It’s been a little over two months since we launched Buried Giant. These have been among the most productive months of my professional life, and I suspect that is true for most of our team. We launched a new website, built a webstore, finished the development of Oath: New Foundations, and initiated the prepress process for five separate projects: all three Wehrlegig games, a new printing of Arcs, and Oath: New Foundations. Most years, I’m happy to just get one project into prepress each quarter.
On top of all of that, we also began our work on the new Arcs expansions. Because of the nature of Arcs, these expansions are much easier to handle than the work we’ve just completed on New Foundations. We have a lot to talk about. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more designer diaries like this one that will offer you all an indepth view into our design and development process.
But, before we jump over to Arcs, I wanted to talk a bit about the work we are doing at Buried Giant, how we approach our projects, and what you can all expect going forward.
The Price is Right
A few days ago, someone on Discord asked me about how we priced our games. I hadn’t planned on writing a long response, but, as I answered their question, I realized I had never spoken directly about how we do our pricing and how it reflects our core business model. So, I want to use this first entry to talk about those things plainly. Then, I want to say a little about the importance of supporting titles and what players can expect from us as we launch our next project.
Let’s start with the basics. Generally, if you are in the business of selling things, you set your prices at between five and ten times more than that thing’s production cost. This formula has proved very resilient over decades (maybe even centuries?). Now, there can be a wide range of variation for a few different reasons. The biggest one, for us, is how many copies we'll be selling directly to customers vs. through stores or distributors. For our historical games, we know a larger number of folks are buying direct, so we can get closer to the lower end x5/x6 of the spectrum. Something like Arcs needs to be cheaper so we can get to the higher end of the spectrum. This keeps prices for wholesalers and stores sustainable. It also means that, generally speaking, we make a little more money from a copy of Arcs sold directly to a customer than from a copy of Pamir, but this is largely offset by the fact that many more copies of Arcs are sold through regular retail channels.
I should say that once you get outside of the indie part of the market and to the bigger players like Asmodee or Hasbro, it’s likely that all of the prices are being set in the x8-x12 range. There’s nothing wrong with this. They have massive overheads and often are paying steep licensing fees to Star Wars or Marvel or whatever. And, obviously the audience doesn’t seem to mind too much.
When Drew and I started Wehrlegig, we priced our products at the very lowest end of viability. Pamir costs nearly twice as much to produce than Arcs. John Company is between two and three times more expensive still! But, we also sell a larger portion of the copies directly to customers, which helps us offset this cost. That pricing structure demanded a lot of caution on our part during the early days of Wehrlegig. Thankfully, Drew and I also benefited from having a tiny overhead. It was very easy for us to lower our take-home pay to compensate for a year where we had fewer sales.
Even though we weren't sure what Pamir would look like in 2018, we had a pretty good idea of its price point and product profile.
Now, with Buried Giant, some of those tools are gone. In the formation of the company, we wanted to make sure we could keep together a great team. That means starting with a larger staff and a lot more overhead. Of course Oath and Arcs help us with this since they are good sellers. But it also means we have to adjust our business plan just a bit. Mostly that's good for you all because it means more regular releases, especially for the first couple of years while we get everything back in print. For us, it just means more work.
So far, I’ve only talked about prices in terms of production costs. What about the price of the actual design, development, graphics, and art? Broadly, we view all of these as fixed costs and we don't pass them to the customer. We do this because I don't want to warp the incentives of the game-making process. Folks are buying a game. They aren't buying the team's sweat. If a game ever gets delayed, it's because I thought it would do better if it had more time. And, as those of you who have followed our previous projects know, I will never hesitate to delay a game if I think it can benefit from a little more time.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we can make games at any price point. Our production budgets are usually informed by our peers. For instance, Pamir was designed to be a $60-90 game. That price came from looking at the market for games like it and then trying to figure out how to spend that production budget on a game that we thought would do well with its competition. Of course, we want to stuff every game we publish to the gills with content and good design, but the price is mostly a function of its factory cost.
There are places where there's more flexibility than you might expect, but those are mostly places where the market has proven able to bear the costs. I'll give two examples. First, John Company and Oath both cost more than a hundred dollars. In both cases, I was initially very wary of building a design for that price point. I knew we could build $120 dollars worth of value, but I wasn’t sure if the market would vindicate us. Thankfully, both games did very well and proved that there was a strong market for games at this price point. While I don’t want to only design games for this audience, knowing that they are out there gives us freedom to explore really big projects, and the work of Arc’s Blighted Reach campaign expansion a much safer bet!
On the cheaper side of things, we had an interesting pricing puzzle for the new denizen deck for Oath. The Root decks cost $10, which is a fair price given the production costs. However, the denizen deck for Oath features three (four?) times as much art and probably twice as much design work. So, I looked around and saw that most content boosters of similar size tended to cost $15 (for instance, a Summoner Wars deck). So, the denizen booster will cost that amount in retail.
But, thanks to the core business model, you all don't have to pay more for it. This really gets to our core approach we’ve always used to design our Kickstarters. We want to give our backers the best deal possible, which usually means the deal most linked to production costs and not market expectations.
In essence, these pricing tools give us the financial space we need to do our work. Indeed, this is true of basically every game company. Without these tools we don't get fed. This is why the tariffs were (and continue to be, perhaps) so scary. They just eat into our ability to build cash reserves which we would otherwise be using for additional development costs.
Our margins on these games, coupled with the direct sales made possible through crowdfunding, allow us to maintain a well-paid and full-time creative staff. Without it, we'd all be working other jobs and games of this scope simply wouldn't be possible. Before Kickstarter, most game publishers in the indie space were 1-2 person outfits with a bunch of contractors. In contrast, Buried Giant has been able to start with 8 full-time staff!
Every publisher in the tabletop space has a different approach and the rise of crowdfunding over the past decade has greatly expanded the types of businesses that can thrive in this space. However, I am a partisan for a specific approach: I consider the full-time employment of folks in a long-term creative endeavor to be a foundational element of our business strategy. I want folks making games to be able to put themselves fully in their work. When I talk about the "studio-model" of game making, that's really what I'm talking about. This is not the only way to make games, but it’s the way we want to make them.
I think this model is very well suited to the sorts of games we make for two reasons. First, I think the deep focus and expertise allows them to work at the frontiers of the form. They have the security to ask the hard questions about what games can and cannot do and can experiment more freely. Second, I think of games as existing in a constant dialogue with their communities. You need a full-time team to properly engage in that dialogue. These are living games made in collaboration with an amazing community that includes you all. This is about far more than playtesting. It’s about the strategy conversations that keep you up late, the events you might attend at a convention, or the fan variant you might post on your lunch break. We are all discovering what these games can do, and we simply could not do our work without your help.
This openness is not for everyone and it has real consequences for how we think about our games. I think our work over the past couple of months on both Molly House and Oath demonstrates our commitment to this dialogue.
Post Release Support Means More Than Replacement Parts
When we started preparing the second printing of Molly House, we knew we wanted to improve the production a bit to help with players playing the game in low-light conditions. Really, of all of our games, Molly House should be playable in dimly-lit rooms! We also made space in this upgrade pack to include some reprinted cards. In the year after the game’s release, we found that we could subtly improve the balance of a couple of the items in the game and clarify the wording of some others. We didn’t do this because anything was broken, we did it because we knew we could make it better. We don’t stop working on our games when the Kickstarter ends or when the packages are in the mail. These games are bigger than their launch events or their retail release dates.
The work of Oath: New Foundations was driven by this philosophy. Months before we began that project, there were voices who encouraged us to just design more content and leave the game intact. In other words, they wanted a traditional expansion. But, Oath was not designed to be expanded in that way, and I knew that the best version of Oath would require months of careful study and a willingness to do the messy work of design. Don’t get me wrong. I love Oath and am tremendously proud of the design. It won a heap of awards and found an amazing audience. But, in talking with that audience over the many years since its release, I realized how much still might be possible.
We approached the project essentially in the same way a digital team would approach a game’s post-release support. We didn’t want to start over. We were still so clearly working within Oath both in terms of its mechanical core and its governing philosophy. At the same time, we were unafraid to strengthen and rebuild when that was necessary. Not every developer is cut out for this kind of careful work, but the team here is uniquely suited to it. We love these sorts of sprawling designs. We love how they seep into your thinking and make you question what might be possible within them. Working on New Foundations has been a real joy and I’m tremendously proud of what we’ve accomplished. Not every system I thought would exist found their way into the final design, but, on the whole, it measures up to its highest ambitions.
This brings me to our upcoming project, Arcs: Beyond the Reach. Unlike Oath, Arcs was designed, from the ground up, for this kind of post-release support. We started working on the design for the upcoming Arcs expansions in the months following the game’s initial release and, even with only a couple months of proper work done, we have already generated a tremendous amount of playable content. With Oath, it often felt as if we were renovating an old, beautiful house with walls of plaster and lath. We did our best to make all of our new work match the bones of that house, finding reclaimed bricks and figuring out the right plaster mix so that the renovations would hardly be noticed by a new player.
Just look at this guy; he was born to build.
But Arcs? Arcs is legos. The core system is incredibly robust and flexible. Of all of the games I’ve worked on, it is easily the most fun to design for. Working on an Arcs expansion is as easy as pulling out a bucket of extra bricks and dumping them on the floor. The trick is to find systems that feel like they belong in the game. It’s easy to build a new spaceship to play with, but it can be a challenge to build something that feels like it belongs in the world and that makes the game all the better for its inclusion.
Arcs and its Blighted Reach campaign were always meant as the first steps into a much wider world. As expansive as that game is, it is also incomplete. In the weeks and months after we finished Arcs back in 2023, I started compiling a roadmap for the game’s expansion. I didn’t know if Arcs would find its audience, but, if it did, I wanted to be ready.
Next week, we’ll talk more about the final months of Arc’s development. Usually I don’t say much about how projects are finished. The days tend to be hectic, filled with a thousand small editorial decisions, last minute testing, and lots of graphic design. There’s usually no time to sit down and write a long essay about process or space to reflect on the design.
And yet, in the case of Arcs, those final weeks were critical. Next week, we’ll talk about how they shaped our plans for the game and set the stage for Arcs: Beyond the Reach.
You can find the next Arcs Design Diary on the Buried Giant Blog.