Selling board games business. Board games are fun for everyone! If my game does not fit, can I contact another publisher
Predicting the popularity of a new board game is a thankless task - once the publisher refused to distribute Monopoly. Tatyana Bondarenko decided to go into this business not because she is fascinated by board games - entrepreneurial flair prompts businesswomen to make good decisions.
Publishing board games is a difficult business genre: no amount of focus groups can predict the commercial success of a box containing a game board, chips, dice and cards.
In 1934, unemployed American Charles Darrow failed to sell the idea of Monopoly to a major publisher, but he took the risk of releasing the game at his own expense - and in the end it became a worldwide hit. His example still inspires newcomers to the difficult market. We decided to follow the adventures of one of those.
From the cell "Start"
Tatiana Bondarenko and her husband started producing board games under the Bonko Games brand just over a year ago. The calculation was absolutely commercial, and did not grow out of a hobby at all: no one in their family ever engaged in collecting "tabletop games", did not disappear on gaming forums, did not participate in fashion game libraries.
But she already had entrepreneurial experience behind her: at one time, Tatyana left a stable, but incredibly boring career as a bank employee and went to, first opening her own small printing house, and then a private hotel for dogs. And in the interim, she managed to work out “streaming” copywriting, which taught her to write a lot and without creative crises. This useful skill turned out to be very useful in her new, board-game field.
If you look at it, the board games market in Russia is very young. Ten years ago, it seemed that computer games in our country won a final and unconditional victory over desktop-printed ones, since only simple “walkers” for children could be found on sale. younger age, and if you're lucky - expensive imported games, but without .
However, since then, Russia has also had its own publishers and bestsellers, both domestically developed and released under a Western license, with circulations of over ten thousand copies. According to the estimates of the market players themselves, now about a hundred new titles of games are released in the country every year.
Meanwhile, Tatyana Bondarenko, with the maximalism characteristic of beginners, saw weak sides Russian market and opportunities for yourself. According to her, domestic developers quality board games are still in short supply, and store shelves are mostly filled with so-called localized games from Europe and America.
At the same time, licenses are often bought not for the most popular games (since the rights to publish Western hits are expensive), and localization can be only partial - to the point that fans of the "board" then have to download the rules of the game in Russian from the site.
So the obvious niche for the creators of Bonko Games was to develop games on their own, to release not “waste paper”, but a high-quality product with decent design and printing. The idea of the debut game came to mind quite quickly: they decided to take advantage of the socio-political situation and release - just in time for the presidential election - a game called "The Election Race, or Who Could Become President."
It was fun to come up with game mechanics and surroundings: various “crusts” that allow you to solve a lot of problems, cars with flashing lights instead of the usual chips, trips to constituencies, lobbying for laws…
Over a deck of cards with bills, for example, I had to sweat a lot. “Fifty of them were required, each with six bills: in total, three hundred were obtained in just one deck,” Tatyana estimates the amount of work done.
To make the game rich in information, and the texts ironic and full of allusions to real life, she had to raise all the high-profile political events of the past few years. For greater solidity, it was decided to style the box with the game under a strict black case.
When the idea lay down on a white sheet of drawing paper in a simplified, schematic form, and then was played dozens of times with several groups of "testers", the moment came for real investment. At that time, entrepreneurs had only 350 thousand rubles at their disposal.
“Initially,” Tatyana says with a smile, “we naively drew ourselves an ideal scenario: the game was invented, transferred to paper, tested taking into account different game situations handed over to a good designer. What difficulties can there be? However, it turned out to be much easier to come up with a game than to publish and then sell.
Obstacle Race
Game design was originally a position that the creators of The Election Race decided not to skimp on. Old-timers of the market will surely smile, but startups spent 120 thousand rubles on it alone. “An artistic realization of a board game for such money, provided that the entire turnover of the game can be only one and a half million, is nonsense,” Tatiana Bondarenko agrees.
However, the "presentation" for the perfectionists from Bonko Games was above all: they wanted to keep the brand, starting with the debut game. The playing field was imprinted on a rigid kappa, traditionally used for book binding, game cards and the certificates were transferred to thick cardboard with a glossy surface. The invented entourage considerably increased the final estimate.
“We could simplify our task and put plastic pyramids in the set instead of tokens,” explains Tatyana. - It would cost only a ruble per set. Meanwhile, the machine cost us three rubles. Here every detail costs money. When you multiply all these rubles by the circulation, you get a rather big amount.”
The idea with a poker box and velvet upholstery inside was never realized. It turned out that all printing houses in Moscow and the region work only on ready-made templates, and there are practically no specialists who develop packaging. I had to get out and look for more modest options. A box with a handle accidentally discovered at home has become a clear model for the production of case packaging.
Now, when more than six months have passed since the release of the game, Tatyana regretfully points out the shortcomings: “Inside the box, they could not do it as they planned. In theory, it should have consisted of two compartments, in one of which the playing field would be fixed, and in the other all other accessories would be located.
When we verbally explained what we wanted to see in the output, we were offered a monstrously inconvenient design that would complicate the already difficult production technology and take half a day to assemble.
The torment over just one box, which cost Bonko Games 65 rubles apiece, led to a disappointing conclusion: there are no opportunities for the production of truly high-quality board games in Russia. In China, as it turned out, the ideal poker version with velvet upholstery would cost no more than 40 rubles. But in this case, a lot of time would have to be wasted on coordinating the layout of the game and solving production problems.
The printing house had to gradually adapt to unfamiliar production, and Tatyana had to go through all the "circles of hell" that major market players describe every year at specialized exhibitions. Director of the Right Games project Ivan Tulovsky, speaking about the prospects for publishing desktop games in Russia, admits that over 10 years of market formation, we have not learned how to print high-quality games.
In the production process, according to him, it is necessary to constantly be in the printing house, otherwise the output can be a product that is very far from the developed layout. In addition, you should be prepared in advance for a decent percentage of marriage in the form of broken cards, uneven fields and color mismatches.
When creating the "Electoral Race", one hundred playing fields were spoiled. “When they were printed, it turned out that no one in the printing house could cut them correctly,” recalls Tatyana. “My husband and I had to show how it’s done.
In front of the surprised workers, we put a ruler on the playing fields, cut the mouthguard with a large mock-up knife and sent it folded into a box.” Having “self-served” in this way in the printing house, startups received playing fields at a price of 28 rubles apiece. And the printing house has gained invaluable experience in the production of desktops.
Old-timers of the board game market like to joke that any task that is technically any more difficult than the production of puzzles is beyond the power of the vast majority of Russian printing houses. Each publisher solves the problem in its own way.
Thus, the Hobby World company, which introduced the domestic consumer to such Western bestsellers as Colonizers, Carcassonne and Munchkin, came to the conclusion a long time ago: it is still possible to print games of European quality in Russia - only for this you need to create own production. Therefore, the company performs the entire postprint at two of its own production sites in the Ivanovo and Kaluga regions.
As a result, the Bondarenko spouses spent about 700 thousand rubles on the release of "The Election Race" with a circulation of 2 thousand copies - a very modest amount, according to Tatiana's estimates. However, production problems pretty much knocked Bonko Games out of schedule: the game was not released by October 2011, as planned, but only by February 2012.
We managed to get to the real March elections in Russia, but missed part of the time that could provide effective sales: summer was just around the corner. “Summer is the time when all the toys are in poverty,” Tatyana admits. - We are very dependent on wholesalers who select goods depending on the season. From June to August, they prefer to buy rubber rings, balls and jump ropes, rather than board games.”
Try to sell
The idea of exploiting the elective theme for commercial purposes seemed to be in the air. Six months before the release of The Election Race, a similar socio-political game appeared on the market - Presidential Elections from Drofa-Media, a developer and manufacturer of children's gaming products. With the timing of release, this old-timer of the market was in perfect order, and it seems that the company managed to skim the cream.
According to Olga Poseva, head of the sales department of Drofa-Media, at first their “desktop” had good sales, but after the March event, interest in it cooled down. “The game didn't become a bestseller, but we didn't place much stake on it,” she comments. “After the election, it became an average product that simply expanded our assortment line.”
Unlike a more eminent competitor, Bonko Games makes a high bet on its first child, since there is nothing else in the portfolio of the Bondarenko couple yet. And now, right on the march, they have to build distribution channels. Working directly with large stores, bypassing the wholesale link, turned out to be troublesome and labor-intensive, which is unreasonable for a publisher with a still meager product line.
Retailers have already demonstrated willfulness towards the publishers of The Pre-Election Race: one Moscow trading house did not appreciate the irony of the game, apparently sensing some kind of “dangerous” political overtones, and suddenly removed it from sales and removed it from the store’s assortment list. But through wholesalers, they managed to put the game on the shelves of some Auchans and sell 120 copies in the first three months.
Why the shelves of many Russian stores are mostly filled with economy-class board games also did not remain a secret for young publishers for long. It turned out that this is the initial installation of both retailers and wholesalers.
In principle, a product in the “above average” and “premium” price categories is more difficult to break into the shelves than “waste paper”: additional arguments are needed in favor of the fact that the game will sell well, and it can be difficult to offer them to a little-known publisher.
According to Natalia Urusova, owner of the online board games store Igrocity.Ru, the price range of the most popular games in Russia is from 500 to 1,500 rubles. At the same time, preference is given to games for families or for companies. And Bonko Games' Election Race turned out to be expensive.
It appeared offline at a price of 1,600 rubles, in the Komus and Superfishka online stores - 1,150 each. The wholesale shipment went to the Urals at a price of 750 rubles, but we can safely assume that further markups in links increased the cost at least twice.
Another well-established way to promote board games, not yet taken up by Bonko Games, is gaming events in clubs, bars and pubs. The interest here can be mutual: the institution receives an influx of visitors, and the publisher, in addition to popularizing the game, can count on the fact that one of the participants decides to purchase a copy "for home, for the family."
At the same time, the publisher's expenses are exclusively organizational - to provide his animator, who will hold the event at the level. It is noteworthy that the publishers of promoted games can even count on a small reward from the institution.
A logical question arises: is it worth it to indulge in all the hard work of your own production and marketing of board games? Can't you just develop the mechanics and design of the game to sell to a publisher?
Large Russian publishers seem to have really matured to the point that they are ready to buy such a product on the side - and even began to publish relevant announcements on the Internet. The conditions, however, turn out to be not very attractive for the developer: 20 thousand rubles or a dollar from the box sold.
"Effective" circulation, as industry participants themselves admit, starts with a thousand boxes, and sales of most games are no more than a thousand or two copies. It turns out that you won’t earn much from selling the idea of \u200b\u200bthe game: this is rather the lot of single amateurs who develop for the love of art. So the creators of the "Pre-election Race" initially did not even consider this option.
According to Tatiana Bondarenko, in the first month and a half of its presence on the market, it was possible to sell 400 boxes of "The Election Race", and in six months - more than half of the circulation. By the standards of the Russian table-and-game industry, the result is not bad.
The first experience, however, invites introspection. The obvious conclusion: you can’t live on one game, you need a portfolio. A little less obvious: a company should not live by “premium” alone, good “economy games” in the assortment will not hurt it either.
Moving to the next level
The element of randomness that gives games such excitement is fully present in the tabletop business itself: you never know which game will really “shoot” in retail. The economy also leaves its mark: a game with an ingenious “engine” may well turn out to be so expensive to manufacture that, at the current price level on the market, it will not find its buyer.
Ivan Tulovsky from "The Right Games" explains a large percentage of the presence of localized Western products on the market by the fact that Russian publishers are trying to follow the path of minimizing risks. A game that has become a hit abroad is at least some guarantee that such a product will sell well in Russia.
Nevertheless, Bonko Games still intend to take risks by releasing games of their own design. The limited financial resources, however, force a change in tactics.
Tatyana Bondarenko now sees the ideal scenario for a well-established and profitable production as follows: it is necessary to launch a line of games in the economy and mainstream segments, which will provide a more or less stable cash flow and will allow you to earn money to publish a really serious and expensive game from time to time.
A portfolio of five titles should be enough to start steadily releasing 3-4 games per year to the market. “It will be possible to celebrate the victory when the assortment will be at least 30 games, and our brand will become recognizable on the market,” Tatiana thinks.
Entrepreneurs already have several economic games in the “branded” ironic style “on the stocks”, the cost of which in retail should be 350-400 rubles. In one of them, the card game Akulina, the characters are styled after the 18th century, and the game will be accompanied by an unexpected entourage - glasses and a dark scarf - to create an image of an unsympathetic heroine for those who lose.
More distant target expensive game"Gold Rush", offering players to get rich in the mine; already made for her game mechanics and set game items- a dummy gold bar, metal coins, an aged leather money bag and non-standard packaging in the form of a prospector's backpack.
In total, Bonko Games has more than 25 projects in development. Some of them are thought out to the smallest detail and are almost ready for game design. Unlike financial resources, startups have plenty of ideas.
Until recently, it was hard for us to imagine that board games - familiar and even, as it seemed a few years ago, beginning to become obsolete entertainment - could be a profitable investment.
The difficulty in predicting the development of the board game industry lies in the fact that the board game market (as they are called by lovers of this way of pastime) includes too many different products - from the usual simple "walkers" (roll the die and move the chips) to complex thematic and strategy games, where you need to calculate options for several moves ahead. According to preliminary estimates, the annual sales of board games is $100 million.
There is no single definition of board games yet. Typically, board games refer to games that can be played indoors using specially designed equipment − playing field, chips, dice, cards, tokens, etc.
As a rule, a small number of items required for the game allows them to be placed on the same table and / or in the hands of the players. The number of participants starts from two or more players. In some cases, there may even be one player, but such games are in the minority.
Board game production process
The production of a board game consists of several stages. The first - one of the most important - is thinking through and developing the idea of the game, determining its type, storyline, goals and degree of entertainment, the creation of a preliminary sample ("draft" version) and testing.
At the second stage, the final external design of all game elements– cards, fields, chips, etc. up to packaging. Then an estimate is made for launching the set into production, the circulation is calculated at which the release of the game becomes profitable (the smaller the circulation, the more “golden” your game sets will turn out), contractors are selected to perform all the work.
The average circulation of one board game released in our country is 5-6 thousand copies. If you have enough difficult game, requiring the use of additional inventory (for example, a cube, chips, tokens, etc.), it sometimes turns out to be appropriate to divide production, up to the search for partners abroad.
Pay attention to the quality of your products. For example, if your board game involves the use of cards and / or a playing field, you should not save on printing.
At the stage of launching the mass production of a board game, it's time to start organizing the marketing of your products.
Usually, new games are offered to small stores (general store, bookstore, toy store, gift store, etc., depending on the theme and target audience of your product).
Supermarkets make quite high demands, which may be beyond the capacity of a young company. Another common and effective option is to create your own online store, where anyone can read the description of the game and the rules, see photos and place an order directly, bypassing intermediaries.
The board game industry is attracting more and more attention from both developers and investors. In fact, the development of a board game takes several dozen times less money than to create a computer. The profitability of some projects reaches 300-350%.
Even during the economic crisis, when sales computer games in our country decreased by $150 million, the demand for desktop games continued to grow steadily.
However, in practice, most likely, it will turn out that the prospects for such a business are not as bright and optimistic as we would like. The competition in this segment is already quite high. And this despite the fact that despite all the efforts of sellers of board games, who do not just offer their product, but are trying to create demand for it, this type of entertainment in our country is not yet as popular as in the West.
For example, in Russia, board games aimed at children of low and medium price categories (from 100 to 500 rubles) are in the greatest demand. Games for older players costing from 500 to 3500 rubles are sold out not so actively.
The cost of developing one board game, depending on the idea and complexity, ranges from several tens of thousands of rubles to hundreds. However, the main problem is not in creating a board game, but in selling it.
Nowadays, when there are too many players (including Western ones) in the domestic board game market, new companies are trying to carve out their own narrow niche, offering inexpensive, but themed games, which, as a rule, in addition to entertaining, also have additional functions (for example, games to develop the imagination, strategic thinking, for learning foreign languages or even learning some skills).
Lilia Sysoeva
08.11.18 20 191 16
How to launch an international network of educational desktops
Sergei did not find suitable board games for his son and invented them himself.
Masha Shapoval
talked to the founders of the business
Together with a friend, he opened an online store in St. Petersburg. Six years later, this business brings 1 million rubles a month.
Now the games are sold in Russia and Eastern Europe, Israel and Chile, Japan and Taiwan. Here's how the guys got there.
How did they launch
In 2012, Sergey launched a circle to teach his son and his friends basic school skills: counting, multiplying, understanding the basics of physics, modeling, and recognizing geometric shapes. He wanted children to learn this through games. Sergei photographed the classes and talked about them in a blog in LiveJournal. For six months, 1000 people subscribed to the blog.
Sergey is a psychologist by education, and at that moment he worked in consulting: he conducted trainings for office workers. He studied elementary school textbooks, found many difficult moments for children and came up with board and outdoor games on these topics. Sergey showed the layouts to his friend Anton: they decided that such board games could be a success.
Sergey prepared layouts for the first four games: three about numbers and scores, the fourth about geometric shapes. Familiar designers drew a website layout for the guys on a barter basis: for trainings and consultations on business presentations, copywriting, public speaking and infographics. 50 thousand rubles were spent on the development of individual elements.
50 000 R
spent by entrepreneurs on the design of game layouts
It remained to print the board cards on large cardboard sheets, and then cut them out and put them into decks. Few printing houses were able to do this, so the first edition was printed through friends. For the second, larger print run, the printing house had to be searched for a month.
First sales
The sale of games was registered with Sergey's individual entrepreneur. At that time, he was already an entrepreneur - he conducted trainings.
In October 2012, the entrepreneurs sent the first games to the organizers of the game libraries for evaluation. These are events where people gather in cafes to play board games.
At the same time, pre-orders were launched at the St. Petersburg parent forum. There, the guys found an intermediary who collected pre-orders and money from customers for a percentage of sales. Teachers of children's clubs and leaders of developing classes became interested in games - they ordered board games for students and advised parents. For the first batch, Sergey and Anton printed four games of 500 copies.
There were no misses. Some boxes had to be printed several times: the cardboard was too thick and the glue was not strong enough to hold it. The party took 450 thousand rubles - Anton borrowed this money against a bonus at his main job.
Sergey and Anton were going to deliver the games right after new year holidays. Time was running out, so the guys came to the printing house to help: they cut the cards, assembled the decks and put them in boxes. The circulation was put into rented cells in the warehouse.
450 000 R
Sergey and Anton paid for printing the first batch of games
During the first month, entrepreneurs sold 900 games and earned 240 thousand rubles on them. Three months later, the first wholesale partner was found - it was an online store of children's toys, the head of which read about the guys' project in LiveJournal. The store took 100 games.
Launch costs, 2012 - 510,000 R
Printing 2 thousand games
450 000 R
Game layout design
50 000 R
Rent of cells in a warehouse
10 000 R
is free
How games are made
Children in primary school are not yet involved in the learning process. To get them interested, you need game form. The mechanics that the Smart Gangs use in games are not new. For example, some work on the domino principle: children find and match the same pictures and learn to count at the same time.
All board games can be played without a host - with children of the same age or even with adults. For example, "Zverobukvy" is often played as a family. The game has two sets of cards: with letters and with animals and their names. Participants take turns opening letter cards and comparing them with the letters that are included in the names of animals. The one who got the last letter in the name of the beast takes the card for himself. The player with the most cards wins. A child can beat an adult without even knowing the alphabet. It matches the drawn letters and remembers them in the process.
Usually Sergey works on several topics at the same time. It takes from a day to a year to come up with one game.
Prototypes are tested by the team: employees try them, write down what to change, and calculate how much production will cost. Before release, they sell a thousand copies to private customers and small wholesalers. After the first print run of 5,000, reviews are collected and games are improved based on them.
Today, the "Gang" has 21 games in its assortment. Topics: counting, multiplication, geometry, logic and reading. The most popular are "Zverobukvy" for 790 rubles, "Read-grab" for 890 rubles and "Turboschet" for 490 rubles.
790 R
stands in the "Gang" one of the most popular games"Beast Letters"
In addition to educational games, Sergey and Anton launched two new lines: entertaining quests and educational notebooks. Quests is a quest to find a gift with cards and riddles. They are bought by gift shops. Notebooks prepare children for school: they teach to count, write and learn letters. Both quests and notebooks are usually cheaper than educational games.
Another direction is corporate gifts. "Banda" prints its games for the children of employees with the branding of the company.
Team and office
The first year the guys worked together, combining business with their main job. Sergey invented games and led social networks. Anton communicated with private and wholesale customers, monitored income and expenses, collected and sent orders through couriers.
In 2013, the flow of orders grew to 6 thousand games per month, and the guys hired a remote worker - a mother with children. She communicated with customers and sent orders.
Sales continued to grow, and a year later the guys stopped coping with the three of them. Sergey and Anton quit their main jobs and found a salesman, a smearman, an assistant and a storekeeper at Headhunter. An office with a warehouse of 45 m² was rented for the team.
The Banda currently employs 45 people. The guys do not have a hierarchy - employees are united by projects. For example, for a gift project on New Year the team brings together designers, salespeople and marketers.
Sergey and Anton divided the business 50/50. Anton is in charge of operations: he is responsible for ensuring that orders come in, money is paid out, and promotions are carried out. Ideas, content, games, strategy and brand are Sergey's sphere. The partners agreed that each makes the final decision on their own block. That way they don't get into fights.
Entrepreneurs use a multi-stage selection process: they conduct an interview, give test tasks, set a trial period with specific indicators. But even with such a system, finding employees is difficult.
Once the guys took three interns for the position of designer, but no one came up. Two candidates failed to meet the challenges and pace. A third completed a week-long paid internship and expected to be back at work the very next day.
But The Gang always takes a break for a few days to think. The same evening, the intern gave the Gang a negative recommendation on an employer review site. The team decided not to cooperate with him.
Clients and promotion
The main clients of the "Gang" are parents, organizers of joint purchases, online stores of games and gifts. There are also companies that buy games as corporate gifts for the children of their employees.
For each category of clients, the guys make a landing page with a selection of newsletters. If a child cannot learn multiplication, a series of 7 letters is made for his parents. Parents read mailings, follow links on social networks, subscribe to other mailing lists and receive discounts on games. Such customers trust the company and are ready to buy more than those who are immediately led to the game page.
The support service communicates with customers in the Omnidesk system. Managers keep track of what mailings the client has received, what he is interested in and what questions he has already asked. So the team can offer a game that suits him best.
Entering the international market
In 2014, Gangs of Smarties games began to be ordered from abroad. For example, the guys received 15 orders from Australia. The head of the local math camp recommended the games to children from Russian-speaking families.
When the dollar rose, the costs of games did not change, and the profitability of the international games market increased. The guys went with their stand to the annual exhibition of children's goods in Nuremberg - this is the largest exhibition in this area. 2.5 thousand euros were paid for participation.
Gang games immediately attracted the attention of the participants. In two hours, 15 representatives of network children's centers and publishers from Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Finland and the USA visited the children's booth. They asked where to buy the games and if there was a translation into their language.
At first it was possible to agree with Hungary. Sergey and Anton sell games in this country to only one store - such a scheme is called an exclusive. The Smart Gang produces games, creates pages for them and suggests promotion, and partners take these tips into account and sell games to their customers. Later, exclusive partners appeared in Israel, China, Taiwan, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia and Japan.
In countries like Germany and Great Britain, it is not possible to work under such conditions. These are highly competitive markets, and no one knows Gang there yet, so partners are waiting to be sold a license to play games or give them 80% discounts. "Gang" does not sell its license: then the partners would release the games themselves, and the guys would not influence this process in any way. Sergey and Anton are also not ready to provide such big discounts.
In order for the German partners to agree to conditions that are beneficial to the Gang, entrepreneurs increase the popularity of games on the local market. Our heroes have found a German-speaking employee, started social networks for the local audience, sell games on Amazon, and continue to participate in exhibitions. Now in Germany, Sergey and Anton receive six new clients a week. Entrepreneurs are sure that after a while the partners themselves will offer to cooperate on exclusive terms.
Until recently, it was hard for us to imagine that board games - familiar and even, as it seemed a few years ago, beginning to become obsolete entertainment - could be a profitable investment.
The difficulty in predicting the development of the board game industry lies in the fact that the board game market (as they are called by lovers of this way of pastime) includes too many different products - from the usual simple "walkers" (roll the die and move the chips) to complex thematic and strategic games where you need to calculate options several moves ahead. According to preliminary estimates, the annual sales of board games is $100 million.
There is no single definition of board games yet. Typically, board games are games that can be played indoors using specially designed equipment - a playing field, chips, dice, cards, tokens, etc.
As a rule, a small number of items required for the game allows them to be placed on the same table and / or in the hands of the players. The number of participants starts from two or more players. In some cases, there may even be one player, but such games are in the minority.
Board game production process
The production of a board game consists of several stages. The first - one of the most important - is thinking over and developing the idea of the game, determining its type, storyline, goals and degree of entertainment, creating a preliminary sample ("draft" version) and testing.
At the second stage, the final external design of all game elements is designed - cards, fields, chips, etc., up to packaging. Then an estimate is made for launching the set into production, the circulation is calculated at which the release of the game becomes profitable (the smaller the circulation, the more “golden” your game sets will turn out), contractors are selected to perform all the work.
The average circulation of one board game released in our country is 5-6 thousand copies. If you have a fairly complex game that requires the use of additional equipment (for example, dice, chips, tokens, etc.), then it sometimes makes sense to split production, up to finding partners abroad.
Pay attention to the quality of your products. For example, if your board game involves the use of cards and / or a playing field, you should not save on printing.
At the stage of launching the mass production of a board game, it's time to start organizing the marketing of your products.
Usually, new games are offered to small stores (general store, bookstore, toy store, gift store, etc., depending on the theme and target audience of your product).
Supermarkets make quite high demands, which may be beyond the capacity of a young company. Another common and effective option is to create your own online store, where anyone can read the description of the game and the rules, see photos and place an order directly, bypassing intermediaries.
The board game industry is attracting more and more attention from both developers and investors. In fact, the development of a board game requires several tens of times less money than the creation of a computer game. The profitability of some projects reaches 300-350%.
Even during the economic crisis, when sales of computer games in our country fell by $150 million, the demand for desktop games continued to grow steadily.
However, in practice, most likely, it will turn out that the prospects for such a business are not as bright and optimistic as we would like. The competition in this segment is already quite high. And this despite the fact that despite all the efforts of sellers of board games, who do not just offer their product, but are trying to create demand for it, this type of entertainment in our country is not yet as popular as in the West.
For example, in Russia, board games aimed at children of low and medium price categories (from 100 to 500 rubles) are in the greatest demand. Games for older players costing from 500 to 3500 rubles are sold out not so actively.
The cost of developing one board game, depending on the idea and complexity, ranges from several tens of thousands of rubles to hundreds. However, the main problem is not in creating a board game, but in selling it.
Nowadays, when there are too many players (including Western players) in the domestic board game market, new companies are trying to fill their own narrow niche, offering inexpensive, but themed games, which, as a rule, have additional functions in addition to entertainment (for example, games on development of imagination, strategic thinking, for learning foreign languages or even learning some skills).
The purpose of this project is to become a link between those who are fond of board games and those who are just starting to get acquainted with this hobby.
Game libraries of the project "Play with us!" - these are events where you can play various board games for free.
Ouse find details of the nearest game libraries .
This project is dedicated to everyone who:
- likes board games or wants to learn more about them;
- appreciates live communication;
- prefers to spend time not only fun, but also useful;
- wants to find new friends and like-minded people.
What is the peculiarity of the game library "Play with us"?
- Only the best board games are presented at the game libraries: current classics of games from all over the world and novelties that have recently appeared in Russia.
- Here you will be helped to choose games according to your taste and mood, as well as understand their rules.
- Most places will offer you a discount on your favorite board games.
Where and how often do these games take place?
Usually games libraries take place on weekends about once a month. With each new event, the Let's Play with Us project is becoming more and more popular. Over 30 have already joined us. largest cities Russia and neighboring countries.
See the addresses of the nearest toy libraries and the exact time of the event.
How to participate in the game library?
All events of the project are absolutely free and do not require pre-registration. Just find the game library of your city in the list, come and play with us!
Where can I find the latest news about the game libraries?
Follow us here on the official page of the project!
Photos from already held game libraries
