Brandon the Game Dev

Few things are more confusing than taxes and laws. As if they weren’t complicated enough to begin with, they also differ dramatically by country, region, and city. I’m fortunate enough to say that when I made War Co., nothing completely broadsided me during the development process when in came to tax and law. There were, however, some nasty surprises and memorable tax bills that I’d rather have been prepared for. Instead of leaving you to Google and experiment on your own, I’ll share a few experiences I’ve had.

Let’s get something straight first: I’m not a lawyer. This is informal advice based on my own experiences and observations. I’m about to list five things I wish I knew about ahead of time. I want to save you a lot of time digging for the right questions to ask and help you avoid some surprises along the way.

1. You need to open a business and treat it like a separate entity from yourself.

This sounds like common sense when I say it this way. A lot of board game developers don’t treat their projects like businesses, though, and that’s a dangerous thing to do. Even simple board game Kickstarter campaigns involve handling thousands of dollars and potentially much, much more. Because of this, it’s absolutely imperative that you open a business and treat it like a separate entity from yourself.

It’s not as hard as it sounds. For me, in Chattanooga, TN, USA, all I had to do was fill out a form and send it to Hamilton county and then to the city of Chattanooga with small checks attached to each form. It’s pretty similar in different states and municipalities in the U.S.: download a form online, print it out, fill it out, remit a check, send it in, wait a few days.

You’ll be given a few options on which type of business to open. There are two types that stand out in my mind as the most likely to apply to you as a reader, so I encourage you to direct most of your further research to them. They are the sole proprietorship and the LLC. If you’re going it alone and you’re not sure how serious you are about being in business, go with a sole proprietorship. If you are definitely committed or you’re going into business with more than one person, spring for the LLC. It may cost more and come with more paperwork, but it provides legal protection of your financial assets in a way that sole proprietorships do not.

Last but not least, open a separate bank account for your business. Connect it to Quick Books and keep track of how you’re spending your money. If you keep clean books on a day to day basis, tax time won’t be so bad.

2. You need to know who’s taxing you.

Speaking of taxes, they’re unavoidable. In the U.S., you’re likely to be taxed at a federal, state, and local level on your business. You are also very likely to have to deal with sales tax for in-state purchases of your game and customs/import fees if you bring in inventory from other countries.

There’s not a whole lot else I can say here because tax laws are so dependent upon where you live. Now that you know the five kinds of taxes you’ll deal with, though, you’ll have a much better time productively Googling the rates you’ll have to pay and the forms you’ll have to file monthly/quarterly/annually.

3. You need to know how to protect your intellectual property.

If you make a game, you’re making intellectual property. You can’t protect mechanics, but you can definitely protect your brand name, lore, art, and other assets. Broadly speaking, there are three ways to protect your intellectual property: copyrights, trademarks, and patents. This government site does a good job explaining the difference between the three. Long story short, you’ll definitely need a copyright, you might need trademarks, and you probably won’t need patents.

4. You need to know how to write a contract.

Despite having some of the most needlessly obtuse phrases in the English language, I’ve come to love contracts. Sincerely, heretofore, the undersigned in the jurisdiction of…

The purposes of a contract are to document the following information:

• Who is involved in a transaction
• What is expected to be done by each party involved
• How much it costs and when payments are sent
• Quality and time expectations
• What happens if someone doesn’t fill their end of the bargain

A contract tells everybody what they need to know about a project before they start it and provides legal documentation that can be used to enforce it. It’s beautiful.

I won’t tell you exactly how to write a contract since that varies on where you live, what you’re doing, how many people are involved, and how much money is involved. I also won’t tell you that a contract will prevent problems from coming up. Problems will still arise, but the contract gives you a better way to have a conversation about them and protection if you have to take your problems to the legal system. Ultimately, contracts and their enforcement depend upon the goodwill of all parties involved since taking them to courts is an expensive affair. Yet the benefits of clear communication make it worthwhile all the same.

5. You need to know how to reduce the potential for legal troubles.

If you find yourself in legal trouble, I can’t help you. That’s lawyer territory and you need to find yourself a real pro. As they say, though, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

If you want to stay out of trouble, here are a few simple guidelines you can follow:

• Get a business license.
• Open a separate bank account for your business. Never mix personal and business expenses.
• Keep clean accounting books weekly.
• Pay your taxes when they’re due. All of them.
• Protect your intellectual property using copyrights and, if sensible, trademarks.
• Write good contracts and honor them.
• Don’t do business with anyone who comes across as seedy.
• Read the previous bullet point again and really let it sink in.
• If you open a sole proprietorship and start making serious money, transfer all your business assets and expenses to an LLC and operate as that LLC.

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Tax and law tend to get glossed over in our industry because they’re not fun to talk about. It’s so critical that you develop an understanding of the basics, though, if only to protect your ability to make more games in the future 🙂

Do you have any advice to pass onto new game devs? Let me know in the comments below!

In 2012, as many as 84% Kickstarter projects were fulfilled late. While I suspect that figure has dropped since then, it’s still a running joke that Kickstarter projects always fulfill late. Behind the scenes, a lot of projects also tend to run well over-budget, too. So what’s happening and how can we prevent you from suffering the same fate?

Let’s get some basic facts out of the way first. Even if you’re just making a simple board game for the first time, you have to treat any Kickstarter campaign like a business. That’s because it is a business. Kickstarter is a way to generate revenue through multiple customers on a shopping site. Kickstarter says that it’s “not a store,” but that’s not the way tax professionals or the U.S. government see it.

Any and all Kickstarter board game projects require you to act as a project manager. You must manage the time, cost, and scope of the project. For board games, that means you have to account for…

• The time spent designing and developing the game, gathering art, building an audience, campaigning, fulfilling, and shipping the game.
• The cost of doing everything above, which is almost always in the thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands of dollars.
• The scope of the game – number of units, number of components, number of countries to ship to, and so on.

What I’ve just described above is every part of the Iron Triangle of Project Management. Basically, you pick two of these to focus on and the other gets the boot. Want a big game made cheaply? Take your time. Want a big game made quickly? Open your wallet. Want a game made quickly and cheaply? Make it small.

The importance of the Iron Triangle isn’t its thoroughness or even its absolute truth. Its sole purpose is to keep you from being delusional. You can’t do everything. A lot of creators get into trouble by giving Kickstarter backers their most optimistic timelines which they are unlikely to meet in even the best of circumstances.

When in doubt, give Kickstarter backers the most conservative timelines possible. You can end a campaign in December and deliver in April. If you tell people “I’ll have it done by March,” they’ll be disappointed. If you tell people “I’ll have it done by June,” they’ll be pleasantly surprised. For better or worse, the timeline you initially put out there into the world will serve as an anchor for people’s expectations. It’s not fair, but it’s reality and you have to face it.

For your use, I’ve included a generic, optimistic, customizable timeline which you can use for your own projects. This is what I consider to be the absolute bare minimum amount of time you need to complete a game as a project. In fact, it leaves no room for holidays or missteps, and does not provide adequate time for art demands beyond those which you’d need for a small box game. It also assumes you already have some level of visibility online and perhaps an established brand. If you don’t have either, take a few months to get your name out there before you jump into this schedule. Needless to say, some assembly is required 🙂

Validate game idea by market		23 weeks before campaign
Develop basic lore		23 weeks before campaign
Game specs		23 weeks before campaign
Contract		22 weeks before campaign
Set up website		21 weeks before campaign
Set up mailing list		21 weeks before campaign
First draft of the game		19 weeks before campaign
Manufacturing RFQs		18 weeks before campaign
Fulfillment RFQs		18 weeks before campaign
Start and maintain WIP thread on BGG		18 weeks before campaign
Work on brand		18 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – early, private		18 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game with at least one person not designing it		17 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – online, general		16 weeks before campaign
Preliminary artwork		15 weeks before campaign
Screen artwork with audience		15 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – online, guided		12 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – blind, online		11 weeks before campaign
Play-test the game – blind, offline		11 weeks before campaign
Create physical prototype (with or without art)		11 weeks before campaign
Test physical prototype		9 weeks before campaign
Sign-off on game / Art must be done		9 weeks before campaign
Print review copies		9 weeks before campaign
Facebook group outreach		9 weeks before campaign
Board Game Geek outreach		9 weeks before campaign
Reddit outreach		9 weeks before campaign
Send review copies		7 weeks before campaign
Podcast outreach		7 weeks before campaign
Blogger outreach		7 weeks before campaign
Streamer outreach		4 weeks before campaign
Press outreach		2 weeks before campaign
Manufacturing preparation (complete)		1 week before campaign
Fulfillment preparation (complete)		1 week before campaign
Kickstarter campaign		Campaign
Pre-order / sales system		TBD
Ongoing distribution		TBD

Once you have a basic timetable established, it’s time to create a budget. Broadly speaking, you’ll need three budgets: game creation budget, Kickstarter campaign budget, and an ongoing distribution budget. We’re going to focus on the first two.

Creating a game creation budget is relatively simple. Write down all the costs that come with developing a game, such as art, marketing, samples, and taxes. This could be anywhere from a couple thousand to tens of thousands of dollars. This doesn’t include the cost to print the game, just the cost to get the game ready to print and ready to Kickstart. Be clear-eyed and rational when you’re making the budget. You don’t want to be overly optimistic and then find yourself having to throw in more money than you planned at the last minute.

Once you have completed that, it’s time to make the Kickstarter campaign budget. This is tricky because you have to account for multiple different scenarios. Ideally, you want to imagine the outcome of your campaign at every thousand dollar increment up to $100,000 and then five thousand dollar increments up to $1,000,000 or more. You shouldn’t expect to make that much money, but you should be ready to make that much money.

You’ll need to create an Excel spreadsheet with multiple columns, most of which will have formulas. For the purposes of this guide, I’ll assume you have a good understanding of Excel because the math alone is pretty grisly.

You’ll first need 12 columns like this:

1. Funding Level = The amount of funding your Kickstarter receives.
2. # of Full Backers = Column 1 / (core reward price + shipping)
3. Qty Ordered = The number of games you had to buy to fill Kickstarter orders (the greater of the minimum order quantity OR the number of backers).
4. Landed Price (No Stretch Goals) = The cost to make games without stretch goals.
5. Stretch Goals Per-Unit = The additional cost to make games with stretch goals at a given funding level, per-unit.
6. Landed Price (Total) = Column 4 + (Column 5 * Column 3)
7. Margin = Percentage of Kickstarter rewards not spent on shipping, Kickstarter fees, or transaction fees. Be conservative with this estimate.
8. Gross Income = (Column 7 * Column 1) – Column 6
9. Tax = Tax Rate in your area * Column 8
10. Net Income = Column 8 – Column 9
11. Creation Cost = Cost to create the game to where it’s Kickstarter ready.
12. Net Change in Cash = Column 10 – Column 12

Once you get these basic formulas right, you can estimate how much your game will cost to Kickstart at just about any level. All you need to adjust are the Stretch Goals, Qty Ordered, and – if things go really well – Tax because you’ll wind up paying a higher Tax Rate because you got into a higher bracket.

Don’t let the immense amount of detail fool you, though. You can still get in trouble with this math. If you are overly optimistic about your margin (consider international backers) or you don’t get the tax rate right, you could end up shelling out money you don’t expect to. This also assumes your core reward is the one that will have the lowest margin. If that’s not true, you may need to adjust your estimates.

Again, some assembly is required with a Kickstarter budget. I’m assuming, for the purposes of this guide, that you understand business math and how to use Excel. My intention is to provide you with a flexible framework to estimate the outcome of several different scenarios playing out on Kickstarter.

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There is a lot that goes into delivering Kickstarter campaigns on-time and within budget constraints. There are no substitutes for careful project management and financial analysis.

Do you have any questions or comments about fulfilling a campaign on-time and within budget constraints? Let me know in the comments below 🙂

Press releases sound really fancy and formal. The phrase “press release” comes with a sort of gravitas that conjures up images of very official sounding businesspeople doing very official sounding business tasks. Extra, extra – read all about it! In reality, press releases are well-crafted emails that you send to bloggers and journalists – in our case, those in the board game industry.

Press Releases vs. Everything Else

Unlike blog posts, podcasts, live streams, and reviews, press releases are much more up-front about their purpose. They exist to inform members of the press about your game, its endearing qualities, and where people can find out more. Some people in the board game media craft articles based on the information in the press release. Others paste the press release as-is on their website. You need to be ready for both outcomes.

The press release process will have you creating a 300-400 word write-up that emphasizes why your game is awesome. This isn’t an objective analysis of the pros and cons of your game like a review, but rather an informative sales pitch. You’ll be sending this write-up as a document attached to emails you send to different members of the board game press. I strongly recommend you write each email individually but keep the press release the same. The personal touch can make all the difference in the modern world where raw efficiency is sometimes valued over meaningful connection.

 

The Limits of Press Releases

Hold on, though, put that pen down! Before you spend any amount of time creating a great press release – or for that matter, launching a campaign – I’d like for you to consider four caveats.

Caveat 1: If your game does not work well as a product for a specific market, it doesn’t matter how many press releases you send.

Caveat 2: Press releases alone will not build your audience. They can increase your reach, but people are likely to dismiss you if you don’t have at least some initial following.

Caveat 3: When people see the press release, you need to have someplace for them to gather if they’re interested. This could be a mailing list, a chat server, or a Facebook group.

Caveat 4: Press releases are not a substitute for other forms of outreach. You still need to focus on generating leads through other means as well.

With all these caveats in mind, there are a few really compelling reasons to send press releases. They are an easy way to spread the word of your board game to larger media outlets. You might get a low conversion rate, but you can easily make up for that in reach. Press releases also tend to populate Google searches when blogs and news outlets post them, which can make your game more visible to people using those search engines. Last but not least, public responses to your press release, particularly by people you’ve never met, can help you gauge how well your game fits the market as a product.

When to Send Press Releases

You want to send press releases about a week or a week and a half before your Kickstarter campaign goes live. Too early and you risk the press releases going up to soon and diluting their effect. If you wait too late, the press releases might be posted after launch day, which is when you really need them.

As for who to send press releases to, that’s a bit trickier. Instead of providing a list which will become dated after a year or two, here is a good rule of thumb. Look for websites that meet these three criteria:

1. They regularly post press releases about board games. You can Google “board game Kickstarter press release” to find sites like this.
2. They have either a contact form, a contact email, or a press kit available.
3. They have more than 200 likes on Facebook. (It doesn’t have to be a huge number since sending press releases is very easy, but you don’t want to waste your time on sites that have virtually no readers.)

You can find a lot of great examples of press releases online, but one of my favorites is included in an old, but good Jamey Stegmaier blog post. To send us off, I’ve included a rough outline below. This will help you structure your press release. You can emulate other people’s press releases until you find the right tone.

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Press Release

[Game Name]

Preview of Kickstarter campaign: [Link]

[Name/company] are coming to Kickstarter to fund the printing of [Game]. [Compare to similar games.]

[Pitch line.]

[Discuss status of the game and how complete it is.]

[Core reward price]. [Discuss shipping]. The campaign will conclude after [X] days. Backers are expected to receive their rewards in [Month and Year].

[Describe game]

Number of Players: [Number of players]

Time per Game: [Time]

Age: [Age]

Website: [Link]

Twitter: [Link]

Instagram: [Link]

Facebook: [Link]

Board Game Geek Listing: [Link]