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Cost to Produce a Board Game (Claustrophobia 1643)

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15 Sep 2018 10:51 #281663 by ChristopherMD
Stole this from Reddit because I know other people here find this stuff interesting too.

The costs for 1 Claustrophobia box, based on 10k units production :

$5 for figurine molds
$2.5 for sculpture
$1.5 for illustrations
$20 for salaries (Monolith uses internal employees to work on the ks)
$26 for the print run (including $20 for the cardboard printing !)
$1 for transport by ship
$12 for TVA (it's an mondial average 15%)
$6 for royalties (8% of final price to the author)
$8 for ks (10%)
82$ production costs for a game that will be sold 79$.( it includes De Profundis content)


I guess the profit will come from the next print-run.
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15 Sep 2018 10:57 #281664 by Black Barney
I wonder why they didn’t just price it at 89$

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15 Sep 2018 11:45 #281666 by repoman
Attachments:
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15 Sep 2018 12:13 #281667 by drewcula
I will most likely buy a copy. However, my enthusiasm has cooled since seeing the demo copy at Gen Con. The player dashboards were HUGE. For a game that already has a large footprint with the map tiles, expanding the size of the player dashboards seems like a bad move. Still, the minis look great. I've had a lot of fun this year painting Monolith's miniatures.

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15 Sep 2018 14:43 - 15 Sep 2018 14:43 #281673 by BillyBobThwarton
I always figured these companies are skimming some of their profits via the shipping fees... I paid much less in shipping fees for my kids monstrous bunk bed than I did on my all-in for Monolith's Mythic Battles.
Last edit: 15 Sep 2018 14:43 by BillyBobThwarton.

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15 Sep 2018 15:29 #281675 by Erik Twice
It doesn't not change the overall point, but companies don't pay VAT, they just collect it. The shpping quote is high, but I don't know how much space the games take, they might require several containers.

Still, I think the takeaway is that Kickstarter is, fire and foremost, a marketing tool, not an actual way to produce games.
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16 Sep 2018 02:34 #281696 by Colorcrayons
I don't understand what the need to use KS is all about for this product. It's so fucking backward.

Asmodee did a fine job on this before they were a huge company.

I somehow feel I can't take the info seriously.
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16 Sep 2018 07:16 #281699 by Ah_Pook
Needing to sell 10k copies at a loss to then see a profit on their theoretical future sales of a second print run for a game like this seems absolutely insane. How many people do they think want Claustrophobia that didn't buy it the first time around?
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17 Sep 2018 04:40 - 17 Sep 2018 04:42 #281729 by Matt Thrower
I flat out don't believe this.

If there are $20 employment costs per copy on a 10k print run, that amounts to $200,000. I don't know who works at Monolith or what they're getting paid but that seems way high for one Kickstarter, not even a year's work.

I can't comment on the rest of the quoted costs, but I can say that I once got a boxful of review copies which mistakenly had a wholesale receipt included. They were high production value games, and they were selling from the publisher at under $10 a copy. That was maybe five years ago, but there's no way I can accept manufacturing costs have increased 800% in that time.

This is absolutely not a call for cheaper games or a suggestion that publishers are ripping us off. Games don't make a lot of money, and everyone involved in the chain needs to make a good living. But to scale that up to suggest copies are selling at a loss and we should be grateful for the chance to buy one is a whole other thing entirely.
Last edit: 17 Sep 2018 04:42 by Matt Thrower.
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17 Sep 2018 05:37 #281731 by Erik Twice
Wow, I did not see those employment costs, which are separate from the author royalties. Yeah :/

Seems Matt is right.

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17 Sep 2018 07:10 #281732 by Sagrilarus
This sounds like someone working the room. No sane businessman would have started the process knowing the fixed costs on that sheet.

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17 Sep 2018 08:01 - 17 Sep 2018 08:02 #281734 by drewcula
I found this thread so darn interesting, I felt I had to enter the cesspool of reddit myself. I wanted more context.
Apparently, the numbers were transcribed from an interview with Monolith's bigwig. My French is deplorable.
The transcriber did include some additional content:

"So it's not profitable... for the first print run. If the game is a success (the 10k boxes sold), they will be able to run a second kickstarter, and this time : the first 4 cost line disappear.
Mythic Battle : the second print run with $1,1M was way more profitable than the first one with $2,6M.

Print run
Once mold and scuplture are paid, figurines cost between $0.1 and $0.12 to produce. So with large print run, cardboard cost more than plastic. According to Frédéric, with only 25 tiles and twice more figurines, the game would be cheaper
Royalties
Interesting, Monolith wants to pay 2x the author compared to the other big ks compagnies(4% seems to be the norm), to attract the best authors in the long run.
Why Claustrophobia
Erwan, an other owner of Monolith is fan of Claustrophobia and they know very well the author Croc, the author. But Claustro was planned by FFG. Since they are all friends with Marc Nunès, co-founder of Asmodee, they used their influence to retrieve the game.
First edition of Claustrophobia : 10k sold in 6 months, and 20k in this entire life"

Also, I got a message from Monolith over the weekend. Their high aspirations to deliver before Xmas have been thwarted. They received delivery updates and apparently, only a portion (40%) of the backers would receive their games before the holidays. So Monolith has delayed their Kickstarter one month until the beginning of November. These four weeks will supposedly ensure that every backer will receive their game at the same time - January.
Last edit: 17 Sep 2018 08:02 by drewcula.
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17 Sep 2018 08:15 #281738 by hotseatgames
Anyone believing Monolith does anything that loses money... I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
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