Making the Game is a monthly guest column by Chris O’Neal of Brotherwise Games. Making the Game follows a year in the life of an indie tabletop publisher as they attempt to bring their third game to market.  In this month's column on developing a new game, O'Neal shares lessons learned from 2017, and predictions for the future.

As mentioned in a previous “Making the Game,” column, Brotherwise is a young company. We’ve only been at this for five years, and only two of those full time. We’re still learning how this business works, and as 2017 draws to a close, I thought it might be useful to look back at the lessons we’ve learned this past year. Here, from the perspective of a small games publisher, are four lessons learned in 2017, and predictions for the near future.

The age of the megahit is probably over (for the moment). As the pace of production of new games continues to accelerate, there are plenty of big sellers, but the odds of any one new game acquiring the coveted status of evergreen megahit grows smaller. For a company like Brotherwise, which owes our entire existence to an evergreen game, this is scary. Without the reliable sales of Boss Monster, we would not have the freedom as a company to take risks, explore new games, and absorb failures.

Our big launch for 2017, Unearth, looked like it had megahit potential in the days following a huge Gen Con launch. But as new releases at Essen stole the spotlight, sales softened to numbers we’re still very happy with, but aren’t Boss Monster numbers. While I suspect this “cult of the minute” will die down a bit in a couple years, for the moment we are looking at a challenging sales environment for smaller companies who depend on big, sustained hits to get them through their slower development cycle. The flip side of this problem, of course, is that already established evergreens are likely to retain that status as retailers find it increasingly more challenging to know what to stock and privilege reliable favorites.

Going out of stock on a game will hurt harder than ever before. Partly due to the more competitive nature of this market, Brotherwise moved production from Cartamundi in Texas, where we had happily been for four years, back to China. Cartamundi is a top-notch operation that took care of us in every way, but they can’t compete with the price break we are able to get in China. There is a down side to every business decision, and in this case we weren’t the only company to have this idea. Game printers in China are currently running to capacity, and our printers are no exception. Due to production delays there, we went out of stock for over a month on Boss Monster 1 and Boss Monster 2 for the first time in four years. This meant lost holiday sales, upset distributors, and disappointed retailers who have grown used to Boss Monster’s reliability. As unfortunate as those lost sales were, they are nothing compared to the pain of losing dedicated shelf space because a retailer had any number of other games they could move. This new double whammy for going out of stock on a popular game should give every publisher pause, small or large.

Marketing will become the new growth area in our industry. You might think that games companies do lots of marketing because you’re a regular reader of fine news sites like ICv2. Compared to other industries, though, we do not. Consider the standard in the toy industry, where up to 15% of a company’s operating budget goes to marketing. I know of no one among my small publishing colleagues that gets close to that level of marketing expenditures. (Brotherwise spent just over 3% of its budget on marketing in 2017.) The bigger companies market more, but that’s the challenge. In an industry saturated with new releases, the ability to spend marketing dollars to get your game noticed will become more and more critical, and make it harder and harder for smaller companies to compete.

This is a great business to be in, and will remain so. Despite my fairly constant worries about the state of our industry, I still think I have the best job in the world in the best business in the world, and think we’re still looking at considerable upside. 2017 Sales for Brotherwise were up over 35% over 2016. Our new game, Unearth, received excellent reviews and has performed very well for us. We are entering 2018 with a set of excellent launches planned, including Call to Adventure; and we have some exciting new partnerships coming online. Growth of gaming coverage in popular media, and announcements like a Catan movie being in the works suggest that our industry will continue to see a blossoming into popular culture that rivals that of electronic gaming. Most importantly, I continue to be awed at how genuinely awesome the people of the gaming world are. We are in the business of fun, and it shows in how terrific my colleagues are. I have to remain positive about what’s to come when I look at the quality of people around me. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to all of you.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.