Dawn of the Zeds Designers Edition - Development the "Normal" Way

As you likely know, every game we have ever made under our brand or for our clients has been printed-on-demand.  A certain quantity gets ordered and then printed, whether it's one game, or 200 copies of one game or dozens of games a few of each at a time for retailers.  Ask any 99 out of 100 game publishers other than our clients, and they will tell you our method is "weird"

Dawn of the Zeds Designers Edition (or DOTZDE) is the first time we are developing a game from the beginning with a "normal" development process in mind.    We know there are alot of folks that are interested in this game, so we were pretty deliberate with the design and development phases.   Not to mention just how many artists and graphic designers contributed to this project.   

The design is complete and pre-orders are now underway for the English version.   Just to add a few layers of complexity, we also have publishing partners in at least 4 different languages.   One thing that became clear is the level of graphics and diligence in making sure the graphics are right is very high compared to when we are just publishing a game under our own brand (where if there's an error, we're the printer so we can literally fix it on the fly).  This game is being printed at volume overseas. There are potential language and file format challenges too.  That means everything needs to be right months before the game actually gets in your hand, to say nothing of the highly detailed and expensive puzzle that is international shipping, tariffs, customs, middlemen  and distribution.  We have a good printing partner (who we have done business with before on game components like all those cool dice in Road to Independence) that and key retailer partners that are allowing us to offer "regional friendly" shipping to many places in the world, and hopefully that will result in happier customers and more sales.   

But at the end of the day, there was time, effort and a not small amount of money put into making the game a reality way before any orders for the game were taken.   That's not a small matter even for a "midsized" (meaning more than one full time employee) wargame publisher and printer.   

To use two words, it's all about the "cash flow" or lack thereof.  We needed enough cash flow to fund the development of the game way before sales come in to cover the costs.   At least that's the "normal" way.   Even in traditional crowdfunding, a creator or publisher is going to invest alot of time and money before the crowdfunding succeeds and they get a payment.  DOTZDE is easily the biggest cash flow adventure we've had, funding artwork and development for well over a year before seeing any pre-orders and the game is still a few months away from general release.   It's been quite the eye-opening experience.  

If this is what "normal" game publishing is like, I'm pretty happy that we publish games in a "weird" way.

Would I do it this way again?   Great question.   Part of the reason we did it "normal" was that we figured there might be thousands of copies sold and while our POD operation is good for hundreds, when it gets into the thousands and all at once, the limitations of POD are apparent.   For the now, the answer would be "if we find another great title by another great designer, we'd probably do it again".  Ask me again in six months after all the dust settles.