The MSRP of Dominion is 45 dollars.
Generally the cost of a game is directly proportionate to the production cost for the publisher.
Not always, but typically you can expect the printing cost to be somewhere around 15-20% of the MSRP... but a whole lot of people have to take their slice between the printer and you buying it.
The artist has to get paid for their artwork, the designer for designing the title.. it has to be shipped freight overseas as most games are made in China or Europe. The publisher will (hopefully!) make a little bit of money, but has to sell to a wholesaler (and pay to ship it to their warehouse) who then sells the game to the store who has to pay rent, salary, taxes, electric bills, etc. Amazon can bypass a lot of that by selling a very high-volume of a lot of things, including board games. Your local store isn't going to sell 100 copies of Dominion this week, Amazon probably will sell a lot more than that.
Most board game stores have a catch 22 that they run into.
You can't stock the 10 "hot" games and only sell those because no one will come to your store. So you have to stock a lot of different sorts of games, which realizing that most of your profit is going to come from a handful of the "hot" titles.
A lot of board game stores also sell comics, miniatures and trading card games, and often the board games are one of their lower margin items.
It's a very interesting ecosystem that exists that I was basically wholly ignorant of until last year.
In order for game prices to drop you have to do one of two things:
1) Print a whole lot of the games so that the cost per copy drops like a rock.
2) Print a really cheap game with really cheap components.
These are the reasons you see Monopoly in stores for 20-25 bucks and TTR and Dominion cost a lot more. They are selling a lot less of those titles and the components are much higher quality.
The more niche a game is, the less it will sell and the higher the MSRP will have to be.
If you double your print run you cost per title can go down 20-30%, which means you can drop the price a bit and make a bit more money... but the risk is a small publisher like myself can't do that or you'll go bankrupt. If I had printed 20K copies of Tammany Hall I probably could have knocked the price to make a copy down about 3-4 dollars a copy and sold it for $50 MSRP instead of $60.
The likelyhood that I could have ever sold 20,000 copies of Tammany Hall at this point is approaching zero, and I certainly didn't have the money for that even after the Kickstarter did so well.
When a publisher prints a game (traditionally, non-KS) they are paying for the game usually 6 months before they can actually sell the game. So cash flow can really kill small companies, which forces lower print run sizes, and drives up the MSRP of the games from smaller publishers. It's also one of the reasons that you see small publishers keep returning to the Kickstarter well. Margins are about the same for Kickstarter and wholesale copies (since you normally have to pay to ship to backers), but because the money is up-front you can release games on a more aggressive time-scale.
I probably *should* have doubled our print run of Tammany Hall so that we could have stock for the next 12-24 months, but we simply didn't have the capital to tie up into the title at the time. So now we are re-printing Tammany Hall again already because we couldn't print what we needed to. This is the reason you see a lot of smaller publishers games sell out so quickly after release. Not to drive up demand, but simply because you can't risk printing 15-20K copies of a title that might only sell 2-3K if it's a dud.
Generally the cost of a game is directly proportionate to the production cost for the publisher.
Not always, but typically you can expect the printing cost to be somewhere around 15-20% of the MSRP... but a whole lot of people have to take their slice between the printer and you buying it.
The artist has to get paid for their artwork, the designer for designing the title.. it has to be shipped freight overseas as most games are made in China or Europe. The publisher will (hopefully!) make a little bit of money, but has to sell to a wholesaler (and pay to ship it to their warehouse) who then sells the game to the store who has to pay rent, salary, taxes, electric bills, etc. Amazon can bypass a lot of that by selling a very high-volume of a lot of things, including board games. Your local store isn't going to sell 100 copies of Dominion this week, Amazon probably will sell a lot more than that.
Most board game stores have a catch 22 that they run into.
You can't stock the 10 "hot" games and only sell those because no one will come to your store. So you have to stock a lot of different sorts of games, which realizing that most of your profit is going to come from a handful of the "hot" titles.
A lot of board game stores also sell comics, miniatures and trading card games, and often the board games are one of their lower margin items.
It's a very interesting ecosystem that exists that I was basically wholly ignorant of until last year.
In order for game prices to drop you have to do one of two things:
1) Print a whole lot of the games so that the cost per copy drops like a rock.
2) Print a really cheap game with really cheap components.
These are the reasons you see Monopoly in stores for 20-25 bucks and TTR and Dominion cost a lot more. They are selling a lot less of those titles and the components are much higher quality.
The more niche a game is, the less it will sell and the higher the MSRP will have to be.
If you double your print run you cost per title can go down 20-30%, which means you can drop the price a bit and make a bit more money... but the risk is a small publisher like myself can't do that or you'll go bankrupt. If I had printed 20K copies of Tammany Hall I probably could have knocked the price to make a copy down about 3-4 dollars a copy and sold it for $50 MSRP instead of $60.
The likelyhood that I could have ever sold 20,000 copies of Tammany Hall at this point is approaching zero, and I certainly didn't have the money for that even after the Kickstarter did so well.
When a publisher prints a game (traditionally, non-KS) they are paying for the game usually 6 months before they can actually sell the game. So cash flow can really kill small companies, which forces lower print run sizes, and drives up the MSRP of the games from smaller publishers. It's also one of the reasons that you see small publishers keep returning to the Kickstarter well. Margins are about the same for Kickstarter and wholesale copies (since you normally have to pay to ship to backers), but because the money is up-front you can release games on a more aggressive time-scale.
I probably *should* have doubled our print run of Tammany Hall so that we could have stock for the next 12-24 months, but we simply didn't have the capital to tie up into the title at the time. So now we are re-printing Tammany Hall again already because we couldn't print what we needed to. This is the reason you see a lot of smaller publishers games sell out so quickly after release. Not to drive up demand, but simply because you can't risk printing 15-20K copies of a title that might only sell 2-3K if it's a dud.
