Hi, everybody. Welcome back. My name is Matthew Boyle. I’m from www.languagecardgames.com, and this is a video series about how to go from having no card game to designing and selling your first card game. In this video, we’re going to talk briefly about price, which is something that drives a lot of people crazy, even if they’re experienced sellers. How do you set that price? How do you set the right price? If it’s too high, people will be driven away, and they’re not going to want to put that money down. If it’s too low, you get into a price war with others. You’re going to drive your price lower and lower with other sellers, and you’re going to be cutting out your own profits and devaluing the very special and amazing game that you’ve worked so hard on. Again, this ties a little bit into blue oceans philosophy; if you’ve succeeding in creating something that people can’t find anywhere else, you should feel comfortable setting the bar a little higher than the price of unrelated games that are competing with each other because yours is different.
Another thing that we should think about that’s just a reality when we’re first starting out is that you’re going to be putting out a lot of money in the beginning. I don’t want you to think that you’re wasting money in the beginning. I want you to think about the fact that you are investing money in the beginning. You are going to be needing to send your game out to a lot of people to test and to review, and that is not a waste. That’s kind of an investment, and in the beginning, when you’re not printing off a lot of the decks, the price for you is going to be, naturally, higher. Please; just regard that as an investment.
If you’ve tested the game well and it flows well and people’s reactions are good, and they’re looking forward to it because you’ve been posting the progress of it online, and you know you have some fans, then just look at the initial costs of this game as an investment. You’re not going to be spending a lot of money on the mass marketing and advertising. That doesn’t really work anymore, and your cards are your advertisement. So please think about that as an investment, and once you get to the point where you can print more decks, the cost for you will be dropping, and you can keep the price of your game the same and you can start to recover some of that investment cost.
The other thing people use to get around this initial problem of taking flight and selling the first game is they use a crowdfunding site, and I think you know what that is, but just really briefly, you get people to sign up or promise that they will pay a certain amount. So if you can get 100 or 200 people to commit to buying a deck, then that allows you to print off more copies at once and make the price more reasonable. Then when your crowdfunding deadline is reached, those people are charged, and you can buy many more of the games and send them out, and then the crowdfunding site will be taking a cut. So that’s another way; if you think the price of your game is holding you back a little bit, you might consider doing that to lower the price a little bit.
This is obviously a very big topic, and I just went through it very quickly, but just keep that in mind. You don’t want to pit yourself against established gaming companies who are printing off thousands of decks. Obviously, the decks for them are costing one or two dollars, and maybe they can make the price of a deck 15 or 20 bucks. That’s tough to do when you’re first starting out, so don’t let that sway you. Don’t let that get you down. People are looking for innovative new games and are willing to pay a little bit of a higher price for them.
If you want to talk about this subject a little bit more, we’ll do it in the comments section. But for now, that’s it. My name is Matthew Boyle, and this is Language Card Games. Don’t forget to like or subscribe if you find this information helpful. We’re moving on to the next video.
