game Industry | Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, & Playtesting Games (Gama Network Series)

< Day Day Up >

Understanding The Board And Card Game Industry: A Guide F Or Inventors

by Brian Tinsman, Wizards of the Coast

In the board and card game industry—a.k.a. the tabletop game industry—game designers are called “inventors.” Brian Tinsman is a professional game inventor with over 25 published tabletop game products. As lead concept acquisitions representative for Wizards of the Coast, Brian has reviewed hundreds of games submitted for publication and helped many beginning inventors get their first games published.

The following is excerpted from his excellent book: The Game Inventor's Guidebook. It is used here with permission.

How New Games Happen

Design

Most tabletop game companies don’t have a staff of full-time inventors creating new games. It’s usually more cost-efficient for them to buy or license at least some amount of games from independent inventors. Inventors drive the whole creative process. They take the germ of an idea and play around with it until it’s a working game. They create a prototype and test it out with lots of players, collect feedback, and make numerous revisions until it’s ready to sell.

Pitching

The designer’s next step is to convince a publisher to risk his money getting the game manufactured. Just like movies, books, and music, the game industry is overflowing with people who think they’re more talented than they really are. For that reason, the most desirable publishers have to screen out the hacks. In many cases you need to demonstrate you’re a legitimate prospect and have some talent before your game reaches the reviewer’s desk.

Manufacturing

When a publisher gives the go-ahead to publish a new game, he hands it off to his art department. Once the art and graphic design are finished, the rules are edited, the game goes to production. The production people select what kind of paper and plastic are going to be used for each component and convert the artwork from computer files or photographs to films, which are fed into the printing machines at the factory. The presses churn out boxes, boards and cards, the molds spit out the pieces, and a worker puts them all together and shrink-wraps it. Once the entire print run is complete, it goes on a truck.

Distribution

Once the game is on a truck it needs to get to stores. The very largest publishers can call up the largest chain retailers like Toys R Us and ask how many copies to ship, but what about all the small publishers and retailers? There are about 5,000 game and hobby stores in North America that aren’t part of any chain. It doesn’t make sense for a small publisher to call each store up and ask if they want to carry a few games. Likewise, a retailer that carries 50 different games doesn’t want to call 50 publishers every time he places an order. This is where the distributors come in. Distributors buy games from publishers, store them in a warehouse, mark them up about 50%, and send retailers a catalog from which to order.

Retailing

Retailers fall into two major categories: mass-market retailers and specialty/hobby shops. Mass-market retailers are mostly composed of big department stores like Target, Wal-Mart, and the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, Toys R Us. Toys R Us alone accounts for 19% of all tabletop game sales in the U.S. Hobby shops, on the other hand are usually small stores privately owned and run by dedicated people who love games (and/or comic books).

Markets For Games

From an inventor’s perspective, there are basically four markets (categories) in which to sell games to publishers. They’re defined by the type of consumer who buys the games in that market, methods of distribution, and product expectations of the publishers. The categories are mass market, hobby games, American specialty games, and European games.

Mass market

Mass-market games are most recognizable of all games to most Americans. They’re the ones you see on the shelves of Wal-Mart and Toys R Us. They mostly come in two types. The first is adult party games like Pictionary, Taboo, and Cranium. Alongside these newcomers are the venerable classics and family games that many of us grew up with, such as Monopoly, Clue, Life, Boggle, and Scrabble children’s games fall into this category too.

Hobby games

Hobby games are mostly the domain of males in their teens and twenties who play religiously every week or more. In general these games are extremely complex and it’s not unusual for fans to spend hundreds of dollars a year buying supplements, cards, figurines, or new rulebooks for a single game.

Most young

Hobby games fall into three major categories: roleplaying games, miniatures games, and trading card games.

American specialty

This is sort of a catchall category for American games that aren’t mass market or hobby games. It includes products targeted at a certain segment, such as strategy games, drinking games, “how to host a mystery” games, and so forth. Generally you should expect small print runs from small publishers, but it’s definitely the easiest category to get started in. There are also a number of games in this category that would be appropriate for the mass market, but for one reason or another haven’t gone through that distribution channel.

European

When someone talks about the European game market, they’re mostly talking about games published by German companies. The German game market is a big one. In Germany, games are quite a bit more popular as a mainstream entertainment choice when compared to North American tastes. German companies put out dozens and dozens of new games each year, only a small fraction of which ever get translated and make it over to the United States. German games in general tend to be much more complex, abstract, and strategic than most Americans are used to.

Others

These four markets are by no means the only places you can sell games. If you have a football game and you can get sporting goods stores to carry it, or if you can find some other way to skip traditional game retail outlets, that can work in your favor. Some companies sell directly to the consumer by mail order. Others sell on eBay or via a web site. There’s also a modest amount of sales to educational distributors and schools. There are innumerable other options for getting your game into consumers’ hands. However, as of yet, none of them have been able to generate sales figures that come close to those of the four traditional markets.

Idea to Store Shelf in Seven Steps

Invent your game. Start with a certain type of consumer in mind. Refine it by getting people whodon’t know you to play it. They’ll discover more problems than you expected. Solve them.
Research publishers. You want a company that publishes games that are different from yours, but are aimed at the same target market. These publishers already have good distribution in places where those consumers shop and will be most receptive to a game like yours. Try to find out what’s missing from their product line by visiting their web site.
Contact your targeted publishers one at a time. Ask if they’re interested in seeing your game. If not, find out why not and what they’d rather see instead. There are four recommended methods of contact:
- Cold call: Call up and ask the best way to submit a game. Be professional. (Works best with smaller companies.)
- E-mail inquiry: E-mail their customer service department with a professional-sounding query letter asking if they would be interested in seeing your game.
- Approach in person: If you have the chance to attend a game convention or trade show, companies will often have booths with development staff in attendance. Ask how you can submit a game concept.
- Broker/agent: You will only need an agent to reach the large mass-market companies. But good agents can often give you valuable objective feedback on your product. Stay away from the shady ones that advertise on TV.
If they are interested in your game, send them a prototype or meet with the R&D representative to give a demonstration.
Wait to hear the company’s decision. (Usually six weeks maximum.)
Get feedback and continue development until you make a sale.
Negotiate a contract and let the publisher take it to market.

Top Ten Reasons Games Get Rejected

Poor gameplay: Lots of submissions just aren’t fun to play.
Unoriginal mechanics: Poor inventors use play elements stolen from a traditional game or a competitor’s game, whether intentionally or unintentionally. While no game is 100% original, it shouldn’t feel like something they’ve played before.
Game is not appropriate for that company: Reviewers see games all the time for categories they just don’t publish. Either people don’t do their research or are hoping a war game company will change their minds and publish a preschool game.
Too focused on theme, not gameplay: Many inventors like the idea of using a certain intellectual property or theme, but don’t have the time or talent to put together a compelling game. Instead, they take a traditional game like Go Fish, introduce a board, and slap some pretty pictures of Barbie on it. If a publisher wanted to do a product like that, they wouldn’t need an inventor to show them how.
Game is submitted without required legal forms or with inventor’s own legal forms: If the company asks you to sign a disclosure form and you don’t, your submission goes right in the trash.

Asking a publisher to sign a confidentiality agreement usually has the same effect. This is like stamping “I don’t understand the procedure” on the front of your submission.
Poor marketing potential: Some games are aimed at a consumer segment that’s too narrow. How many people are going to be interested in your subject?
Not feasible to produce: New inventors tend to over-design games with too many rules and too many extraneous components. If your game has lots of pieces or anything that would be complicated to manufacture, ask yourself if it’s absolutely necessary.
Game depends on an unobtainable license: Sure it would be nice to do a Star Wars-themed boardgame, but Hasbro has the license locked up for the foreseeable future. Even if it were available, very few publishers could afford the licensing fees. If your game depends on a license you need to make sure the license is available and affordable before you pitch.
Unclear rules: It’s a little-known truth that rules are unbelievably tricky to write. If you want a demonstration, watch someone try to play your game for the first time from your rules while you say absolutely nothing. If a publisher has that much trouble, he’s just going to quit.
Competes directly with another product in the company: Some people assume that if a company has a hit product they’ll want another one just like it. In fact, the opposite is true if it’s aimed at the same consumer segment. A new product is just as likely to pull customers away from the old game as it is to bring in new players. This is called cannibalization risk.

< Day Day Up >