As I mentioned in last month’s Customer Update, GMT is now growing at a pace that is significantly faster than ever before in our history. Although I don’t pretend to understand precisely the mix of factors behind our exploding growth, what I believe is that we are benefitting from a sort of “perfect storm”:

Popular games and game series’ that are standing the test of time and continuing to sell well as they age

A growing corps of creative and skilled designers and design teams who continue to hone their craft and bring us innovative new games

An increasing awareness of our games across the broader game market due to a core group of very popular strategy games as well as the increased customer reach fostered by our expansion into digital products

Of course, these synergies are leveraged by the power of the internet, and more specifically, an increasingly varied and eclectic customer base full of people who enjoy our games and are willing and able as never before to spread the good word about them online through the powerful tools of social media, blogs, YouTube videos, and mass-gamer sites like BoardgameGeek.

In this series of GMT Games State of the Union articles, I’m going to take a look at our games, our design teams, our strategies to increase our ability to embrace and foster growth, and finally the challenges that growth is bringing and how we intend to meet and overcome them. For this Part 1, then, let’s talk about our games.

The games are the product that we ultimately trade for your gaming dollars. Their quality is paramount. The designers of these games (we’ll look at them in detail in our next installment) and their teams are our capacity to continue to create future products. Because of this, they are possibly the most important cog in the GMT machine (although all of our team members are very important) because without them, we would lose the capacity to provide quality designs to our customers. And that’s really what it’s all about; putting consistently high-quality game designs on our customers’ game tables at a pace that we can handle and that meets but does not exceed our customers’ demand.

Now let’s look at the sales of our games in a bit more detail, as we examine where GMT Games stands today.

The Games

First off, our overall sales are increasing this year as never before. 2015, for reference, was one of the three top years ever for us in terms of gross sales. In our first quarter of 2016, we sold 60% of what we sold for all of 2015! (Now you see why we need some new infrastructure and systems – but that’s for Parts 3 and 4).”

Let’s start with a look at our All-Time GMT Best Sellers. For some perspective, back when we began and through the 1990s, all of our print runs were between 2,500 and 5,000 copies, with the larger runs reserved for our GBoH series games, pretty much our most popular games in the early years. And our product line was virtually 100% “wargames”; most but not all were of the “hex and counter” variety.

Our print runs haven’t changed much on the traditional “hex and counter” boardgames we print today. There remains a small but dedicated market for those games, and we continue to encourage designers who love to design wargames to create more to meet that portion of our customer base demand.

It’s clear, though, when you look at our all-time best-selling games, that it’s our non-traditional wargames, our card-driven strategy games, and our Euro and family games that have driven our growth over the past ten years or so. Although we occasionally hear from wargamers who bemoan our printing other types of games, it was the decision to do so – starting with Paths of Glory back in 1999 – that opened the door to more customers, growth, and the capacity to profitably print more wargames.

Our Best Sellers

Here’s a look at our best-sellers, with approximate lifetime sales.

Twilight Struggle is The Boss

So, clearly, Jason and Ananda’s T wilight Struggle – the game that has broken all of our sales trend models – has been the biggest hit for us. But the impact this game is having on our company can’t be measured only by total sales. Twilight Struggle is the game – surprisingly more so than our more traditional Euro or family offerings – that has really put us on the map with the BGG gamer base (which is many times larger than our traditional wargamer customer base).

It’s also the only game we’ve ever produced for which we have printed more copies in each successive print run (we’re on our 9th printing now!). Most games sell 50% or more of their copies in the first month after release, with a downward sales curve over time after that. Twilight Struggle, though, continues to surpass its initial month’s sales (which weren’t really all that great at the time, actually) on a monthly basis; the game continued to sell at an increasing pace, even before the launch of the PC/Mac/iOS versions by Playdek this spring. As an example, Tony and I decided late last year to reprint 22,000 copies of Twilight Struggle – what we anticipated would be about a 1.5 year supply if sales trends continued. We got the games into our warehouse in December. And they sold like hotcakes, even better than we’d projected. By April, we were sold out! For us, even given the historical sales trajectory of Twilight Struggle, this was a stunning acceleration!

Something you always love to see in business is a “mature” product that continues to outsell the new products. We only have one of those – Twilight Struggle – but it’s a keeper!

The digital release of Twilight Struggle has been amazing for buzz and branding for us, but because of that massive upswing in sales pace between December and April, we don’t have any copies of the boardgame to sell (We’re printing 26K more now)! But the digital sales have been tremendous and have brought thousands of new players who had never heard of Twilight Struggle into the TS player base. Based on what we are hearing from many of them, they’ll get physical copies too – once we get the game back in stock. And of course, once folks see and like ONE of our games, it opens up lots of possibilities with the rest of our game catalog, as well. So this massive (for us) exposure of Twilight Struggle – even with some of the hiccups we had with the (ugh!) Kickstarter process – has really been good for GMT. And we think the best is yet to come.

A Common Thread

Let’s go back to the rest of the games on the best-seller list. #2 – Battle Line is a fast-playing Euro/family strategy card game. #3– Dominant Species is a deep strategy game, again themed and aimed at the Euro/family market. #4 – Commands & Colors Ancients is a lighter wargame, dressed up a bit with blocks, stickers, and cards – aimed at both wargamers and the crossover Euro/family market. #5 – Paths of Glory is a brilliant card-driven strategy wargame by Ted Raicer, aimed initially at our wargame customers, but over time embraced by many “crossover” strategy gamers as well. #6 – Combat Commander is the coolest hex-and-counter tactical wargame I’ve ever played (admittedly, I’m a tad biased). But because of the amazing system that Chad Jensen created – a game that immerses you in a new story every time you play – this series has gained a foothold among “crossover” Euro players as well.

As you look down the rest of the best-seller list, you see more two more awesome strategy CDGs from Volko Ruhnke, a wildly popular strategy racing game with a cool set of Euro mechanics (thanks Jeff and Carla Horger!), a couple of Reiner Knizia fast-action family games (Ivanhoe is still the game our family takes on vacation, and we’ve taught virtually all of our children’s friends how to play over the years), two classic strategy CDGs from Mark Herman (who created the CDG system that is at the heart of Twilight Struggle and so many other popular best-selling games) and Ed Beach, and more Commands & Colors, courtesy of Richard Borg. ALL of these games have found a fan base that includes but is not limited to our long-time wargame players. And for us, popularity among that much larger crossover game and euro/family strategy game market means increased sales and enhanced opportunities for growth.

Coming Soon to a Bestseller List Near You

So, did you happen to notice what’s not (yet) on that best-seller list? How about:

These products are all too young in their life cycles to have had enough print runs yet to vault them into the top 15. Most of them have had just one or two print runs and are either sold out or are have just recently been reprinted. But I have no doubt that most of them will be there, over time, as they are VERY popular. (Liberty or Death sold out its first print run of 4,000 games in 37 days earlier this year!) By later this year, most of these will be back in stock and, we hope, bringing fun to thousands more game tables in our expanding customer base.

Whither the Wargamers?

So where does that leave our hex-and-counter wargamers, the guys who’ve been with us since the beginning? Well, I’d contend that it leaves them in a heckuva lot better place than if we were producing only wargames for 2-5 thousand customers, and struggling financially to put out 2-3 games per year. Or worse, out of business, like so many of the companies whose games we played and loved over the past 30+ years. Because of P500, where we’ll print games even if only a relatively small number of gamers want them, we’ll be able to continue to profitably create and produce quality wargames for a long, long, time (and we have quite a few designers who love to create wargames)! And that makes me really happy, because I’M ONE of those guys who loves wargames, although I have to say that there’s not a game on that Top 15 list that I don’t enjoy. But because we make strategy games of all kinds that appeal to many wargamers AS WELL AS a much broader audience, we can be financially stable and put out enough games of many types each year to give virtually all of our customers games they’ll really like every year.

So what’s happening is that those Top 15 games (as well as some other older games) are continuing to sell really well, and the newer games are selling better early in their life cycles than virtually any of our games except Twilight Struggle, and the confluence of those sales means growth and financial stability for GMT.

Innovative, Unique, Eclectic Strategy Games

As I wrap up this Part 1, I want to take just a minute to talk about the TYPES of games we want to create as we move forward. I’ve used the terms “wargames,” “crossover games,” “Euro/ Family games, ” etc, throughout this article. But I want to say that those are only terms that I used to try to characterize or identify the various likes of customers. When we set out to create or produce games, we don’t think of the games in those terms. What we want to bring you are challenging Strategy Games, of all sorts. A lot of them will be military-themed or focused, because the roots and interests of many of our designers lie in that realm.

But we don’t intend to be limited by labels. Rather, across what are currently 51 design teams, we’ll do our best to create games with systems that teach, challenge, surprise, frustrate, and delight you as you play them. Like some of our past games, many of them will be games unique in the history of the hobby, weaving systems and methods familiar and not into a tapestry that brings something new to your game tables on a regular basis. Games like Twilight Struggle and Fire in the Lake and Dominant Species and Talon and Churchill, with plenty more Wing Leaders and Panzers and Next Wars and Operation Dauntless’ and MBTs mixed in. Some of them will be called Pericles and Welcome to Centerville and Next War: Poland and Mr. President and 1846 or 1960. Many more are already on the drawing boards and design tables of our amazingly talented design teams. We’ll talk in depth about those guys, the creators – next time.

For now, suffice to say, on the product side of GMT, considering both the burgeoning sales and the expanding reach of all of our games, and thanks to both our outstanding team members and our loyal and growing customer base, the state of our union is strong.

Enjoy the games!

Gene

July 20, Hanford, CA

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