The time has finally come. Less than one week remains until we launch the Kickstarter campaign for our first game, Gangster Dice. All we need is $8,000 and our long imagined dream of producing games will become a reality!

So why $8,000? Why is this the magic number that will make it all happen? Why not an even $5k or $10k? Come to think of it, why are we using Kickstarter at all?

Why Kickstarter?

The last question is the simplest to answer. Why are we using Kickstarter to get funding instead of just printing up 500 games and trying to sell them?

This comes down to simple risk. We could spend thousands of dollars producing hundreds of copies of Gangster Dice and hope they sell, or we could put the game up on Kickstarter and only spend that money if we know we have the funding to do so.

In addition to that, Kickstarter offers us more exposure and gives our backers a feeling of being involved and being a part of making this game happen, which is much more fun than just buying a game online or finding it on a game store shelf.

Sure, makes sense. So why the $8k?

This question is less simple, and it involves math. I know, I dropped the M-bomb and I do apologize, but let me go over the numbers and show you how we came up with the magic sum of $8,000.

When we were figuring out our funding level we wanted to find the break-even point–that is, the amount of money we need to raise to manufacture 500 copies of the game, ship them to the USA (from China, on an actual ship), and then mail each individual copy to our backers. We need to produce at least 500 copies of our game so that we can set a reasonable price point. Let’s be honest, as fun as this game is no one is going to buy Gangster Dice for $50.

In addition to that we need to cover Kickstarter and Amazon Payments fees. Kickstarter takes 5% off the top as their fee for using their site, and Amazon charges 3-5% to cover credit card servicing fees. We are also doing some minimal advertising and some paid reviews, and then of course we need to pay our artist.

Huh, that’s a lot of stuff. How much does each of those items cost?

Well I’m glad you asked, because I do actually like math a bit. Whoops! Sorry about dropping that second M-bomb. Here is an itemized list of our expenses:

500 copies of Gangster Dice, produced by King How Limited: $2490, or $4.98 per game

King How setup costs for manufacturing: $900

Freight from China to San Diego: $500

Gangster Dice Graphic Novel, produced by Allegra Printing and Marketing here in Tucson: $510

Artwork, advertising and paid reviews: $1,000

Total: $5,400

Now, you may notice that doesn’t add up to $8,000. So where does the extra $2,600 come in? This requires some more complicated ma–err, calculation.

We want to offer Gangster Dice at as low a price point as possible, and we decided on $25 for the base game. So that means that every game we sell will be $25 toward achieving our $5,400, right? Well, not exactly.

Since it costs $5.30 to ship each game using USPS Priority Mail small flat rate boxes, we need to subtract that cost from the $25 to get the real amount we raise with each game: $19.70. So divide the $5,400 by $19.70 and we get…wait for it…274 games.

Whew, that’s a lot of games. But we’re not quite done with our calculations yet. We need to multiply that number by $25 to get our total funding goal. And that works out to be…

$6,850!

But wait. We need to factor in the 10% for Kickstarter and Amazon fees. Curses! That’s an extra $685, roughly $7,500 total. And of course there are always hidden costs, so we add in a $500 safety buffer. And that of course brings our total number of games we need to sell up a bit, let’s just say 300 to be safe.

And that’s what it will take to make this game happen: we need to sell 300 games. Wish us luck, we’re going to need it. See you during the campaign!