Becoming a Profitable Game Publisher with Van Ryder Games

George: 0:00
Hi there, my name is George and I help independent creators launch their products and games. On this podcast, those creators share their journey from an idea to an actual product and everything in between. Today’s guest is AJ Porfirio. He’s the founder of Van Ryder Games. AJ raised over six and a half million dollars from close to 60, 000 backers across 23 campaigns. Some of his most notable titles include Final Girl and Hostage Negotiator. AJ has bootstrapped his way to a multi million dollar gaming business, and now he’s going to teach others how they can do the same. His new power publishing program teaches creators what it takes to build a successful profitable gaming company from scratch. And today we’re going to unpack some of those lessons. Welcome AJ.

AJ: 0:41
Hey, thanks for having me.

George: 0:43
So before you became this wildly successful gaming entrepreneur, let’s go back to the year 2011, over a decade ago. There’s a first campaign on your Kickstarter account called”If I’m going down” that raised 10, 000. Take us back to 2011. How did this get started for you?

AJ: 1:04
Yeah. That’s a time many years ago. And I was, like a lot of people learning and figuring out my way through life and starting a family. And I had a regular day job. And I always loved games. I grew up on games D&D, Magic, Hero Quests, et cetera. And as I grew up another, my main passion was baseball. So I actually played baseball for a long time through college and professionally for a few years. And then along that, in that time, especially as I progressed, there was less and less time for hobbies and other things. And so I was. I’m never really out of games, but I wasn’t playing a lot of games outside of computer and stuff on some free time. And then as we started having a family and. I just got a hankering to play a board game or to find specifically a zombie board game. Because I love horror, I love zombies and I just was like, I want to see what’s out there. What kind of zombie board games are out there? And I came across last night on earth. Which is, has been around for a while, but at the time, if you looked up, this is pre zombicide, that was one of the, there’s only a few one of the kind of big zombie games back then. I got it for Christmas, and I’m like, stoked to play this game, and Unfortunately, my wife and some of the rest of my family weren’t really that interested playing a board game. And so the thought crossed my mind where I was like, gosh, if this play, if this game was one player, single player, I just play it myself. I’m an introvert. I have no problem spending time with myself. And it hit me and I was like maybe I can design my own zombie game. And so that’s the Genesis. And then a lot of time passed between then and the Kickstarter. I don’t want, probably shouldn’t take up this whole podcast telling that story, but that was what got me going. And just thinking about designing a game and figuring out.

George: 3:05
And so back in 2011, you had a 10, 000 Kickstarter. Was that even enough to actually go ahead and make it?

AJ: 3:14
It was, yeah. Back then things were a lot different and the approach was a lot different. There’s not a lot of. There’s probably a handful of publishers still around from back then ourselves being one. But back then there was, there was crazy things like we did. People did free shipping, like you didn’t charge for shipping, you just charge for the game and we’re going to ship it free. Which just doesn’t with things like that, they don’t work now. And costs were different, You could, I did a 1000 copy print run back then. Now keep in mind, this is my day job is supporting me. So it’s not, it wouldn’t have been sustainable if I was trying to do that as my job and pay myself and make a living. But, since I already had an income from elsewhere, I could use the funds from the project to. Go towards fulfilling it. And yeah, it worked and we got it out there and that was the beginning of the journey for me.

George: 4:10
So what I noticed in your Kickstarter profiles, you go through the project. So this first one raised 10 K and then it goes up, I think to 20 It’s very consistent. You really see you climbing this ladder. Of going up and up. And then you have a game that’s a hundred K and then 200 K. What is the point, or what was the point for you where you could quit your day job and this became like your main thing?

AJ: 4:32
Yeah. Great question. So actually Detective City of Angels was. At the time, our biggest kickstarter are, I believe it was around$240,000 or something in that range. And that was really the one that, and I should state that game is actually designed by my business partner, Evan Derrick, and he had joined a couple, a year and a half, two years prior to that. And we were doing it, both doing it together. While we had our day jobs and that project was really the one that allowed us to, make the decision to go full time. We didn’t do it right away for a variety of reasons, but about six months or so after that was funded successfully, we took the leap and been full time ever since.

George: 5:15
Amazing. One of the cool things that you guys do is you have these Graphic novel adventures. Can you just explain like what this is and how this works? Because I think the first one was actually a big breakthrough for you as well, but what is that for people who don’t know what these are?

AJ: 5:33
Yeah. So these are our graphic novel adventures are like. Comic books. Choose your path type of adventure. If you remember the text, choose your own adventures when you were a kid. Except we’re doing it in a comic book. And so it just really opens up. A world of possibilities because now we can do things like hide hidden numbers in the graphic, or make puzzles, where you have to distinguish, different symbols and solve the puzzle. And so adding the visual element to the graphic novel adventures just really changed the game and the, and those are licensed products. So they’re originally. Created in French. There’s a company called Makaka Editions and they make those. So we take them, do the English translations, and then make sure all the puzzles work in English and all of that. And then we publish them in the U. S. and elsewhere.

George: 6:27
How did you get there? Did you just see that in France one time on a trip?

AJ: 6:31
So the first book we did that, or that I came across, it was called”Captive”. It’s in our library. It’s, it was in the first season one. And at the time, Makaka Editions, who’s the original publisher, they had made a deal with Blue Orange Europe to do an English version of that book. So Blue Orange had done that book, like a, just a sample to see. And they, they told me it was mostly to try to find localizers. So it worked. Cause I came across it and I got it. I was like, ah, that sounds really cool. And I was just curious about the book. I wasn’t at that time trying to do anything with it necessarily. But then when I read it and played it, I loved it. And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. So much. So it’s difficult for me now to go back to tech space. Choose your paths because it’s just to me, it’s so much more robust and better. And so, I was publishing at this time and so I was like, you know what this is cool. I want to see if there’s more of these. So I, I found. In fact. Yeah. There’s this company in France and they have, a lot of these different books, not just this one, but that was the only one in English. And so I was like, huh. So I reached out because Blue Orange’s logo was on the book. And I reached out and was like, Hey what’s the situation here? Are you guys open to. To an agreement and they were open to talking about it and we got terms figured out and made it happen. And so here we are 20 books later and we’re going to have five new ones coming up soon.

George: 8:03
Yeah, because you have season five launching in March, right?

AJ: 8:06
So that’s yeah, March, I believe it’s March 19th. We will go live with the season five, which will be five new adventures.

George: 8:14
Wow. And how does that work when you do licensing? I’m always curious if you feel like this is a good path for folks who are just beginning. Do you think it’s smart to start with licensing because you don’t have to do all the work from scratch if you’re a small team? Or is it really expensive because you have to pay like licensing fees up front?

AJ: 8:32
So it can be any and all of the above. I think that I would not recommend someone learning how to make a game or publish a game through licensing unless Maybe if they’re already familiar with licensing it from other areas, then I could see maybe doing that. But there’s so much you’re going to learn producing and publishing your first game or product, whatever it is, that adding additional elements on top of that. That’s not like it’s impossible, but I generally recommend, starting small and work your way up and figure out things as you go. And once you’ve got one thing figured out and you can figure out the next thing. So yeah, that’s how it answered that.

George: 9:13
It’s, I think that kind of brings us into your, you have this thing called the power publishing program, which is coming up, which is where you teach creators or beginning entrepreneurs, how to start their own publishing or their own gaming company. And what really struck me was that in the introduction video to that, you talk a lot about the business side of things and profitability and how to build a profitable business. And it struck me because I think, especially in games a lot of it is passion driven, this starts as a hobby for a lot of people and sometimes I feel like money is secondary. And so I thought it was just interesting to see you speak about that as a highlight. Can you just briefly introducing your own words? So I’m going to talk a little bit about what this program is and what you’re going to be teaching.

AJ: 9:57
Yeah. You covered it pretty well. It’s a program, not just for new publishers, but also for existing publishers, or maybe they’ve done a few games or maybe even done a lot of games. But I’m, I’ve been feeling really called to share what I’ve learned in this 13 year journey of mine and ongoing. I couldn’t shake this thing, for six months. I’m just like, you need to do this. You need to do this. And so finally I was like, you know what? I have a lot of it’s scary putting yourself out there. And but I decided to push through that fear and make it happen. I’m really excited about it. It’s launching in March. So probably not too long after. We’re doing this here and yeah, I want to share, there’s so much to share that I feel like we’ve done differently, probably than most other publishers and I’d like to share some of those things and encourage other publishers to do things differently than everyone else, including myself. I don’t think anyone should be taking a cookie cutter approach to publishing because otherwise you’re just going to. Be another, another face in the crowd. How are you going to stand out? And that’s going to be a big theme along, a lot of the courses and lessons in the program. And there, there’s going to be lots of discussion about finance. I think there, one of the things I want to dispel is there’s a bit of a myth. It gets perpetuated in board game publishing, but not even just publishing throughout the industry and all facets, retail content creation, all of this, these things that. There’s just not a lot of money in publishing margins are so thin, it’s, don’t expect to get rich doing this, all of these thoughts that I think are, they’re limiting beliefs ultimately, because. I’m here to tell you, no, that’s not true. And I frankly believed the same thing in the beginning. I didn’t, I had goals that I wouldn’t call very lofty. Oh, I just want to get my game on the shelf. I just want to see my game published. I just want my game in the hands of players. Like those are all good goals to have, but if you want more, there’s more out there and that’s what I want to, I really want to communicate and honestly try to change. A bit of the narrative if possible about that,

George: 12:12
if you don’t mind sharing a little bit, I think when you see a big campaign, like a million dollar campaign or a multimillion dollar campaign, and you’ve had some of these really successful campaigns, does that make you a millionaire or does most of that just go into fulfilling and, cause I, I feel like some creators actually they raise there’s two types of creators. There’s creators that can raise. A multimillion dollar campaign and still be like broke and or out of business because they overspend on things. And then I think there’s creators who built these things up really in a smart way and they actually become millionaires doing this thing. Can you just break down what that looks like for you? You have a big campaign, say a million dollar campaign, you, AJ, like how much do you make off of that?

AJ: 12:55
Yeah. It’s going to be different for everyone. And a big part of that is how you manage. Your finances and your project. We don’t necessarily do it like that where it’s like, Hey, I’m, AJ is going to get 10 percent of this campaign. We have, we’re now an eight person company. We have salaries. And so we get our salaries and then obviously being an owner, we have an additional stake in terms of the success of the business. But I will I do feel comfortable saying that. More of the money goes towards production, shipping overhead rent for offices. There’s, and this is one of the things I’m going to, I want to help people with because I feel like you’ve hit on something here, which is there’s a perception that, you know, maybe. Publishers are just slinging a big bag of money over their shoulder and walking off. And unfortunately, like when money does get managed poorly, it’s not necessarily, I don’t think the people are doing that, but they’re unfortunately overspending in certain areas and they put themselves in a bind where. We’ve seen things over the last few years with publishers asking for additional money and yeah, COVID happened and some other things happened and they all, for the most part, were at least able to give a reason or whether it was valid or not. That was, they give some reasons on why they’re asking. And I, I. I’m not going to throw stones necessarily because, Hey, like that was tough, man. Container prices through the roof. There were some things and whether a publisher was able to weather that or needed to ask for money, a lot depended on how responsible they were with their funds, their business model. A lot of the companies that got in trouble were ones that their whole business model is just crowdfunding. And. When you have distribution sales, that it goes a long way towards solidifying your business and having consistent income coming in, right? You’re selling to retail through distribution and to retail stores, you have a constant supply of kind of funds coming in through those sales and then you could do your kickstarters. And but if you’re just kickstarter and things are crowdfunding and things. Go south or you have a, take a big hit or you mismanage the finances. Now, all of a sudden, I’m not going to say people have intentionally done this, although it’s probably true, whether you’ll go run a new project to help you get through the last one, that becomes like a dangerous game. And we’ve, I think, seen some. Examples of that.

George: 15:37
Yeah. I think we all know some of these examples. One of the things that I find fascinating is that there’s creators who say, I am going to spare no expense for my game. I’m going to make the biggest, the best game. It’s going to weigh a metric ton and it’s going to have all the miniatures and that’s. Like how I sell my games and obviously it costs a lot, that’s their homework. And then there’s folks who say I’m going to make great games But i’m going to be a little bit more conservative in the materials I use and just how elaborate this is Because I really want to be profitable on a per game basis. Where do you stand in that? How do you look at that?

AJ: 16:19
So my position is I think a publisher should do what they think is best for them to make the best possible games they can make and be profitable doing it, if you’re only choosing one or the other. Well, that seems like a missed opportunity. So one of the, I think probably most valuable lessons that I’m going to do in my program is going to be a lesson on strategic pricing. I think that we, Van Ryder Games, have a huge competitive advantage. Because of all the critical thinking we put into pricing and how we think about that. And I think that for the most part, other companies aren’t doing a lot of critical thinking there. They just maybe think. This, maybe this is the price. There, there’s a, you know it, I’m sure, but there’s a thing that gets perpetuated called the five X rule that I’m going to completely, uh, disband that, that whole thing, because I can’t stand. When it gets recommended, because what it does is you just

George: 17:27
repeat the 5x rule for folks who don’t know.

AJ: 17:30
Yeah. So the 5x rule is I just hesitate to say it because I dislike that it gets perpetuated so much, but what it is, and it’s important to know, and I’ll have to cover it in the program, but it’s says you should price your game at 5x your landed costs. Meaning the cost of manufacturing plus freight to get it to your warehouse where you’re in your region. And so that would say if you’re landed costs of your game is$5, you should price your game at 25, five times five. And it’s just such a lazy, like.

George: 18:02
Why do you hate it so much? What’s wrong with it?

AJ: 18:04
The problem with it is that you’re just, it’s just bypassing actual critical thinking. Why are you pricing it at five X? Because someone on Facebook told you that’s generally what it does. And that’s not to say sometimes if you do the critical thing and you do the work, the diligence, you may land there. Sometimes you might land there, but sometimes you might land at seven X or depending on the situation, it might make sense to do even four X or a lower amount. It’s just all depends. And I’m going to get into really into the weeds and details on this. And I hope that, we can, as an industry start. Start questioning, not just that, but everything like you should always question. I’m going to encourage my students and participants like question what I do. It might not fit for you. It might be different. So think critical. Yeah.

George: 18:57
And I think this is just. Hard always. Cause we also do courses and whatnot. And, you got to start somewhere, and especially if you teach things, there’s generalizations that happen. I personally, I sometimes talk about the five X rule because I just see some folks not understanding how expensive things can get, but I, what I see a lot of folks kind of misunderstand is like just the fees, right? Like the shipping and the import duties and all of that. So I just, I always encourage people to. Charge as much as you can and maybe charge a little bit more than you think is reasonable because I think all founders or creators tend to underprice their own things because you’re a little bit like scared to charge a lot for it. And what we find a lot in the campaigns that we run is if you have a cool product or if you have a cool game, People, if they’re either bought in or not, if they’re at price, isn’t always the differentiating factor. So do you feel like, I guess what I’m trying to say is, do you even feel like price matters that much as a deciding factor where you feel like. If people just love your game, you can pretty much charge whatever you want to charge within sort of reasonable bounds.

AJ: 20:04
No, it’s critical. It’s critical. Yeah. Oh yeah. It’s critical because I understand especially if you’re coming at it from a crowdfunding angle, thinking about it that way, but this is also a little bit of the error that some people make, because what happens is let’s say you, you do what you’re saying and you just say, Oh, it’s not that important. I’m going to charge. 30 bucks. Okay. And I hear you on the five, like I get the five X as a recommendation as a kind of safety cautionary. Yeah. Like you definitely don’t want to be stuck with not enough to to cover things. And really what it stems to ultimately is that the thought is that at that, at a five X level. Your game can exist and will and can succeed in distribution because what happens is a lot of time, once you start thinking about distribution, you’re selling to distributors that 40 percent of retail, they take their cut, then they sell to retailers and then, they’re going to make their margin on top of that. So you’re getting, 40 percent of what you’re getting on sales through kickstarter. And now there’s other costs, right? And not just Kickstarter, but direct sales. So you’re going to have shipping and or whatever other costs that you don’t typically have as high of when you’re selling through distribution. But the reason why getting back to your original question is it can be an issue is because if you aren’t thinking about those things and how your economics flow through the entire system, let’s say you, because you could end up making a game that’s profitable when you sell it directly. But it loses money or is like break even in distribution. Now, all you’re doing is getting your money back when you sell through those channels.

George: 21:51
So basically what you’re saying is Kickstarter crowdfunding is just a starting point, but you got to think through the lifetime of this product and this game. And the pricing is a one way door. There’s no going back from that if you set that up. Poorly for your, even though it may be doing well for your crowdfunding, then distribution comes around the corner and later on and you set yourself up for failure.

AJ: 22:14
Yeah. You can, it’s your business, you can change price, but there’s a lot that goes into that. And that’s tricky, especially, if you go, it’s easier kind of to go up in price than down in price. So, you could be more aggressive on the low end, but if you get it right the first time that you don’t have to worry with those things,

George: 22:34
where do you feel right now are the biggest opportunities for making big money in games?

AJ: 22:42
I feel pretty strongly that the answer to that question is always going to be the same. And that is doing something different that no one else has done. You have to stand out. And that’s not just from the perspective of the game design. You can have competitive advantages in how you do your business. You can have competitive advantages in how you market. You have amazing marketing. We see this all the time. Companies sometimes coming out of nowhere. their marketing is amazing and they have huge successes. So that’s my, probably my best advice is like really ask yourself what, why is this special? What about this product or my business or how we do things? Yeah. Is different and sets us apart.

George: 23:30
And I guess the opposite side of that is what would you recommend people not go into going into 2024? What has been done too much?

AJ: 23:40
I, I hesitate to tell people not to do something because I tend to, so something about me, when people tell me not to do something or something won’t work, that’s exactly when I feel like. That’s what I should be doing. Like our, if you’re familiar with our game final girl, it has a very unique box model and the core box is not playable by itself. You have to have the core box and a feature film box. And it, the box system is so as it is because the game is so modular. And before we launched, did that product, there were. Retailers distributors. This will never work. Customers. That’s terrible. I can’t believe but we had a lot of people saying, Oh, this is really cool. We felt it. We’re gamers to we know, you almost anyone who goes into this business is a gamer and you know what you like. And and that’s not even the only example of when we’ve trusted our gut to do something unique, no one else has done and it’s, final girls, our biggest hit by far. It’s paid off immensely. So I would say don’t it’s got to be like a double negative, right? Don’t necessarily listen to everyone else. If you feel like there’s a risk you should be taking

George: 24:56
I agree with that. I think a lot on the creative side, sometimes, however, not so much on the financial side. I think if you’re going to buy, your course into your program I think it’s always wise to listen to financial conservative advice, but I completely agree with you. On the creative side to just be, yeah, just do the thing that you think is cool, right? Cause that’s what people buy into.

AJ: 25:23
Yeah. And I agree with you. All I’m saying is it’s just, there’s an extra, right? And validate it for yourself. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise what am I doing teaching? If I’m not, trying to get you to, understand, Hey, this is why this works. But again, like you, you may have a different method, but yeah. finances is key, right? Like it’s probably why I don’t have data on it, but I’ve always wondered how many Kickstarter and crowdfunded projects and publishers are one and done, meaning they just do the one game and then they’re done. And I would suspect it’s a, almost like a funnel, right? You have 50 percent drop off after one game and then maybe 30 percent more after two or three games. And then you’re left with kind of, The five to 10 percent successful ongoing publishers that survive and thrive.

George: 26:14
Is that for in your business kind of key to your profitability as well? The fact that you just continue to bring out more projects and you have titles that build on each other, does it get more profitable as you do more projects over time?

AJ: 26:29
So yes, with a, with an asterisk, I guess a little bit. Every, most people, if you’re around the business long enough, there are games called evergreens and hits that continue to sell right over. A long period of time. Some have a are a long tail, but and maybe eventually die off and some just continue and will sell forever. But most games are. That you sell one print run and it’s done, right? Like you sell the most the first two months the game comes out and then it trickles out over the next six to twelve months. And from then on you may sell a handful. That’s most games and yeah. There’s no magic formula to make an evergreen, otherwise we’d all just be all making just evergreens. So that’s where it comes in to the more games you can do and the more experience you get with what customers like and what gamers. Enjoy and what cool things you do that really land with people, the higher chance you’re going to be able to have a hit, which is really key to sustain a board game publishing company, you’re not going to be able to, no one is going to be able to make a company that just does all one and done’s and is lasting. It’s just not realistic. Because once you start to really have a lot of employees and overhead and things like this. You have to have consistent income to support that

George: 27:54
when it comes to hits, when do you know, because final girl was a hit remains a big hit. When is it that you’re developing this? Is it when you’re play testing or is it when you just launched on kickstarter and see those numbers shoot up? When do you know you caught lightning in a bottle?

AJ: 28:11
I would call a final girl a mega hit at this point, which was different because we’ve had evergreens before, but not like that. Like hostage negotiator was our first evergreen. So a, an evergreen, what’s going to happen is I talked about the first two months of sales and then it dips and then it stays there. What’s going to happen with an evergreen, assuming you have enough stock, you’ll be able to see this is you’re going to see a nice bounce back up like in month four. Okay. The first year going to be good. Three is usually going to dry. And this is generally speaking, it could be different, but then it’s like all the retailers are restocking and you get, a lot of orders in that fourth month. And it’s okay, this now, this is a good sign. It’s not a, it’s not a for sure, but this has good legs, and so then the longer it goes from there and you keep seeing kind of the volume, the sales volume, you can start to be more and more confident. And if you still have pretty good volume at six months, that’s generally a good indication. Now, when it gets tricky is if you sell out of your print run and you need to reorder some, you sell out some time within that window, you didn’t get to see the process play out. And this is where you hear a lot of advice about. That first restock, cause you’re going to reprint at that point. You’ve had enough success to reprint. And what happens sometimes is you reprint and for whatever reason the froth or the hype or the whatever is gone, or people have had more time with the game and now it’s suddenly not quite as hot as it was, and then you end up. Sitting on a lot of this reprint and not quite able to sell it. So that’s a thing to watch out for. But with final roll, honestly, what I’ve noticed different from any of our other games is the way people talk about it. You hear, I’ll see posts and just, they’ll say things like, and it’s so organic God, I freaking love this game. Just the kind of this kind of language that it’s just a slightly different and you can go see, go look at, the wingspans of the world and the, any game in top 100 on BGG this is the kind of language people are using. And you like, you almost, when you love a game, what do you do? You like, can’t wait to tell someone about it. Man, that was awesome. I gotta go to, like, when people feel like they need to shout out about this. Even product in general, like how amazing it is. That’s it, man. The word of mouth is the best marketing you can get. And it’s what I think propels pretty much every mega hit to be one.

George: 30:47
Is that something, are you one of those founders that just goes online, on X or BGG and looks for what people say about. Is that what you do late at night?

AJ: 30:58
I stay very connected. And it’s, I think it’s. Important personally to me. Um, heck, I’m a, I love games. I love hearing people talk about our games and supporting our community, right? Like I’m there in our discord every day interacting with our community. Yeah. I check, I keep a pulse on things like Which is when you’re running a company. I often think, gosh, is this what I should be doing? But, I enjoy it. Yeah, I definitely am checking out posts and I’m checking out what people are saying. Good, bad, indifferent. And you made something right? It feels good to get that kind of validation that people are enjoying this thing. Yeah, I definitely stay on top of that.

George: 31:47
Awesome. AJ, thank you so much for your time. Your Power Publishing program is Almost coming out. So if you’re listening to this now, by the time this is, this podcast episode is coming out, your program is just about to launch or has already launched, where can folks go if they want to join?

AJ: 32:03
Yeah, I’ll have the website publishedboardgames. com and they can go there and there’ll be lots of information. It’ll go if it’s not live quite when this launches, it’ll probably be up around the beginning of March first week or two, and it’ll have all the information they need. To learn about the program, there’s also a YouTube channel for power publishing. They can find and see I’ll be doing some kind of shorter teaser videos to help. People learn a few things and decide if they want to join the program.

George: 32:35
Awesome. And season five of the new graphic novel adventures is also out by the time you’re listening to this, all of these will be in the show notes. So go ahead and check that out. And I really hope that if you’re listening to this, you feel inspired by AJ to start your own. Profitable gaming company. AJ, thank you so much for your time.

AJ: 32:55
Thanks, George. Appreciate it.