Brandon the Game Dev

Heads up, this post is targeted at game developers in the United States. However, if you live somewhere else, some of what I say will still be useful.

Nothing can take the steam out of creator’s sails quite like the brutal reality of trying to ship a physical product all over the world. In fact, I’ve been calling fulfillment a Kickstarter killer since July – before I actually got my Kickstarter off the ground! With that in mind, I’d like to spell out four nasty things about fulfillment that you might not expect.

1. Fulfillment is expensive.
2. Even domestic fulfillment – packages originating in the United States and going to somewhere else in the United States – can be tricky.
3. Your international customers might be charged customs or VAT, unless you ship from within their country or region. That means you have to fulfill your games through a third-party distributor OR YOUR CUSTOMERS MIGHT GET CHARGED EXTRA.
4. Don’t try to fulfill your game on your own if you have more than 200 people to send to at once. Same principle applies if ongoing shipping takes more than an hour or two.

With those rules in mind, here’s a how-to guide to address the first “nasty thing.” In a couple more weeks, I’ll post three more how-to guides on “nasty things” 2-4.

How To Prepare for the Cost of Fulfillment

Step 1: Respect Complexity

For a moment, consider all the variables that go into fulfilling a Kickstarter campaign. Your manufacturer has to receive parts from their suppliers. They have to send the product to you or your distributors in bulk. Then they have to separate the rewards and send them to individuals. The whole time, your rewards or their component parts are zipping back and forth in boats, cars, planes, and trains. They cross country lines multiple times, go across oceans, fly thousands of miles, and are handled by multiple different companies. Your rewards are subject to all kinds of laws and taxes that you can’t possibly understand all at once. No one can.

That realization sink in yet? Good. Don’t let it dishearten you, because it’s not actually that hard to deal with. You just need to respect the complexity and variability of what you’re doing. That’s the beginning of understanding.

Step 2: Build Accurate Cost Tables Ahead of Time (and Leave Money for Unexpected Expenses)

For domestic shipments, if you’re shipping a lightweight game that can fit in a USPS padded mailer, your shipping cost – with supplies included – will be about $7.50/shipment. For a medium size game, it will cost about $15.00/shipment. For a really big one, you could be looking at $20.00/shipment.

I’m basing these estimates on the cost of USPS priority mailers, which tend to be the cheapest way to send packages in the US. They’re pretty reliable, too. You might lose 1-2% of packages, often due to bad addresses or porch pirates – both of which are not the fault of any shipping company.

International shipping is a little more complex. For that, you need to know the weight of your game and ask for the shipping cost table of any distributors you choose to work with.

Step 3: Build Shipping Cost into Domestic Deliveries, Add Shipping Cost to International Deliveries

If you’re selling online or doing a Kickstarter, you need to be aware that buyers/backers do not understand what goes into shipping. They don’t understand how expensive it is. They just know Amazon Prime gets them packages in 2 days for free.

For this reason, you need to build the shipping cost right into your purchase price/reward price for buyers/backers in the USA. For international buyers/backers, it’s a little more complicated. Figure out the cost your distributors will charge for delivery. Make sure you factor in the price of delivering stock to the distributors, customs paid, account fees, and warehousing fees. Divide that by the amount of inventory you have there. Take that figure and subtract the amount of money it takes to ship to the USA. That’s how much extra you should charge your international backers.

Of course, you need to do two more things if you’re launching a Kickstarter:

1. Account for the 8-10% cut that Kickstarter and its payment partners will take. That’s 8-10% on every dollar you earn, including that which appears to be set aside for shipping.
2. Sanity check your shipping prices with backers before you launch. It’s next to impossible to change them after the fact if they’re too high or too low.

This work is heavy on spreadsheets and details, but it will pay off in a big way. The specific numbers and fees you will work with will change with your project, but the steps above can save you a ton of financial headaches.
 

Creating my first game, War Co., is one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done in my life. It also happens to be, not coincidentally, the hardest project I’ve ever worked on. I’ve had so many rude awakenings and heartbreaks over the course of the nearly two years I’ve been working on it. Below, I share four rude awakenings I’ve had during the development of War Co. and how I’ve overcome them.

1. There are far more game developers out there than I thought.

When I first started working on War Co., I didn’t realize the sheer size of the board game community. I had a foggy idea that there were lots of people creating games, but I didn’t intellectually or emotionally understand that thousands, perhaps millions, of people were trying to do what I was trying to do. On Twitter, between the War Co. and Brandon the Game Dev accounts, I follow over 500 board game developers. That’s just the ones I’ve got sorted into Twitter lists, too, the real number is probably well over a thousand.

It was hard for me to accept that there were thousands of people trying to do what I was trying to do. It’s harder still to accept that the vast majority of them will fail. I slowly came to realize that this was my pride and fear talking.

Game development is cool. Seems like everyone wants to get into it. The vast majority of people who call themselves developers aren’t serious.  The ones who aren’t serious fade away in less than a year, usually, but their sentiments remain online like ghosts. Just by sticking around, I realized I was doing better than most game developers. The same principle can apply to you…if you stick around.

Then I realized something more profound – we can all lean on each other, sharing ideas, commiserating, opening up our hearts to one another. Your fellow game developers will very often be your biggest fans, wisest mentors, and best friends. I became a member of the game developer community.

2. Kickstarter isn’t as indie as I thought it was.

I’ve written at length about my ideal version of Kickstarter. It’s no secret that much of my game development knowledge was formed in my attempt to process the raw emotions that came with my first Kickstarter campaign’s failure. To make a long story short, you must have a very polished game and campaign to succeed on Kickstarter if you’re a first-time game developer. I had a magical viewpoint of Kickstarter, and that was pretty brutally taken apart in one very hard week.

Thankfully, I didn’t make the mistake of assuming Kickstarter would provide the crowd. I had a social media presence for months beforehand. What I didn’t have, however, was any idea how social media traffic would translate to Kickstarter, a game more than halfway complete, reviews, testimonials, contacts within the board game community, or accurate cost estimates…

Shit. This is hard for me to admit to you right here. Don’t make the same mistakes as me. 

I wanted to improve, so I got deeply involved in the board game community, continued my social media marketing, finished the game, got about ten reviews, and fire-proof cost estimates. I relaunched at a higher goal of $10,000 and earned $12,510.

3. Many of my biggest potential fans were burnt out.

I found that a lot of the people who loved board games the most were also the hardest on them. I call them early adopters – they’re the folks who will take a risk on a mediocre Kickstarter because they love ideas and want to be the first to try the newest, coolest thing. They’re super-fans and they love, love, love board games.

These very same people who will back you when no one else cares are the harshest critics. They play a lot of games, and they are – whether consciously or not – sizing you up to the greatest games of all time. No pressure. They’ve also been burned by a lot of bad Kickstarters, been hassled to try a lot of garbage PNPs, and generally seen a lot of lousy hijinks in their time.

I learned to listen to them. I learned to observe Twitter trends, read Reddit threads, and scour BGG ratings. If you stay involved, you will understand the pet peeves of your niche audience. You will understand their loves and hates, their pains and pleasures. It takes time. Thankfully, many people who love games the most aren’t shy about telling you what you can do better. If you can handle harsh criticism, it can make your game – and indeed, you yourself – stronger.

4. It takes longer than I thought to design a game.

This bears little explanation, but it’s quite possibly the biggest bear of them all. I thought it would take about six months to make War Co. That was naive. The truth was that it took a lot longer than that – almost every game does. Only thing I knew to do was keep sticking with it. Keep showing up. Keep looking for ways to improve.

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I’ve had a long journey. It’s been a road of many twists and turns for me. I leave you with these parting words of advice:

1. Stick with it.
2. Start a Twitter account. Follow at least 100 game developers – both successful ones like Gil Hova and Jamey Stegmaier, and struggling ones as well. Organize them into a Twitter list. Keep tabs on their projects.
3. If you want to Kickstart your game, get it 90-95% finished before you campaign. Build a big social media audience with a lot of one-on-one interaction. Ask your followers, privately and directly, for their feedback. Listen to them. Continue this process for a month or two.
4. Figure out who your game is for. Find the places they hang out. I suggest using Twitter and creating Twitter lists of people who like your style of game. Watch them gush. Watch them complain. Take notes, adjust your game and your business around their needs.
5. Seriously, stick with it.

Procrastination has an undeserved bad reputation. When I say procrastination, it may bring to mind images of someone watching cat videos or 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger clips until 3 in the morning. It may bring to mind a college student sleeping until 11 and skipping his or her two morning classes.

How myopic to dismiss procrastination so quickly! My pet theory is that procrastination is actually our minds’ crude reaction to another issue. At its heart, procrastination is avoidance. You don’t avoid things for no reason at all. You avoid them because they’re unpleasant or because you’re tired or because there’s something better.

When I find myself procrastinating, I know that it’s time for a little introspection. I then ask myself these five questions:

1. What do I want?
2. What big steps do I take to get what I want?
3. What small steps do I take to get what I want?
4. What motivates me?
5. What demotivates me?

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What do I want?

It is extremely easy to avoid doing something if you don’t want to do it. Earth-shattering revelation, I know. But let’s face it: it’s exhausting to chase goals and it’s extra exhausting to chase goals you don’t even want to reach.

For a concrete example, let’s imagine you’re designing a push-your-luck game. Problem is that you don’t care for push-your-luck games! In this example, it makes sense that you should try creating a game you would want to play. Making War Co. would have been impossible for me to do if I didn’t fundamentally like the genre and the game I was making.

When you’re being creative, doing something you like is critical. The world’s best chef would probably be a very mediocre accountant.

What big steps do I take to get what I want?

A lot of people have a really good idea of what they want, but a lack of direction leaves them wandering and confused. I’ve been there, too. Sometimes it helps to write down what you want and outline the major steps it takes to get there. Having even a rough road map to reaching your goals makes them feel more real, more possible, and less abstract. If you want your goal and it feels real, you’ll be less inclined to procrastinate.

What small steps do I take to get what I want?

Sometimes having a rough outline won’t cut it. If you know what you want and the basic way of getting there, break it down until you have small, achievable, specific, bite-sized steps. It’s highly motivating to be able to accomplish something toward your goals every day.

Keep tweaking your to-do list until it’s open enough to give you freedom, but defined enough to keep you moving.

What motivates me?

If you know what you want and have a very strong idea of how to get there, sometimes it’s tempting to procrastinate because the process of getting there still sucks. Set up a reward structure for yourself so that you’ll keep chasing your goals. Take time off if you need it. Enjoy the little pleasures in life and in your creative work. You’re not a robot.

What demotivates me?

If you know what you want, how to get it, and how to keep yourself motivated, that’s great! If you’re still procrastinating, though, it could be a sign that something is siphoning off your creative energy. It can be something as simple as a pen that won’t write, a chair that hurts your back, or neighbors who play their music too loud. You might be tired, restless, or stressed. You might find it exhausting to discuss your work on certain social media channels or forums.

Examine your creative process and think about what makes you groan, cuss, and cringe. Consider cutting that out of your process if it’s not absolutely necessary. Learn to minimize the annoyance’s impact if you can’t remove it entirely. You’re in this for the long run.

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Defusing procrastination isn’t so tricky if you abandon the arbitrary guilt associated with it. See procrastination for what it is: a crude signal from your mind telling you to evaluate your life.