Chapter 20: Publishing Your Game

You have a game. It works. It has been developed, playtested, and revised. The rules are written, the counters are designed, the map is drawn. Now you need to get it into the hands of players. This chapter covers the three paths available to you: traditional publishing, self-publishing, and digital-first distribution. Each has tradeoffs. None of them will make you rich. I know this because I have tried all three, and this chapter is as much a cautionary tale as it is a guide.

Wargame publishing is not a viable career path for most people. The market is small. The margins are thin. The audience, while passionate, is not large enough to support a full-time income for anyone but a handful of established publishers, and even they operate on margins that would horrify someone used to mainstream business. If you are designing wargames because you love it and want to see your work in print, this chapter will help you do that. If you are designing wargames because you want to make a living, I would encourage you to reconsider that plan. I say this as someone who tried it and learned the hard way that creative ability and business ability are separate skills, and possessing one does not guarantee the other.

The Traditional Publisher Path

Traditional publishing means submitting your game to an established publisher (GMT, MMP, Compass Games, Decision Games, Revolution Games, and others) who handles production, distribution, marketing, and sales. You design the game. They do everything else.

This is the most stable path and the one most likely to produce a game you are proud of. A good publisher has professional graphic designers, experienced developers, established printing relationships, and distribution channels that reach retailers and customers worldwide. Your game will look better than anything you could produce yourself, and it will reach more people. The publisher’s reputation lends credibility to your design. A first-time designer published by GMT or MMP enters the market with an implicit endorsement that no amount of self-promotion can replicate.

The tradeoff is time and money. Publisher timelines are long. Submitting a game, getting it reviewed, entering the development queue, reaching production, and arriving in players’ hands can take years. GMT’s P500 system, where a game goes on a pre-order list and enters production once it reaches 500 orders, is the industry standard for managing financial risk. It works for the publisher and for the customer. For the designer, it means waiting. Your game sits on a list. Orders trickle in. You check the P500 page to see whether the number has moved. It hits the threshold, enters production, and ships. Or it does not hit the threshold, sits on the list, and you wait longer.

The financial return is modest. Royalty structures vary by publisher, but a wargame designer can expect somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars for a typical print run. Larger publishers with bigger print runs and higher price points pay more, but the per-game income supplements your income. It does not replace it. You are not going to quit your day job on wargame royalties.

You get a product done right in exchange. Professional production values. Wide distribution. A game that sits on retail shelves and appears in convention dealer halls. Your name in the credits of something that looks and plays like a professional game, because professionals made it. For most designers, and all first-time designers, this is the right path. Submit your game. Be patient. Let the publisher do what publishers do.

I was not patient enough for this. That is a personality flaw, not a criticism of the model.

Self-Publishing

Self-publishing means you handle production, distribution, and sales yourself, either through a business entity or your own personal operation. You find printers. You source components. You manage inventory. You ship boxes. You handle customer service. You are no longer a designer. You are a business owner, and those two jobs have almost nothing in common.

Self-publishing is more accessible now than it has ever been. Print-on-demand services can produce small runs of maps and rulebooks. Counter sheets can be printed by specialty shops. Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms give you access to upfront capital and a built-in marketing channel. Wargame Vault and similar platforms handle digital distribution with no inventory risk.

I have opinions about crowdfunding that I will keep brief. Kickstarter campaigns work for some designers and some products. They provide capital before production, which solves the cash flow problem that kills most small publishers. They also create obligations. You are taking money from people in exchange for a promise to deliver a product. If you cannot deliver, because production costs more than expected, because your timeline slips, because life intervenes, you have people’s money and they do not have a game. If you use crowdfunding, scope your project conservatively, build in a margin for things going wrong, and deliver what you promised. The community remembers who follows through and who does not.

Do not start your own publishing company unless you have significant capital, a realistic business plan, and the discipline to execute it. Running a business requires skills that have nothing to do with game design: financial management, vendor relationships, inventory control, customer service, marketing, accounting. You need to make promises you can keep and keep the promises you make. I can design a wargame. I could not, as it turned out, run a publishing company with the consistency and professionalism the job requires.

The financial discipline alone is a serious barrier. You need to pay printers on time. You need to pay artists on time. You need to pay developers, graphic designers, and anyone else whose work your product depends on. If cash flow problems mean vendors wait months for payment, if production delays mean customers wait years for products, you damage relationships that you cannot repair. The wargaming industry is small. Your reputation as a business partner follows you in ways that your reputation as a designer does not.

Digital-First Publishing

Digital-first means releasing your game as a print-and-play file, a VASSAL module, a Tabletop Simulator implementation, or a combination of these, before or instead of pursuing physical production.

This path has the lowest barrier to entry and the lowest financial risk. You create the game files. You upload them to a platform. Players download them and print or play them digitally. Your costs are your time and whatever software you used to create the files. You carry no inventory, deal with no printers, ship no boxes.

Wargame Vault is the primary commercial platform for digital wargame distribution. It handles payment processing and file delivery. You set the price. They take a percentage. Players download the files. The per-sale revenue is small, most print-and-play wargames sell for modest prices, but the per-sale cost is near zero, so the margin is high in percentage terms even if the absolute numbers stay low.

Digital-first publishing also serves as a proving ground. A game that generates interest as a print-and-play can attract the attention of traditional publishers. Several games that started as free or low-cost digital releases have been picked up by publishers for physical production. If your goal is eventually to see your game in a box on a shelf, releasing it digitally first lets you build an audience, gather feedback, and demonstrate market interest without financial risk.

The limitation is reach. Digital wargames sell to a fraction of the audience that physical games reach. Many wargamers prefer physical components. A print-and-play game requires the player to invest time and materials in producing their own copy, and many players will not do that for a game they have not already decided they want. Digital-first works well as a starting point or a supplement. It works less well as a primary publishing strategy if your goal is to reach the broadest possible audience.

Marketing a Wargame

Marketing in this hobby is almost entirely word of mouth. The community is small enough that a good game finds its audience through forum discussions, BGG ratings, convention demos, and review copies sent to the handful of people whose opinions carry weight.

Your BoardGameGeek page is your storefront. Most wargamers will look there before buying. Good photographs of the components, a clear description of what the game covers and how it plays, and a responsive designer who answers questions in the forums all contribute to sales. BGG is also where your reputation lives. Positive ratings accumulate slowly. Negative experiences spread quickly.

Convention presence matters if you can manage it. A demo at ConsimWorld Expo, WBC, or a regional convention puts your game in front of players who can try it before buying. In-person demos convert browsers into buyers more effectively than any online marketing.

Review copies sent to respected reviewers and content creators generate visibility. A thoughtful review from someone the community trusts is worth more than any advertising you could buy. Advertising in this market does not work. The audience is too small and too savvy for it.

Social media will make or break you, and I say this from experience. As a solo publisher, there is no separation between you and your business. Your personal social media behavior reflects on your company. Your arguments, your tone, your interactions with other members of the community all shape how people perceive your business. If you are the kind of person who gets into arguments online, as I am, understand that every argument costs you potential customers. People do not want to give money to someone they find unpleasant, even when that person is correct about the substance of the argument. Being right and being combative about it produces enemies who remember the combativeness long after they forget what the fight was about.

Be thoughtful about your online presence. Be professional even when others are not. Respond to criticism of your games with grace and to personal attacks with silence. Your reputation is half your business in a community this small. Protect it. I did not, and the cost of that carelessness compounded over years.

Pricing Your Game

The relationship between component quality, print run size, and retail price is the central economic reality of wargame publishing.

A small print run costs more per unit. Printers charge setup fees that spread across the total quantity, so five hundred copies of a game cost much more per copy than two thousand. Component quality adds cost at every level: mounted maps cost more than paper maps, die-cut counters cost more than uncut sheets, linen-finish boxes cost more than plain cardboard. Every upgrade improves the product and increases the price.

A ziplock game with a paper map and a single counter sheet can retail for thirty to forty dollars with reasonable margins. A boxed game with mounted maps, multiple counter sheets, and professional packaging might retail for eighty to a hundred and twenty dollars. Margins on both can land in a similar range, because the higher-priced game also costs more to produce.

Pricing too low is a common mistake for self-publishers. The instinct to keep prices accessible is understandable but the math does not work if your price does not cover production, shipping, platform fees, and leave enough margin to fund your next project. Price your game based on what it costs to produce and what the market will bear. Look at comparable games from established publishers and price in the same range. Wargamers expect to pay wargame prices. Underpricing your game does not attract more buyers. It signals that the product is lower quality.

What I Would Do Differently

I started Conflict Simulations as a publishing company because I was impatient and because early results were encouraging. Games sold. Money came in. The operation felt viable. I lacked the financial discipline and business experience to keep it that way.

I made decisions that seemed reasonable at the time and proved costly in hindsight. The most damaging was offering pre-orders on games that were not yet finished, collecting payment upfront for products that did not exist in final form. Pre-order revenue was supposed to fund production. Instead, I was taking on obligations I could not fulfill on the timeline I promised. Some games took far longer to complete than projected. Some are still unfinished. The people who paid for those games trusted me with their money, and where I failed to deliver on time, I damaged that trust.

I have worked to make good on those commitments, fulfilling orders where possible, processing refunds when asked. But the damage to my reputation was done, and reputation in this community does not rebuild fast. Pre-orders are not wrong in themselves. Publishers use them responsibly all the time. Mine were problematic because I did not have the production infrastructure or financial discipline to back the promises I was making. I was a designer playing at being a publisher, and the two jobs require different skills.

I was too ambitious in scope. I published close to thirty games in less than a decade. That pace required cutting corners I should not have cut, shipping products before they were ready, and spreading my attention across too many projects at once. Quality suffered where it should not have. I commissioned art for games that remain unfinished, money that made sense in the context of an ambitious production schedule and makes no sense in retrospect.

The burnout came around 2020. My personal life was falling apart, I was moving constantly, and the business was the last thing I could focus on. Production slowed. Communication with customers and partners suffered. Problems compounded. The operation that had felt manageable when energy and optimism were high became unmanageable when both ran out.

The company still exists. A handful of retailers stock my games. Revenue from those sales and from my full-time job covers operating costs. But the operation I envisioned when I started, a functional small publisher producing a steady stream of quality wargames, did not survive contact with my own limitations as a businessman.

I share this to give you information I wish someone had given me. You can learn to design games, write rules, develop scenarios, create maps. The business work, managing cash flow, maintaining vendor relationships, fulfilling obligations on time, keeping your public persona professional, knowing when to say no to a project you cannot complete, that is the part that determines whether your publishing venture survives.

Be honest with yourself about which skills you have and which you lack. If you can design games and run a business, self-publishing can work. If you can design games but not run a business, find a publisher. The mistake is taking on responsibilities you cannot meet and letting other people bear the consequences.

Case Study: The Economics of Small-Press Wargame Publishing

Most designers have no idea what the numbers look like until they are already committed. Here they are.

A typical small-press wargame (paper map, one or two counter sheets, rulebook, ziplock bag) costs eight to fifteen dollars per unit to produce at a run of three to five hundred copies, depending on your printer, your component choices, and where you print. Setup fees, shipping from the printer to your location, and packaging materials add to that baseline.

Retail price for a ziplock game in this market ranges from roughly thirty to fifty dollars. If you sell direct through your own website or at conventions, you keep the full margin. If you sell through distributors, you sell at roughly forty to fifty percent of retail. If you sell through a platform like Wargame Vault or Noble Knight, the platform takes a percentage.

At a five hundred copy print run, selling through a mix of direct and distribution, a successful ziplock game might gross ten to fifteen thousand dollars over its lifetime. Subtract production costs, shipping, platform fees, art commissions, and replacement components, and the net shrinks fast. A game that sells out its print run at these numbers might net a few thousand dollars over two to three years. That does not account for your time, which in a self-publishing operation is substantial.

These numbers improve with scale. A publisher producing multiple titles per year amortizes fixed costs across a larger catalog. Backlist sales provide ongoing revenue. A reputation for quality brings repeat customers. But reaching that scale requires capital, and the early years of any small publishing operation are the most capital-intensive and least profitable.

The math works if you treat it as a hobby that partially pays for itself. The math does not work if you need it to pay rent. If someone tells you otherwise, they are either working at a scale you do not have access to yet, or they are not telling you the full story.

I tried to make the math work as a primary income source. It did not, and the attempt cost me more than money. Learn from that. Design your games because you love the work. Publish them because you want to share the work. Build the business side with eyes open, expectations realistic, and a day job you can fall back on. The wargaming world needs more designers. It does not need more designers who burned out trying to turn a passion into a paycheck.