First meeting with a production company

Production company

It is a lot of fun to design your own game and create some testable prototypes, however, at a certain point you want to take the next step. Arranging our introduction meeting with a manufacturer felt like the first real step to move forwards with our game in a more serious way. It's also an important step to explore the board game world.

This step is also important to gain some grip on the estimated costs involved with developing your own board game. We had 2 purposes during this meeting:

1. Find out more about the process from game idea to production
2. Receive a high over estimation of the manufacturing costs

Are you looking for a production company? Then look in this list of manufacturing companies to find a suitable partner for your game.

Ludo Fact

Our first meeting was with the German manufacturer Ludo Fact. We stumbled upon this factory by accident via a blog post from 999 Games who visited the factory with their employees. The games of 999 Games are of high quality, so Ludo Fact felt like a trustworthy company.

In our contact request we described some of our background and what we are working on. A manufacturer has to invest a lot of time in new publishers, so they like to know who they will be investing on. We also shared a list of all the components we expected to need, in order to create a costs estimation. Within a week our first Skype meeting was scheduled.

During this meeting we quickly noticed that there are lot of thinks we didn't knew about. Miguel, our interlocutor, walked us through the whole process, but also let us think about our ecological footprint and how we could be efficient with our components optimise the costs. He also helped out with some tips and tricks for running your own Kickstarter campaign and how to use Stretch goals for upgrading materials for example.

Stretch Goals

With a Kickstarter, you work towards a funding goal. If the funding goal is based on a minimal version of your game, you can keep it as low as possible. For example, if you want to work with miniatures, you could work with tokenfiches instead. The game wouldn't lose any of the gameplay, but can be manufactured for the most optimal costs. If during your Kickstarter campaign, you get funded for 125% for example, you might be able to upgrade the tokens with miniatures after all. This also helpes in making the Kickstarter community help out with trying to fund extra for the game to make the game in its best state. You can see how Stretch goals work in a game we recently backed, called Northgard .

In our first game, you play as a student. To make the game as dynamic as possible, we created 10 different student character card, while the game can only be played with 5 players. In the most basic version of the game, you don't need 10 character card, so we want to create a funding goal, bases on 5 characters and create Stretch goals for the other 5. This way, it will be more realistic that our game will be funded, without having to impact the gameplay of the game.

After our first meeting, which we felt very good about, we also wanted to meet other companies as well in order to determine which company would best fit our needs. Ludo Fact shared that they aren't a budget solution, but you get a lot of quality. We want to be able to measure and compare different manufacturers to be able to make our own choice.

Ludo Fact created an high over estimation for the manufacturing costs, based on the minimal version of the game. Together we created a list of components and materials needed for the game. In the next blog post, we will share some of the options you have for this.

With a minimal quantity of 1.500 games, our next question will be: How are we gonna sell all of those games?

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