#44 - Peter's 2024 Finances (Industry Talk)

Music. Welcome to Fun Problems, the problems of fun. I'm Peter C. Hayward. I'm AJ Branton.

And this is the shortest game design podcast in the world. Why is that, AJ? Because today it's another minisode. It's a minisode. Now, I honestly don't think we're that good at doing minisodes. There isn't up longer than we expect, but we're going to try our dang best.

What are we talking about today? Today we're talking about money, specifically your money, specifically your money from board games.

Yes why are we doing this AJ this is a weird thing to do I think this is a super valuable thing that I'm very thankful that you're willing and excited to share with everybody because the board game industry is not very transparent when it comes to finances and I think a lot of people have no idea how much they should be asking for how much they should be expecting if they're in the industry those all sorts of questions like I know very established

designers who have sold games and made like hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties off of a single game. And they are like actively interested in other people's finances because there's just no information out there. So hugely valuable. Last year, 2024, was my year of finance. Every year I pick a yearly theme, which is inspired by Cortex, which I mentioned last episode was on my favorite podcast. And last year was year of finance because I am not from this country.

I'm in America, but i'm not from america and immigrating is very expensive as well as that in the early days of my business jellybean games i paid some incredibly poor decisions just really really dumb things that i did and then in the more recent years i got quite sick and a few campaigns failed partially as a result of that illness and so i lost even more money so i started 2024 not knowing.

Not not having a good grasp of money i just didn't get it i just couldn't wrap my head around it so i i downloaded a program called monarch not a sponsor monarch and i say downloaded it's a web app and just put all my finances in there and started like tracking what i spent and how i spent and realized that what i really should do is work out which how much i make from my different board games and when i get paid and how to expect it and this and that and so

for the first time in my life i have board game data and so i wanted to do this episode to share it like you said for transparency i think it's an interesting topic this is entirely inspired by matthew dunston matthew dunston is another australian designer who does a every year does a financial transparency post on originally they're on twitter now x and he's moved to substack so we'll put a link to his most recent one

it's really good really recommend checking it out i am directly aping his style, there is no originality here at all but i made pie charts so i'm just gonna i'm just gonna talk through my pie charts um if you have questions as we go please ask if afterwards you've got follow-up hopefully because there's not many pie charts but i will say this is a hundred percent games that i. So nothing Jelly Bean Games, nothing Coffee Bean Games, nothing Bean Games is here is included whatsoever.

This is entirely my income as a designer, not as a publisher. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. And even like the games that I publish as a publisher, I'm not counting that because I frankly just didn't have good enough records. Everything else I was like, ah, I got paid this much on this date. When it came to my company, it was such a disaster that I just put that in its own spreadsheet that I haven't touched it.

So without further ado i'm gonna i'm actually gonna go back a few years so i don't have a pie chart for this but i signed my first game in 2016 and from 2016 all the way up to 2021 so that five six seven eight nine ten that six year period i made a total of four thousand dollars i don't have a spreadsheet for that i don't have a pie sheet for that just everything that i made as a designer not including games i published myself was four thousand dollars up to that point and so

our story begins in 2022 how do i share screen can you send me a link to it as well so i can see it not blurry it's a good idea oh no i gotta allow the app okay there we go share screen i actually don't know if i can can you see what though is that clear enough that's actually crystal clear weirdly okay great it's a still image so right right that makes sense so So, do I have control of it? Yes, I do. Oh, I should. Oh, there we go. Okay, so this is... Oh, can I draw on it?

Oh, look at this. Sorry. Ah, no, come back. This is my first time using this presentation thing. So, 2022, I made about $20,000. I've rounded all the numbers down just for the sake of not giving exact figures, but it is very close to $20,000. And as you can see, the vast majority of that was royalties from That Time You Killed Me. That Time You Killed Me had a...

That was the first year that that game came out. and i've counted all of these finances as when i received them so some of these royalties might have been for 2021 i can't remember exactly when it came out but this is money that i received into my bank account in 2022 as you can see most of it was that time he killed me other is some other small games that i have to do. I don't really think about much. And then I made a lot of money from advances. AJ, what are advances?

Advances is money that you get when you sign a contract with the publisher that is against future royalties. So if you get, say, a $2,000 advance, that means that the first $2,000 that you would be getting from royalties, instead you just don't get it all. You have already received it.

And if that money would have never materialized, let's say they just don't decide to publish the game at all you still keep the two thousand dollar advance are we doing this as a youtube only episode or do you want to commentate the graph no i think we can commentate a bit and just as a side note make sure you get advances people if a publisher offers you a contract with i've got more thoughts on advances trust me okay yeah so there's nothing else i particularly care about

pointing out here but yeah it's a you know it's 41 of the graph is your advances it's an enormous amount so the the advice so the thing about the thing about being a publisher is that you have more games than you could possibly publish and i don't just mean games that are available i mean games that you love so it is very very very easy for a publisher to sign a game, even if they don't want to publish it there there is a publisher that i'm thinking

of i won't name names obviously who famously had somewhere in the long lines of 200 to 600 signed games, and they were publishing three a year like the the the owner just loved fell in love with the game signed it and then just spent the rest of her life dodging emails from. Did I say the design of the game? The publisher, the person who ran the publishing house, loved all these designs, signed them, and then spent the rest of their life dodging emails.

It is very, very, very easy for a publisher to sign a game if there is no skin in the game. So I recommend one of two things when you sign a game, either, as I do, get a big old hefty advance, or have a kill clause. Have you heard of a kill clause, AJ? Yeah, basically, if it's not signed by X, or if it's not actually published by X date, then it's reverted back to you. Something like that, right?

Yes and specifically what i'm talking about is if it's not signed and they give it back to you they also have to pay you at that point so if if it put you know it advances immediately the publish having skin in the game if i say hey i want to you know i want to sign this game and the designer's like yeah sure let's go the other way if i'm a designer and publisher's like i want to sign this game and i say sure go for it and they're like cool

okay here's a piece of paper done in three years time when the contract runs out or in 10 years time when the contract runs out they can be like, I don't like this game as much. I'll just give it back. They have lost literally nothing. What you have lost as a designer is the ability to pitch that game elsewhere, is the hours of following up with publishers. If you say, yes, you can sign my game. I want 1,000, 2,000, 10,000, whatever it is right now as an advance.

Then the publisher is like, oh, I don't know about that. They're probably not going to publish your game. It's not quite that simple. There's cashflow issues. But generally speaking, if they're not willing to put any skin in the game, and by that, I mean cash on the table, that is a huge, huge, huge red flag. Well, and frankly, it's a red flag if they don't have the cash flow.

If you can't give me $1,000, even $500, if you're a really tiny publisher, this is your first thing, I don't think you have any business being a publisher, to be blunt. I have one publisher who is quite small, and so I was okay with a $500 advance because I'm aware, like, you know, economy of scale. I normally ask for much more than that. And again, I don't want to name too many specific numbers because publishers get mad at that, which is why I've approximated this.

So for the sake of listeners, this graph has 20K, 57% of which is that time you killed me, 41% is advances, and the rest is other.

The other reason to get an advance is because you will not see money for a while.

Uh i've got my i've got my spreadsheet here i can't share this one because it's got a bunch of stuff that hasn't been announced yet but i can tell you there is a game i signed in, what's the biggest gap i can find here there is a game yeah i've signed games and not seen a cent of royalties for two years more than two years it can it can be years and so getting that advance at the time of signing means that you're at least like you're seeing some cash inflow,

very few designers do this get do this gig full-time i would say it's probably more than it was 10 years ago but i'm still thinking double digits at most make a full-time income from it like oh make a full-time income that's a different question yes i i phrased it wrong i'm a full-time designer i do not make a full-time i would say there is probably a double-digit number of designers in the world, maybe very low triple, but like probably double digits who make a full-time.

Dependable annual salary of, let's say, 60,000 US or more. Oh, and let's also say that that doesn't include being a developer. If you're a developer and designer, that is- Different gig. I'm talking about design is your job. Now, I do development work, but my main gig is not even board game design. It's something else because it's just not reliable.

So yes, I strongly recommend getting advanced. Now, if the publisher is refusing to give advance, if they're like, look, we just can't do it for whatever reason, and you still want to sign with this publisher, name a high number for a kill. Cool, okay, I won't take it in advance, but if this game is not signed within X years, I want $5,000. Because you do not want them to have, basically you want to make it as hard as possible for them not to publish a game once they've signed it.

I think it's really unfair.

I feel bad about this because I have done this as a publisher. I've signed games that have never come out.

And I do think it's really unfair. It's something I really try not to do these days because i think it's so unfair to sign a game hold on to it give it back you've just wasted years of someone's life especially because some games only work at a certain time like you know there was a roll and write trend that is largely passed i'm not saying it's impossible to sign a roll and write game but signing a roll and write game at the peak of roll and writes was very different

to signing it now and so when you get that game back it might the market might have moved on or something else might have done something similar etc etc so i i asked for big goal advances whenever I can. So any other thoughts before we move to 2023? I think there's a very big asterisk gift upon those kill fees, which is, are you really willing to go down the legal rabbit hole of forcing them to pay you up if they don't say yes? I mean, you can't really.

It's prohibitively inexpensive. I mean, if you have the signed contract, part of the issue is that you're in Canada. If you sign with an American publisher, you can't reasonably come to the u.s and like sue them that that's it's going to cost more than that it's more about putting the money where the mouth is and if a if a publisher reneges on a signed contract that is something that you can guilt-free share with the world i think.

I'm not a proponent of whatever, cancel culture or whatever, but I think if someone's doing shady dealings, as in there is a legal contract and they've reneged on it, I think going public is a completely reasonable thing to do in that situation or threatening to go public, which in this industry is a big deal.

It's true but again that that could have can very easily result in you then like having your name dragged through the mud and still have no money at the end of it so personally i would still be advanced or nothing but that's my line in the sand we're also being very negative all the publishers i've worked with with maybe one exception have been so lovely like i've had a really two exceptions i've had a really wonderful

relationship with all but two publishers that i've worked with one of whom has never released more than one game so you've probably never heard of them.

Oh actually on the note of making sure that they sign your game get that publication window as soon as possible it is really common again because it's it's cost free for a publisher it's really common for a publisher to say yeah you know we'll sign your game and if you if we have if it's not out by 2035 you get it back they have no incentive to put it out before 2035 they can sit there absolutely no issue i have been too aggressive i've had publishers tell

me later hey yeah that date you gave us really stressed us out and i don't think the game was as good as it would have been if we'd had more breathing space so i've loosened it up a bit but i am pretty aggressive with contracts generally and especially with i don't want five years i don't want 10 years i want three four years tops because that is that should be more than enough time to get the game developed, arted and ready for publication if if it weren't longer than that cool i want

a bigger advance if you want five years great i'm doubling the advance i'm asking for because i want you to be financially incentivized it's all about game design incentive game design is incentive design, incentivize the publishers to publish a game once they've signed it because there is no inherent incentive which sucks but is absolutely.

2023 aj what do we see here so we see again that time you killed me is a massive proportion of your income followed by advances again pretty similar amounts but then two other games that aren't in the other column we have fiction which makes it 15 of your income and converge which is 5.6 of your income and your overall income is 50k this year so going up from 20k to 50k was a very nice boost. As you can see, the majority of that was, well, I can never have a majority works.

A lot of that was That Time You Killed Me. This was the year where I think it actually sold better in 2022. But again, you just don't see those royalties for a while. So I got the vast majority of my That Time You Killed Me royalties in 2023, despite the fact that I think it actually launched in 2021.

This is a good time for us to talk about payment schedules, maybe. Yes. Yes. Excellent point. Every publisher is different, but the general pattern is that a publisher, so let's say, AJ, you're a publisher. You are selling games largely, okay, well, there's three main avenues. Firstly, there can be a Kickstarter. Kickstarters are amazing for publishers. They're amazing for designers because you get a big chunk of money.

Possibly the majority of the money up front, which as the publisher means that you don't have to worry about, will these games sell after a few years?

Printed them and as the designer you should have in your contract you get that money pretty soon after the kickstarter closes generally speaking i try to advocate for you know 30 days after the kickstarter closes i get paid which is different to the other cycles we'll talk about in a minute but that's because they have the money like they literally have the money and they're not spending it yet there is no reason for you not to get paid very soon

after the kickstarter gets gets published so converge here is actually converge was my second ever kickstarter game that i didn't do myself and so i got i got that money straight off the kickstarter and that is i'm looking at the numbers here that is i'm trying to do the math six sevenths of the money i've ever gotten from converge so far up to this current date right it is really the vast vast vast majority of it i got straight after the kickstarter which

is great nice actually sorry it's actually three quarters because i forgot about the advance and so the first the first time the publisher gets paid is for the kickstarter if they do a kickstarter then there's direct sales which is the publisher selling it at conventions on their website amazon could be considered direct sales that is they sell the game to a consumer and they get the money straight away that's probably one of the thinnest slivers unless

you're a very specific company like button shy do a lot of direct sales and a lot of Kickstarter and very, very, very little retail presence. Something like the op is almost entirely retail with no direct sales or very little Kickstarter presence. And then a publisher like AllPlay is an interesting mix where they do a lot of direct sales, they do pretty good numbers on Kickstarter and they have a big retail. It really completely depends on which publisher you're working with.

But with direct sales, no, sorry, let me pause direct sales. Retail sales. Okay. AJ, you're a publisher. I am a store. Talk me through what happens. So I don't sell directly to the store. Much to the chagrin of many a self-published designer walking up with 10 copies of their home printed game to your local friendly game store. Hey, do you want to buy my game? It's only $30 or whatever.

That doesn't work. That's not a thing. So as a publisher, I don't want to have to deal with 400 different stores for Canada. I don't want to deal with thousands of stores across the world, right? I want to make one sale of my games. It is a whole different job selling to individual stores. And I don't want to have to have the inventory, having to hold on to an inventory, as Peter can attest, is a nightmare.

So what I want to do as a publisher is I want to do a print run estimating about the actual number of copies that people want and sell as many of them as I can immediately to a distributor. Distributors are basically massive warehouses that just hold on to tons of copies of games from all different publishers. They're only going to buy, though, what they think they can sell. And of course, you know, they don't want to sell out of their inventory immediately.

They want to be able to weather the storm for a little bit, so they're going to order more copies of it than an individual store. Of course, they're selling to a bunch of different stores, but you're going to sell often to multiple different distributors.

So once I've sold off my stock to the distributors, then individual stores go to the distributors to buy. And so each store can buy from any of the thousands of games that come out from those distributors as long as they have stock. If a game becomes a mega hit, then maybe the distributor will come back very quickly for more copies of the game. that happened with Wingspan. It happens sometimes with early CCGs that really take off. They're sort of a flash in the pan.

Oftentimes, it's like a slow purchasing of games from the publisher, from the distributors, and that trickles out to all of the game stores. You mentioned that as a publisher, you don't want to sell to each individual game store. As a game store, you don't want to buy from each individual publisher. One of my first jobs was in a map store. I sold maps, and there was one product that we had to buy directly from the person, and everyone else was from a distributor.

And back in the day, you'd literally get a sheet of paper, and you'd write the number that you want, sort of like a sushi order. You know, there's sushi. When you go to sushi, you write like the number. It was like that. You'd send that in or you'd give it back to the guy, the rep when he came in and you would get exactly that many copies. So what does this mean for you as a designer? Fortunately, you don't have to worry about most of this.

What it does mean is that when a publisher sells it to a distributor, they can either just flat out sell it and get the money right then, or more likely they will sell it on consignment.

What is that, AJ? so consignment is when they get the money as the thing actually sells so the actual person doing the selling doesn't have to pay anything for it up front they only pay for it after it is sold and they give them the cut it's not super common but it does happen yeah i think with distributors it's more common not not with the stores but with the distributors sure you you as that i can't speak to as a publisher you'll have let's say a distributor takes 20 copies of the

lady and tiger cool they will store it for free but they won't pay me for those copies until they have sold them so the the reason there is this big lag in when you get money is because what will happen is at the end of the month or even the end of the quarter the distributor will count up how many copies they've sold and send that money at the start of the next quarter to the publisher at the end of that quarter the publisher will add up how much they've sold or how

much money they got for that game and then pay out the. Designer, up to 60 days later. 60 days after the end of quarter is very common. That means if you go, if you a store buy one copy of my game on the 1st of January, the distributor pays the publisher at the end of March or, sorry, even later, it could be, you know, 30 days after the end of quarter could be April. Then the publisher's like, oh, great, we got this in quarter two. They pay it out to the designer two months after the end of Q2.

So a game that is sold to a store on January 1st might pay to the designer as late as, what's the math on that, July? End of August. There is a huge lag. And this is one of the reasons why I say get in advance. It means that you will actually see money. Things in Rings was a very big hit. That came out early 2024. I got my first non-advanced payment for that at the very end of 2024.

And that is, there is such a lag. So that time you killed me mostly sold in 2022, but as you can see, I got the income for it in 2023 and that made it a very good year for me. Anything else on this one before we move on to last year? Let's go. Which is the last year in my little slideshow here. Can you tell me what we see? So this one is a lot more varied. You'll see that the, that time you killed me sales have gone down to 4.6, which is, I think is a 10th of what it was in the last year.

A part of that is your sales in total, or sorry, your total royalties has gone up to $100,000. And Critter Kitchen is now the majority with 45%. Advances is just under 20. Fiction is still doing well at 10. Converges just under three. And Things in Rings is 16%. As a reminder, if you listen to this, I'll put this in the slideshow in the show notes. And there's also a YouTube where you can go and look at these.

So as you can see, very big, very big difference. And this is, I'm going to say this, I don't know how else to say this. This is what's called having a hit. Critic Kitchen did a million dollars at Kickstarter and that translated to the, by far the biggest amount of money up, like my Critic Kitchen payment. And I only got one payment for the entire year of 2024 was almost as much as I made the previous year in total. And because it was a Kickstarter, I got it pretty much straight away.

I got it i think i mean it finished kickstarting in 2023 i think it ended in november and i got this in 2024 but i got it very early in 2024 so this was this was the start of my year it was a very nice year i'm still not out of all my debts it's how many debts i was in but i really started to make it make a dent in them advances was still a big chunk and that is because i had a bonds a year i've got the numbers here in 2022 i signed three games

in 2023 i signed nine games in 2024 I signed 10 games. So that is 10 games. And I insist on getting an advance for each. I'm very, what did Alex call me? A contract hawk. I get an advance for each. I negotiate high percentages. And you can see like it is a big, big chunk of my 2020. If you've been doing the math, 20K to 50K to 100K, that pattern is not going to continue. I would be shocked if I even reached, I might reach 100K again this year, but I absolutely don't expect to.

And this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to be a full-time game designer. Because you might be like, 100K, great. That's more than I get from my job. Yeah, but I might see 40K this year and 20K next year and then 80K, like there's no way of knowing.

It's completely dependent not only on publishers signing the game and then doing them right and then publishing them in a timely fashion but also how they landed the market and you know the dream of every designer is to get an evergreen it would be very lovely if if you know critic kitchen or things that rings that evergreen i'm gonna go back for a second let's look at that time you killed me that time you killed me whoa that's doing really well whoa that's doing even better oh that game

that game's my most successful game in terms of like bgg ranking and people know me for it and yet two three years after at least i'm i'm done with making money for that game essentially yeah any thoughts a to the j yeah i think there's a very important lesson here which is like if you are trying to make a living as a game designer you need to have a nest egg you need to have very good idea of your finances and not spend all the money as

it comes in you need to think forwardly with your money and use it carefully so that you can survive those rough years.

And you can't rely on games being hits forever most games aren't going to succeed in the long run there's so many thousands of games that come out every year that even if your game does well like you just pointed with that time you killed me maybe you know it trickles out and you can't find a publisher to republish it and it's it's just done oh it's a one and done most games are yeah most games are not reprinted uh most

games even if they're like popular and successful The market's just so busy these days. People don't want to buy the game that was hot three years ago, they want to buy the, Those evergreens are the apex predator. They are the very, very, very thin sliver at the very top. Currently, signs are pointing towards things in rings being an evergreen. I would very much be happy if it was. But who knows? Next year, that might be it. That might be it for sales of things in rings forever.

I think there's also an important lesson to learn here, like you said, about having a hit.

If your goal is to be a full-time designer, the way I see it is either you can hustle and bustle and just be the best salesman in the world and sell a million games and if you sell a million games you know you you'll be able to make it off of just like tiny little advances and then eventually maybe one of them takes off but the real way to that i think is sustainable is you put in the work you you make really good games

you design product first and you get a bit lucky and if you keep at it eventually you might have a hit and then like you said you know you can't guarantee that you'll keep getting hits, but you have to keep working towards the hits. Having one hit is worth way more than all the other games that you made in the year combined, right? Oh, absolutely. Literally, you can see that here. If you take advances out, that one hit eclipses everything else I've done.

Now, I like having other things because it means, A, you're getting money in more often, which is really helpful for budgeting, and B, I just like making games. We're talking about this in the Discord. Did you see that conversation? There's so many messages I couldn't keep up with it. I read a little bit. We were having a conversation with people in the Discord today about the advantages of having one big hit versus lots of little games.

And I think it's a personality difference more than anything. I would love to have an Ark Nova level hit, but if you asked me to choose between one Ark Nova or the 30-odd games I've gotten signed, I would pick the 30-odd games I've gotten signed. That's just more interesting to me.

Whereas you know spirit island ark nova there are a bunch of games that are a designer's one big game and they can probably make a full-time living off it for at least at least a couple of years if not a decade i'm just not built that way that that's i mean again i'd love to have a big hit but i would much rather have a lot of stuff even if none of it does as well or even cumulatively does as well as as. It's funny for me, I just think about it on a completely different axis.

For me, it's how satisfied am I with the game? And if I had 30 games that I was like max out, I was like super, super pleased with, then I would want the 30. And if I was like, I think I have 29 good games and one great game, then I would just want the one great game to be the mega hit. But that just speaks to me being a perfectionist more than anything, I think. I want to talk about a few other things. I've got Matthew Dunstan's excellent, excellent blog post up. Link in the show notes.

Really, really recommend it. So I'm just going to ape some of the things he talks about. He always sends his reviews with a reminder that this is as a result of designing for over a decade. My first design was maybe 2012. So 13 years I've been doing this. And you saw those numbers. I was literally 10 years in before I even made 20K. Now, I'm very happy to have made that 20K, but it's not, you know,

even that was not guaranteed. If that time you killed me hadn't been signed, I would not have even hit 10K until years later. Like, it's not a case of like, ah, I've just learned about game design. I'm going to quit my job and become a game designer. No, no, no, no, no, no. I was doing this for a decade to hone my craft, to build connections, to make all the mistakes.

Like, it's not a, in no way is it a get-rich-quick scheme. As mentioned, I'm many tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

So it is the opposite of a get rich it's a get get poor slowly scheme yeah 100 expenses i don't really track that well i do now so i could actually let me open up monarch i can't share it but i can tell you my expenses for the year while i pull this up the other thing i want to mention is i track my time do you track your time at all i do not i i track time very closely i list every play test i have because the way i organize my development process for games that games

i'm developing or games i'm designing it's the same way i do like bullet point this is the date of the play test and then i put my notes down so i can track exactly how many play tests i've had for every game but i don't track my time individually for each game i i track my time for each game but also because i do that i can sort of clump it all together i yeah i don't have i don't have expenses tracked so i didn't do conventions in 2024 i deliberately took the year off i'm back this

year at conventions i'm going to one in just a few weeks i'm going to tantrum con and so that is going to substantially like add to the expenses but i'm probably going to sign games that i wouldn't get to sign otherwise by going to conventions i buy equipment i have a printer that i'm always refilling paper you know standard kind of prototyping stuff i buy a lot of.

Any other expenses you can think of as a game designer? Yeah, I mean, if you're traveling to conventions, you can write those off as expenses, right? If you're having meetings. That's such a big part of it. Travel is probably the number one expense for game designers. Yep. And it's really tough for me. I know that you and basically all my co-designers are really encouraging me to make it to as many cons as I can.

But money is really tight for me, and it's very, very tough to justify going to these cons, especially when I go there and everyone just says, email me later. And I understand, like, one thing I'm disappointed about is I was planning originally to go to a con with you this year. And I was thinking, like, documenting, like, the experience of going there and, like, learning how to do it properly. Because I feel like I'm not getting good value out of those conventions.

And obviously you do. So I think that process could be valuable to our listeners. But I have to postpone that for a bit. As I mentioned, now, I'm in a very privileged position in that, like, a friend of mine is letting me stay with them for free.

A publisher I work with is giving me a badge. but i am i am frugal as heck when it comes to going to conventions i'm i'm flying to tantrum con which is in charlotte uh in north carolina from from florida where i'm going to be anyway is a 50 flight and then home again is a hundred and i think a 95 flight so like oh my gosh 60 total to fly across the u.s and that is because i i change dates and i move stuff around and this and that i if i can i'll get an airbnb for conventions

if it's cheaper like i will do anything i can to cut those costs because i know that is the biggest output as a designer i didn't go to conventions last year but you know what i did do i went and stayed with alex and it costs money like i get to stay with him for free obviously but flying out there we split meals while we're out there etc etc i've got my hours up for last year so i track them in two separate categories one is published games and one is pitchable games and then as soon as a

game gets signed i move it into the published game category as mentioned all my or the majority of my 2023 income.

Was from a game that i that was published in 2021 which means i stopped working on it in 2020 which means i stopped designing it in 2019 so hours track to income is just nonsense i'm hoping that as the years go on i can get enough data that i can start to be like oh look i worked more this year and made less that year but the next year etc etc but my hours tracked for 2024 were 648 dollars 648 hours on published games

which is games that either got signed or were signed when i was working on them and 473 hours on pitchable game and that is games that have not been signed and might never be signed the game that i've spent the most time on by far is providence which we talked about last episode of co-design with alex that game i don't know if it'll be signed it's It's great. I really love it.

But, and you know, we learned a lot from it and we got better at working together and it inspired a different game that did get signed, et cetera, et cetera. But the, it's always a gamble. I talked about the fact that it is cost-free for a publisher not to sign you. No, I was talking about consignment. I was talking about the fact that you can give that to the warehouse and they will not pay you until they sell it. That's your life as a designer.

You are not paid until you sell it, no matter how long you work on it, no matter how hard you work on it. So this is all very doom and gloom. But the numbers are lovely.

How does your time tracking account for playtest swaps?

If you go to like a playtest meetup and you playtest your game for an hour and then other people's games for three hours do you track those three hours at all or is that part of yeah so the way i track time and this is this is a personal thing is if it is time that i wouldn't have spent without that thing it is tracked so the classic example is going to the gym let's say i live half an hour from a gym i track the time it takes to get to the gym

and the time at the gym and the time takes to go back now there is a case to be made for not tracking that time that's how i like to do it because that is the time that i spent going to the gym it's not how much time i was at the gym so if i'm going to a playtest day and i only playtest this one game i track it as that game if i go to a playtest day like first play la and i play half a dozen of my games and half a dozen other people's games or a convention where it's just like

constantly swapping i just track that as a generic playtesting and so that you know the numbers aren't perfect because i don't want to pull out my phone every 10 seconds be like oh got a change to this and i track all of that as published games so i i count that as published games because a lot of the time i am i am playtesting games that have been signed and we're developing or that later gets signed yeah i just did some very rough estimates and under that rubric i think i'm at probably.

1200 hours a year somewhere in that ballpark but that's a very very rough mine's 1150 so that i know that you do this about as much as i do so that checks out yeah one thing oh shoot i forgot i was gonna say classic me oh no last episode i was writing stuff down the whole time because i knew i'd forget yeah oh it's such a good one too i can't forget do you have anything else to say, like i said this is all this is partially doom and gloom and partially a success

story i'm very very very happy with these numbers these these numbers have helped really pull me out of the debt that i caused myself by moving country and running a company badly board games also got me into the country i'm a permanent resident i'm an alien of extraordinary ability have we talked by this on the podcast. Yeah, but you can tell people more. Basically, it's a special visa that America offers, which is if you are notable in a field, you can get permanent residency.

And so I got into board games to get this visa. And at the end of 2023, I got the visa. Spent 2024 burning myself out. We could talk about work-life balance. That's something I really did not have a handle on last year. Yeah, I think this episode's turning into a bit of like just general advice for you as a designer making a career, but let's do it. So I, because I finally had my permanent residency, I was like, great, now I need to get out of debt. So that's why I did year of finance.

I started tracking my expenses. After about four months, I was like, oh, I understand money now. I was just spending money without really getting it it sounds so stupid when i say it out loud but i i didn't understand money so i needed to spend a year to understand money and now i understand money i don't just spend money without being like well hang on that 400 that i'm spending on this thing that is four hours of paid development work or you know a full

advance from a small publisher like do i want to spend a full advance on this thing probably not so i got so obsessed with i I have this spreadsheet that I was talking about. I got so obsessed with it that I genuinely think I became a workaholic. If I wasn't working, I was antsy. I just always wanted to be working. And I realized it was a problem when my things in rings payment came in and it was a nice chunky payment and I couldn't appreciate it. I was like, great, cool.

I got to get back to work. And I was like, what am I doing? This is what the work's meant to be for the money. Not in a mercenary way, but if I can't celebrate the success, what am I doing?

So i very consciously took the entire month of december off we we recorded a bunch of podcasts all in a row so that i could take the rest of december and not do anything any work i took it off jellybean i took it off my my other job i stopped working entirely and just vegged and sort of let myself reset and then this year last year was year of finance this year is my year of freedom where if i don't if i'm if i'm getting stressed working on

something i stop working on it i put it aside and i work on something else.

And so work-life balance is, I'm in a very privileged position that I get to do this full-time, like I get to create. My other career that makes me, my sort of steady income is I'm an author. So that is also a very make your own hours kind of job. But yeah, I was just overworking and overstressing and look, check in with yourself and see if you're stressed all the time. Because if you are, it's not good. Yeah, it's really tough to do the work-life balance thing.

I found especially because i don't do physical prototyping or playtesting i playtest from my computer which is the same computer that i theoretically use for leisure activities and stuff like that and so i actually found myself trying to like divorce them in every possible way that i can i've heard some people who had to make the shift work from home during covid would be like i just get up leave the room like turn the lights off like do do a lap around the house or something come back

in and it's it's different or even just like just find anything that you can do to like switch computer mice this is the mouse that i use when i'm doing my work versus my play and i'm trying to do as much of that as i can because it and and like when i play video games i try to play like on my ps5 instead of my computer again that's also privileged like oh i have both.

But it's it is very difficult to know when to turn that off and i i had the same thing this year i took the first i i took the second vacation i've taken as an adult this year or late last year, because i found that i was burning myself out a bit and i wasn't i was really easily losing track of how much time i was spending working and i i also have like a little bit of guilt because my wife's bringing in all the income and i was

bringing any income or you know barely any for my development work and stuff i know you mean that you gotta just because you feel bad about doesn't mean that you thus must work on. And she's the one who's complaining that I'm working too much and I need to spend more time with her. So like at that point, it's like, okay, I think it's fine. I want to talk a little bit about publishers. We were talking earlier about the kill fee and like taking the legal route.

The most important thing for picking a publisher, and I think literally the most important thing above all else, is you've got to be able to trust them. If you're in a situation where you're like, oh, I might have to take this to court, don't sign with that person.

Like if you if you don't if they don't have a good reputation or you're not friends with them or you know whatever if you can't find people to vouch for them do not sign with that publisher because you're never going to take things to court and you need to be able to trust them and so the reason to get in the contract is not because you don't trust them it's to be like hey a contract i'm going to break it down a contract is what you

and the publisher both agree should happen putting it down is just formal to be like you know in two years you can't be like well you said 800 they're like, no, I said $8. You have it in writing. The line is it's a formality and it almost is. It's just a concrete way of saying, look, this is what we have decided on.

It's not going to be enforceable, realistically, especially, like I said, you're in Canada, most publishers in the US or if I publish with a European person and no one has enough money to go to court, blah, blah, blah. If you have a wingspan level hit, sure, maybe, but anything short of that, you're not going to enforce it. So you've got to pick someone who you trust, trust, trust.

And when I say that's the most important thing i mean we talked last episode about how alex and i had an offer on providence that we ended up passing and it's not i didn't trust the publisher but we just didn't get the right vibe from them and the vibe is more important than signing the game unpublished designers are going to listen to this being like well nothing's more important than signing the game but trust me the the worst thing you can have is a game signed that you then spend the.

How many people have you met who they signed a game and they're like, and it was in development hell for seven years and then I got it back or, you know, any number of horror stories from signing with small, sketchy publishers because they just really wanted their game to exist.

And so the question that I'm sort of answering is, well, how do you make sure that the publisher pays you? And the answer is you sign with a publisher who you trust to pay you. I have got, oh, actually I can tell you numbers. I've got games signed with 13 different publishers.

I have got a total of 26 games signed with 13 different publishers and four more with contracts on the way with one new publisher in there so i i work with publishers repeatedly a lot because again the trust is the most important thing and all but one of those from that list i would you know i would trust i completely trust i've never had any of them refuse to pay me or had any issues with payments whatsoever most publishers in this business are so lovely and so like competent

and all this kind of stuff it's really it's really great to work with most publishers i say most publishers but most publishers i've worked with but it's because i avoid the ones if i get a sketchy vibe or anything like that if you don't trust them before the contract don't sign the contract does that make sense yep and if you're not sure if you should trust them or not ask around you know hop into our discord hop into board game design lab just be

like hey guys just got a contract from this company i just wanted to do a check has anyone worked with them before how did how was your experience you know and i i'm nervous to say this on the podcast but it's gonna be true if you want my eyes on a contract that you're worried about i will look at it don't just send me every contract you ever signed but i have now signed what did i say 26 contracts with publishers i have gotten a pretty good sense of what to look

for send like pm me on discord whatever send it to me i will have a look at it i'll give you some quick notes or like red flags or anything I've done this with people before, because I wish I had done that with the first two or three contracts I signed. Not that they were, one of them was horrendous. One of them had a 99 year expiration clause, no, no advance. The royalties were like at their discretion. Almost. It was, it was ridiculous. I was just like, oh, it's a contract. Go for it.

And then some others were, I'm like, oh, I should have asked for different numbers or I should have cared about this. But yeah, I will look at a contract if you want eyes on it, because I don't want anyone. There's also a cardboard Edison post that should be mandatory reading for everyone before you sign one of those things. I'll put a link in the show notes. Oh, and now there's a guild too, the tabletop to publish the Diners Guild.

Yeah, Jeff Engelstein, Elizabeth Hargrave, and Sen made it where looking over contracts and being a liaison, that type of thing, that's like their whole deal. Yeah.

So do use the resources, sign smart, and make money. Ideally. Anything else on finances? No, I'll have to do follow-up. I'm going to re-listen to this episode and I'll be like, oh, that's the thing I was going to say. But I think we covered a lot of good stuff. AJ, do you have a publishing tip? We're going to come up with a name for this section. Yeah.

Do I have a publishing tip? Let's call it Get Published. Get Published. My publishing tip is before you pitch to a publisher, look at the games that they have published, see if there's any through lines.

And if there are through lines, experience then obviously you're not going to like redesign your entire game around it but try and think of a way to present it that sounds like it would appeal to them if they mostly do middle weight euros and yours is like middle heavy or like light medium maybe just position it a little bit more that it's going to be the thing that they want it to be you know yeah completely agreed i'll add a footnote which is don't do that at the expense of your game

publishers always want to see the best version but there are so many times when one of the reasons why i pick a publisher very early in the design process is because a lot of frankly arbitrary choices you have to make.

Arbitrary is maybe not the right word but like you know the game would be just as good if you went this way or that way and by having that publisher north star i can be like ah yes you know what if i am pitching this to the mid-weight publisher i should make the mid-weight decision if i'm published you know etc etc cool aj you want to have some mini fun let's do it, What is the biggest waste of money that you've ever, what's the biggest money you've ever wasted in your life?

I kind of feel like we've done this question before, but also I don't remember what my answer would have been. So maybe we haven't done it. I have an answer that I'll say it and you'll know if we've done it before. Go for it. I love being creative. I'm a novelist. I'm an improviser. I'm a board game designer, et cetera, et cetera. Creativity is my jam. And at one point I was like, you know what? I'm going to get into mixing music. This is when I was 21.

So like very young. And so there's a program called Fruity Loops. Have you ever heard of this? No. It's like DJ software. It's like, I don't even know how to describe it. You use it to remix songs and those kind of stuff. It's one of the more popular ones out there. And I was like, oh, I should get Fruity Loops. And again, I was not good with money until last year. So I saw that they had various ways that you could buy it.

Or for $600, you get a lifetime deal where you'll always have the newest Fruity Loops. So of course, I was like, well, if I'm going to do this, I'll want the life. Like, it's going to save me the most money over the long term. Literally, I think I opened that program twice ever. I did not go on to become a famous DJ, as you may have noticed. I didn't even really get into it more than that. So I spent $600 to get lifetime access to the software I never used.

And then, and this pisses me off a little bit, after 10 years, they were like, eh, we can't really justify this lifetime thing anymore. So you have to buy the new version. And I was like, that's not how lifetime works. Wow. That blows. I hope I got that right. Otherwise, Fruity Hoops is going to sue me for...

Have i told that story before no it does something so i don't think we did it i think so i'm a very frugal person and you know i've got a little bit of anxiety a little bit of perfectionism and a whole lot of inbuilt guilt for spending money my wife is like had to talk me into buying more things for myself you need a bath towel i can just shake it off like a dog no you need a, You wouldn't believe if you met my parents. I've got friends who think like, oh, sure. I've got friends who think like,

oh, you're so frugal. And I'm like, no, I'm so wasteful. I'm so wasteful. My parents are mortified at some of my purchases. But there was one time when a neighbor of mine was like, oh, I'm selling my old paintball gun, you know, barely used, all sorts of stuff. And I was like, oh, OK. And he ended up talking me into buying it. But I don't have any friends who go paintballing with.

And he was like he was like you'll go with me and then like it just never ended up working and i don't think he was trying to scam me or anything but it was like in the end i paid hundreds of dollars for the stupid paintball gun i literally never used it once in my entire life i'm gonna tell a related story which is not me wasting money but me just like i guess getting ripped off as a kid do you remember pokemon cards aj oh yeah so when

pokemon cards first first first started i like many people my age at that time went and bought a booster pack and i opened it and it had a charizard in it i was like oh cool the certs already second booster pack. Hurts already but a second booster pack also had a charizard in it so you're like oh charizard's so common the most common so i traded them both away for like oh embarrassing.

You know how much those are is the rare in all of like the first pokemon set i think one of them sold to jake paul for like a million dollars or some nonsense yeah it's crazy cool well that was a minisode on finances if you have any follow-up questions hit us up in the discord we'll answer in our follow-up episode that we'll do mostly because aj has a pending question that he really wants to get to thanks so much for listening and aj how do we end the podcast by you

asking and me saying there's nothing special bye everyone i like that that's our new tradition. Music. Thanks for joining us you can follow us on facebook or twitter at fun problems pod or reach us via email at funproblemspodcast at gmail.com we'd love to hear from you and if you enjoyed the podcast please tell a friend.