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A game development log where I share the hardest game design problems, and share thoughts on the games I'm playing. My name is John Rudolph Drexler and you can find my games at catacombian.com
John (00:00.878)
Sold 322 copies of Colossi in one day. and I'm gonna break down the numbers and how it works and where all that money goes. so I'm super, super excited. I'm gonna put throw some images probably over my face here to to make it clear what exactly this looked like. But let me catch you up. Wow, dropping things all over the place. Let me catch you up on what is actually going on here. So Colossi game I published in 2023.
And ran a Kickstarter for sold three hundred something copies, I think, if I'm remembering that correctly, have since s sold some online, have gone to conferences, but I have this big fat distribution problem. I've talked about that on here. Look at previous episodes for more information on that. I ran into this distribution problem that is very, very difficult to solve by myself. I can solve it through kind of e commerce, like growing my own website. I have done some of that. it's been a little bit tricky and has not
brought in the kinds of numbers that I'm really excited about. I can go to conferences. This is fun. It does break even-ish, but it is a ton of work and it's totally exhausting for me and I can't do it at scale. and I can't really afford to hire other people to do it for me and I wouldn't really want to do it that way anyways. and so then I've tried to go directly to retailers. And this is where I've started to learn about how board game distribution actually works. and so
Just to kind of like zoom out here, without even looking at this side of the money, you have retailers, you get distributors, this secret category I didn't know about consolidators, and then me, the publisher. So typically what happens is the normal kind of situation is that a retailer buys the game at a wholesale price, which is about 50% of what they will end up charging for it. Sometimes they take even more than that.
sometimes in the case of like Magic the Gathering, they take less than that. But the point is that the retailer gets about half most of the time. The thing is, what retailers are thinking about is moving games that they know can sell, and so they're risk averse, they're thinking about shelf space. Talked about this before, but because of all of this, they want to work with a relatively smaller number of distributors, and they don't want to have relationships with every single publisher they work with. It doesn't scale well the unit economics of shipping.
John (02:21.632)
a few games versus shipping pallets full of games, which is what a distributor can do, makes it so that retailers have a strong, strong preference for working with distributors makes a ton of sense in the world. Distributors are taking a relatively small chunk of every game sold and so they are thinking about volume and they're extremely risk averse. They're not trying to like warehouse anything that they don't know that they can sell, right? They're only trying to warehouse what they can sell for the shortest amount of time possible before throwing it on a pallet.
And getting it to a retailer. And they are managing big, big volume. And so someone like me who's like, I have fifteen hundred games and I want to get them out there, distributor doesn't really have time for that, right? Okay, this introduces a secret third category that I did not know about until this year, which is the consolidator. I've been working with Quartermaster Direct. this is not an advertisement for them, but I've had a wonderful experience.
working with them so i don't mind throwing some free advertising their way they're really cool and they're really smart and what they do is they consolidate lots of small publishers like me who have little games that are not going to sell probably millions of copies and they consolidate those together and use their existing relationships with the with distributors
to get it out there and to sell it to retailers on your behalf. This way, retailers still get to work with distributors. Distributors don't have to work with all of us tiny publishers. They get to work with this one consolidator who feeds them games that are already pre-vetted. So I reached out to Quartermaster Direct. They really liked Colossi. They said we want to work with you on this. We think that distributors are willing to buy this. We're going to go out there and try to sell it to them. We'll tell you how many we sold. Okay, they came back.
and they sold three hundred and twenty-two. They're expecting more to come in. And so they told me they said go ahead and ship us six hundred copies. So my warehouse, as you may know, is my mom's basement. She's 70 years old. And so we hired some extra hands who are kids, like the teenage kids of friends and cousins of mine. Hilarious, amazing scene. They watched YouTube videos about how to pack pallets and did it and they did an amazing job.
John (04:41.197)
I sent 600 copies to Orlando. What happens with this money? And this is where I think things are kind of interesting. So the retailer, as mentioned, pretty much always takes 50% of whatever's gonna happen. So they are gonna buy a game essentially for twenty dollars and sell it for forty so that they can make it worth their while to be a retailer. Makes complete sense. next up is the distributor who actually brings the game over to them.
and the distributor is gonna take about ten percent on average. And so they get their four dollars for connecting the publisher to the actual retailer, getting it there on a giant palette, safe, secure, sound great. This category I didn't know about, which is Quartermaster Direct and others, they take a little bit less than that. They don't quite take ten percent. And so on a given game that costs forty dollars, they're gonna get about three dollars and thirty cents of that.
completely reasonable for me and then at the end of this for this forty dollar game Catacomian gets twelve dollars and seventy cents per unit sold, which is honestly really not bad. I used to be selling this game for thirty and when I would get, you know, sell wholesale to a few retailers before I got this deal, I was getting fifteen per copy and I was like paying for my own shipping and stuff.
So the unit economics are basically a wash and quartermaster direct is getting me connected to all of these distributors who I I didn't even know about. And this is where things get really cool because the distributor, the distributors that I'm working with are in yes, the US, but also in Canada and Europe. So this is a big deal because I've had a number of experiences where somebody in Europe said, I want to buy the game.
And I have to say, sorry, shipping cost me $70 to get the game to Sweden. if you want to pay $70, which is about twice the cost of the game itself, you're totally welcome to. And a number of people have, which is awesome. It really means a lot. Thank you for your support. Now, if you are in Canada or Europe, the game is available in some online retailers who can ship to you at a much, much more reasonable rate. this is incredible. It is getting the word of colossi out there.
John (06:56.487)
And it is so exciting. So where does the twelve dollars and seventy cents times somewhere between three hundred and six hundred games actually go into the catacombian bank account and will almost certainly be used to commission art for my next game. Because art is the most costly part of this of this whole process. So rest assured the next thing is coming and it's gonna look beautiful and I now understand distribution.
much more than I used to, which is really, really fun. So I'm thrilled.