Arthur’s Production Diary
How the Factory Lockdowns in Spring 2020 are Still Affecting Us
In the Spring of 2020 our factories in China (and pretty much everyone all over the world) were on a temporary lockdown with major restrictions of movement. By early summer most of these were lightened and most of our factories indicated to us they were back to work...
All About Tooling
The most frustrating part of waiting for a Kickstarter to be fulfilled is, well, the waiting. And for the types of games we typically put on Kickstarter - games with lots of plastic miniatures - the tooling process is the longest and most difficult to estimate part of...
The Weird Tale of Trying to Hire an RPG Freelancer
I had been meaning to write a long post-mortem on the Planet Apocalypse project, but haven't had a chance to devote headspace to it, while being as continuously busy as I am. One of the things we've been busy with is expanding our stable of freelance developers for a...
All About That Vat (on Kickstarter)
I’ve previously written about how a small publisher prices games generally (see here), as well as how we price shipping for Kickstarters (see here), and also about sales tax for US backers (see here). Today I’ll tackle a long discussed (if not overly prominent) topic...
Arthur Fills You In
Arthur recently did a Town Hall answering questions regarding production and Support. We've condensed it down to just a few minutes, which, knowing how Arthur loves to talk, was quite a feat! Click to watch
Sales Tax on a Kickstarter?
A few weeks ago we began charging sales tax on our pledge manager for all Kickstarter sales. (This did not extend backwards to already paid orders). We received lots of comments about this, so I asked our accountant for a concise explanation (a few paragraphs down)....
After the Kickstarter: The Board Game Industry’s Value Chain
The unasked question I’m going to answer here, is: Since Kickstarter creators sell directly to customers (without the intermediary of distributors and retailers), why can’t they offer the game at the same price as they would to a retailer? My half-snide initial answer...
How Shipping Prices Work on Kickstarter
We recently set the prices for our Cthulhu Miniatures Line we’re selling on the Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos for 5e Kickstarter. Here is the link to see the prices for these minis if you’re a KS backer, compared to the MSRP we’ll be offering them at. It seems...
What Really Happened to The Gods War?
I have a story I’ve been dying to tell, but could not for many many months, for the sake of Petersen Games’ relationship with our main factory. Our primary factory – which manufactured The Gods War - has been involved in a legal battle with a former employee of...
Making Games for a Kickstarter Campaign, part 3
In the last post, I discussed the breakdown of costs and the general rules for setting a game’s price. This time I’ll dive more into how the print run size effects all this – especially when you’re not able to afford to pre-print everything like Monolith shrewdly has!