Selling your game on a CD

[merc_fx]

Hey guys,

We are looking in to providing our game for purchase on CD (as well as download), much like Hamumu games and others. We are looking to do the standard dvd case, cover and perhaps an insert. Here are my questions:

1.) As this will be for our first title, do you think it is work plunking down the cash to buy our own disk printing system or outsource that to another company? We would buy one should our games prove successful, but for the initial run of 100 or so, what would you suggest?

2.) How do you handle selling the hard copy of the game if you are using a third party (plimus) to handle credit card sales? I saw in other posts that Plimus will ship out your product if you send it to them, any experience with this?

3.) Any advice on the best way to make case covers and inserts? Just print them yourself or have them made? Cost effectiveness of either?

Thanks for any help.

[ErikH2000]

2.) How do you handle selling the hard copy of the game if you are using a third party (plimus) to handle credit card sales? I saw in other posts that Plimus will ship out your product if you send it to them, any experience with this?
You mean you can print up your own stuff, send it to them, and they will ship it out? Is that on the site? (Link please!) I only see CD On Demand.

The plan I had, since I also want to do my own printing, was to have Plimus send an order notification and handle the shipping myself. A downside is that I have to do some extra work and charge sales tax for Washington customers.

FWIW, I don't know about DVDs, but I figured my costs for a regular jewel case dealie as follows:

- $.15 mailer
- $.25 single jewel case
- $.10 return/sender label
- $.30 30-page insert booklet
- $.32 CD
- $.35 CD Label
- $.70 ink

$2.17 per item

This is based on buying in quantities of about 100 from mail-order suppliers.

-Erik

[Hamumu]

You forgot shipping!

I am getting out of the CD business myself. Even with my rather low volume (maybe 30 CDs a month), it was just a royal pain to print and cut and ship all the time. I'm really looking forward to having all orders just be happy little smiles in my inbox that someone else has to slave over. So I would not recommend doing it yourself. I have been for a long time, and it saves a TON of money, but it's just too much work that keeps me from getting the real work done.

The money's big though - I'm going from charging $5.00 flat to ship anywhere in the world with a full-color DVD case, full color CD, and full-color one-sheet manual (folded once to make 4 pages, including front and back), to ... I don't know yet what I'll charge, but it'll cost me $6.99 PLUS whatever the shipping cost happens to be, to ship a black & white CD in a paper sleeve with no manual. Nasty. The $5.00 was very functional - it was a little over cost for US orders, and anywhere from a little to a lot under cost for foreign orders, but since most orders are in the US, it evens out (and when I got multiple CD orders, I made out a little better too, since shipping is cheaper).

That's with swiftcd.com by the way.

And yes, doing the sales tax was a yucky part of the process. I look forward to drop-kicking that into swiftcd's lap. Really it was nothing big, just once a year issue, but you know, tax things... yuck.

I took a poll on my site to see what the customers thought, and a lot of them really wanted the nice cases, but it was about equal with the number who said "I don't care, it's what's on the disc that matters", which was also equal to "Who cares? I only buy downloads!", so that's a big enough majority in favor of going the cheaper route rather than the nicer. Not that it's cheaper than it has been, but I'm definitely done doing all this labor (and the case/manual/CD graphic design was like the most dreaded part of releasing a new game too). I'm in this business to make games, not to MAKE games!

[ErikH2000]

I guess there is a part of me that really loves the idea of a physical product, so I'm more inclined to do that extra work. In fact, I have my CD prototype propped up above my desk to motivate me to get the lasts tasks for releasing the game complete. My wife happens to be an expert in small-run print jobs because her business is making wedding stationery. So we have some nice printers, cutting tools, supplier connections, and familiarity with issues to hassle over. Plus I'm fortunate to live a hundred feet from a mailbox company with Fedex/UPS/USPS pickup and delivery.

It's also a little hard for me to say "no" to the game fans when they already have their hearts set on the CD. I mentioned the possibility and then immediately on my forum everybody just expected that the CD would be available. So I'm biased towards making them happy. I will still need to pay attention to the costs and time to make sure it is worth it, however. In theory, it's a way of offering something more expensive to a market segment willing to pay for it. We'll see.

-Erik

[Nonz]

Wild and crazy idea here.

How about instead of making a CD and covers/packaging and such why not have it available on your website. I would say a vast majority of customers have CD Burners and colour printers and should be capable of making their own hard copy of your game.

That way they get what they want and you don't have to worry about all the extra hassle of copying, printing and distributing.

Nonz.

[Hamumu]

That'd be completely insane for my customer base - not one person would ever use it. Depends on who your customers are!

Erik, I feel exactly like you do. The physical products are great and I really love providing them to people. It was painful to say that had to stop. I just need to step out of it so that I'm not spending all my time doing it, and moreover so that I'm not subconsciously sabotaging my business growth. You'll certainly be better off with someone in the biz around... provided she does it for you! It's a real weight off my shoulders, but I'll miss it. I have boxes and boxes of little leftover halloween goodies (erasers, plastic paratrooping witches, spiders, finger puppets, keychains....) from last October when I stuffed orders with them as a bonus. Kind of sad!

[milieu]

I just got an email from DiskMakers.com pitching their self-service CD printing. According to the email, "New low prices! 100 CDs start at $279. Includes full-color inserts, slim jewel boxes, and black on-disc printing".

Looks like you can design the whole thing online, with a 2 day turnaround on orders.

I have no connection with this business; just posting because it is one of the cheapest offers I've seen for small print runs of cds.

http://duplication.discmakers.com/mcm/discmakers/index.jsp

[ErikH2000]

I have no connection with this business; just posting because it is one of the cheapest offers I've seen for small print runs of cds.
Wow, that is cheap. It almost matches the cost I had for doing it myself, plus they would handle assembly labor. Hmmm. I wonder what their cost is for a regular jewel case and 30-page insert booklet? Okay, I will stop mumbling my thoughts out loud now.

-Erik

[arcadetown]

Why make and shipping CDs yourselves? Thought most order processing services provide this option. BMT Micro does this for us if user chooses the additional $10 CD option. They, as well as think other processors, keep the fee which is fine. Is nice to offload that work and not deal with it. User convenience option that isn't used very much but helps make those extra sales wouldn't see otherwise.

[ErikH2000]

Why make and shipping CDs yourselves?
Well, I can still beat the price doing it myself. $10/CD doesn't impress me so much, but I do admit $2.79/CD is getting to a point where I'd have to consider if it's worth doing it. That price would also come up, I'm sure, if the company we are talking about produced the "deluxe" CDs I wanted to give to my fans. The CD is not just a means of delivery, it is a collectible that fans of previous releases are asking for. So I want to do it right--not just cheap. If I had a larger number of orders so that it became a big task, then that also means I could order my materials in larger quantities, send jobs to traditional printers, have more efficient batch assembly, and bring my costs down even further.

And like I said before, I have some advantages for printing and shipping from home that make it easier for me. I've also shipped CDs and other things to people from home in response to on-line orders so I know what I'm getting into. One man's hassle is another man's light work.

-Erik

[NuriumGames]

I do CD on-demand with swiftCD. DVD box, Black line art CD, full color insert for $9 + shipping. Just 1-2% of the orders are for the boxed version.

[Hamumu]

It's interesting that with my games, I get 40%+ CD orders currently. And that Discmakers think is very interesting... maybe combined with Plimus drop-shipping, hmmm...

Those CD options from order services are an absolute joke. An incredible rip-off for the customer, and a really poor quality product. I don't consider that "offering a CD", I consider it more like an alternative way of downloading the game... very very slowly.

[Chris Evans]

I also do my own CDs. I talked about it in this thread a little over a month ago:
http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=1540

[arcadetown]

Most of our CD requests are users that want to use the game on another computer that is not internet enabled, typically a home or child's computer. The BMT CD could be better but it does the job. Would be nice if they shared the CD charge profit. But offloading that work saves time, stress, and hair so the few extra bucks it might generate isn't worth the hassle in our case.

[arcadetown]

btw - one thing that might really be nice about a CD is ability to pack all the other trial games on to it. Got to look more into that.

[merc_fx]

Thanks for all the info so far. One more quick question: How much does it cost to ship your cd? In the US? Internationally? Just looking for ballpark to estimate pricing.

[Hamumu]

Go here:

http://ircalc.usps.gov/

and enter 4.8 ounces and any country you wish. That's what it costs me to do a DVD case game in a Jiffylite mailer. $1.29 in the US, $4.00 in most of europe, $1.60 in canada, I think $6.40 in various far-off locales. If your game has a thick manual, you are likely to hit the next price point though.

[ApeZone]

I've been using Elfring Font's cd-ship.com (http://www.cd-ship.com/index.htm) for a couple of years without problems. They seem to be cheaper than most services and print CD labels in color, something I don't like about SwiftCD.

Part of my reason for not shipping myself is that most of my customers are in the US and I'm in Canada. They only cost $5.50 for shipping to the US. While the idea of shipping myself sounds great, I think it would take too much time.

Andrew
apezone.com (http://www.apezone.com?src=igf)