Relaunching SDG Games
A New Game, a New Website, a New Store, and a Refreshed Classic
Over the holiday season I had some time to work on my “side gig” — SDG Games — my business designing and selling educational board and card games for the glory of God. I originally launched SDG Games in February 2021 with the release of Journeys with Jesus. Over the past three years I’ve launched an additional 4 board and card game products and a free web-based game.
Heading into 2024, the SDG Games business faced a number of challenges:
- The games are too expensive and delivery times are too long
- Margins are incredibly thin
- Product awareness is very low in the target market
If a client described a business like this to me, my natural response would be “why are you even in this business?” To answer my own question — most of the games I’ve created first for me — to help me learn specific Biblical truths. I enjoy designing them, enjoy playing them with family and friends, have learned a lot, and want other families to be similarly blessed by the games. Given my commitment to my main consulting business, I can’t spend too much time on SDG Games, but I do want it to operate better and bless more families.
With that context, I put on my consultant’s hat and set about solving the performance challenges while keeping it a simple business that won’t distract me from my main focus on consulting. Over the past few weeks I’ve specifically focused on improvements in three areas:
- Production
- Distribution
- Marketing
Reconsidering Game Production
There are basically three ways to participate in the tabletop game industry.
- The approach most likely to drive the greatest sales of your game is to license your game concept to a successful game publishing company that has the design, marketing, and operations resources to profitably produce game products at large scale.
- The approach that has the potential to provide the greatest profit margins for the designer is through self-publishing.
- The easiest (and least profitable) approach is by making your games available through a print-on-demand platform.
Each of these approaches have their advantages and challenges. Publishers will only license games with broad appeal to a large target market. Self-publishing typically involves running a successful crowdfunding campaign and then managing overseas game production. Print-on-demand is easy for the designer, but it’s expensive and slow to make games one at a time.
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For the past three years I’ve relied on The Game Crafter (TGC) for my game production and distribution. TGC, the world’s leading print-on-demand platform, is a wonderful operation and without them I probably never would’ve made a single game. However, ordering a single copy of the original Journeys with Jesus today would cost the buyer $54.99 plus shipping (inflation has driven the price up about 10% since launch) and because of TGC’s order backlog wouldn’t arrive in the buyer’s hands for almost two months. About 90% of the price goes into the cost of making the game. The remaining 10% is split between TGC as distributor and me as designer. Bottom line, the game is more expensive than most families are willing to spend on a game and yet still produces almost no profit. To make matters worse, customers have to place the order weeks before they will actually receive it.
My primary solutions to this challenge have been two-fold. First, I’ve been much more cost-conscious in my design approach. Second, I’ve rethought how I get the games made.
Since launching Journeys with Jesus, cost and the resulting price have been the key consideration in my game design. About half the cost of that first game was in the large game board and the large box to hold it. All of the games I’ve designed and launched since then have been without game board and therefore could fit in a smaller (less expensive) box. Two of the games (Illuminate and Prophets & Kings) are just a few dozen cards in a simple tuck-box and therefore can be priced at ~$20. The other two games (Roman Catacombs and Roman Roads) have more complex card decks (and Catacombs also has a printed scorepad) so they require a slightly larger 2-part game box, but even so I’ve been able to price these at ~$35.
However my original vision was to launch a line of “Journeys” games covering different aspects of Biblical history and geography. For the past several months I’ve been prototyping and play testing a game based on the churches the Apostle Paul planted in Greece and Turkey. Producing this game at an affordable price with the components available through TGC was proving to be a challenge. So instead I’ve decided to source the parts from various suppliers (5 at current count) and assemble the games myself. The assembly is quick and easy (a couple of minutes of my time per game), but has required me to order and inventory the components in “bulk” (at this point I’m ordering the components by the dozen, not the hundreds or thousands). Doing so has allowed me to get the unit cost down close to $20. The game is at least on-par with our “Roman” games in terms of quality and playability, so I’ve decided to also price Journeys for Paul at ~$35, which I think is still a good value but provides somewhat more attractive margins to compensate for the extra effort it takes to manage and produce the end product.
For the past couple of years I’ve also tried to come up with a more affordable approach to Journeys with Jesus. TGC is always enhancing their component portfolio and recently I’ve discovered a more affordable board design that also fits in a smaller box which together reduce the cost by over $3. Reducing the number of cards in the game and eliminating the tuck box to hold them (a more reasonable approach with fewer cards in a smaller game box) provide additional cost savings, getting the production cost to just below $35. The cards I removed were for journeys recorded in the Gospel of John, leaving those journeys described in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), so I also created an expansion pack with the removed cards (priced at ~$13). I rebranded the original Journeys with Jesus as the Legacy version and made the new lower-cost version of Journeys with Jesus and the Expansion Pack available in the TGC store.
Above I mentioned that the second aspect of addressing production costs was rethinking how I get the games made. My approach for Journeys with Paul is one example of that. But I’ve also considered suppliers other than TGC.
Several months ago I tested a new print-on-demand service called Launch Lab. The service is provided by Launch Tabletop a manufacturer in Hong Kong, and sister company to Ninox Games, both of whose main businesses are as outsource manufacturers for game publishing companies. These types of companies typically produce games at a fraction of the cost of print-on-demand, but require the publisher to order hundreds or thousands of games at a time. That works great for someone on the tail end of a successful crowdfunding campaign, but wouldn’t work for someone like me. Launch Lab seeks to break that model, providing competitive print-on-demand services leveraging their high-scale manufacturing facilities.
When I initially tested the service I was really impressed with the quality of the game that I received and the speed of delivery. But, while their production cost for a single copy of a game was only slightly higher than TGC, shipping costs from Asia were nearly double that from US-based TGC. Launch Labs also had a limited number of standard components available, making it nearly impossible to re-create my TGC-based game designs. I exchanged a number of messages with CEO Nick Chan and others on his team providing feedback and I was impressed with their responsiveness.
As part of my re-evaluation these past few weeks I revisited Launch Labs and found that their component options had improved dramatically and their pricing had dropped about 10%. For quantity 1, with international shipping costs (which have increased), they still aren’t competitive, but significant volume discounts kick in at quantity 2 and really start to ramp up at quantity 11. They don’t have an online retail store equivalent to TGC, but from a pure production perspective, they have become a compelling option. Based on what I’ve seen, they seem to beat TGC on price, quality, and shipping times. In any field, it’s hard to ignore an option that is better, faster, and cheaper.
A New Approach to Distribution
As I described earlier, my main distribution strategy for SDG Games has been to sell through The Game Crafter’s online store. This is an easy solution, but as I’ve explained, it results in high prices (with low margins) and long delivery times. This approach also doesn’t work for Journeys with Paul, which isn’t made by TGC (although they do provide one of the key components). At the very least I needed a way to sell this one game, and whatever solution I came up with should also provide a simple way to leverage the production advantages available through Launch Lab.
When I launched SDG Games, I created a WordPress-based website on a hosted platform. One option would be to add an e-commerce plugin (e.g. WooCommerce) to WordPress. However, from past experience I knew that managing this type of online store (including securely collecting and processing payments, calculating and collecting sales tax where appropriate, calculating shipping costs, etc.) takes more work than just installing and enabling a plugin. I also wasn’t thrilled with my WordPress-based website. The underlying hosting platform seemed somewhat unstable (about once a week I’d get notifications that my website was down, with unexplained outages lasting minutes to hours), and WordPress is functional, but it takes a fair amount of work to make it look great across mobile and desktop. I need a solution that just works and doesn’t take much ongoing work from me.
So I decided to break my web presence into three parts. I didn’t want to lose the content I’d created in WordPress, so I broke that out with the new address blog.sdggames.fun. I hand-coded a new business website (starting from some good bootstrap-based responsive templates) and am hosting it using the Cloudflare Pages service. This approach should give a simple but solid website that will be stable, easy to update when I add new games, and not require much, if any maintenance. Finally, I created a new store called SDG Biblical Wisdom using Shopify. From past experience, I know that Shopify is simple to manage and takes care of all the messiness. Managing three platforms may sound like more work, but I think leveraging the strengths of each platform will prove much more efficient than trying to compromise one platform to serve all three purposes.
I will continue to offer most of my games through TGC’s store, but customers will get the same products (potentially with higher production quality) at the same price (but with better margins for me) and much faster delivery times if they buy directly from me through my websites. That will require me maintaining some inventory, but I think the benefits will more than justify the extra effort.
Of course, none of this matters if no one knows the games exist.
A New Marketing Approach?
Marketing is the one area I haven’t yet holistically rethought. However, I have committed to having a booth at the Midwest Parent Educators Conference in Kansas City in April. One of my previous companies regularly had a booth at this conference and I know that it typically draws over 1000 families perfectly matched to the the SDG Games target market. I have ordered inventory and started creating marketing materials I’ll use at the show. This inventory order will also provide the initial inventory for my new online store. Shopify supports Point of Sale for pop-up events like this so I’ll be able to easily take credit card payments (including collecting local sales tax).
Not only do I hope that this event will drive some sales and increase awareness of SDG Games and our products, but I expect this to be a great opportunity to talk to and learn from potential customers. I believe that I will be much better prepared to develop a marketing plan for SDG Games on the backside of the MPE Conference. Stay tuned!
Is your business facing hard challenges and difficult decisions? Do you wrestle with even knowing what questions need answering, much less how to find the answers? Maybe I can help you go from today’s painful reality to a plan for future success. Drop me a note and let’s talk about it.
