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Ask Valley Games: Nearly 750 Words on 750 Special
Q: As Valley Games is reasonably new to the business and your “P750” business plan is slightly different than what most Eurogamers are used to, have you had any surprises so far in the way things have gone? What were your big “lessons learned” over the past two years?
A: I’d like to start off with a plug for our preorder program. It’s called the “750 Special”, and not the “P750”. A lot of people associate preordering with GMT games, and this is where the confusion comes from, I think. Not to worry though, I think GMT is a top-notch company, and to confuse us with them is more of a compliment than anything.
Yes, our business plan is substantially different than what Eurogamers would normally expect. Because of this, I’m actually a little surprised with how well the preorder system is working. I’m particularly surprised with how some of our non-reprints are doing, Container especially. Who knew there were so many people who would be willing to preorder a new game, knowing very little about it. We’re flattered that so many customers would put their faith in us to deliver a great game.
There have been some big lessons learned over the last couple years, but of all these, I would say that the biggest is with running the business itself. It’s one thing to love games, but we’ve also learned that we will need to love answering emails, making phone calls, and handling paperwork. It’s not that we didn’t expect to handle these things, but the sheer size of it all is still a little mind-numbing at times. It’s surprising just how many little tasks there are each day, and how varied each of them can be.
Q: How successful are you finding the 750 Special program to be for Valley Games? Have you found a lot of support for this platform?
A: We’ve found that the 750 Special is good when trying to reach the “gamers” of the world. In this regard, I think it has been a success, and we have found a lot of support. The real challenge is those more passive gamers who do not actively seek out information about games on the Internet. For these people, it appears we are simply not getting the message to them. It’s still strange to get “You guys are reprinting Hannibal?” emails, especially so late in the printing process. This tells me that the 750 Special program has a lot of room to grow.
Q: Will you eventually print all of the games on the 750 Special even if you don’t have the required pre-orders and instead rely on potential sales after print? What do you think is a realistic schedule for having each of the announced games printed?
A: I’d really like to answer “yes” to this question. Valley Games simply refuses to sign a game that we don’t all love, so in some ways these projects are important to us as gamers as well as a publisher. With that being said, it is vital that each project be taken on a “reduced-risk” basis. We’re still a very small company, and if we were to simply produce a game without preorder support, we would be taking on a lot more risk than we would feel comfortable with.
In some cases, we’ll take a game to print without 750 preorders. Die Macher was an example of that, and Container is too. In most cases, however, we’ll want to see some significant preorder support before we start sinking significant amounts of money into a project. We’re confident that most of our games will reach the 750 level at some point, and we’ll respond by delivering the best product that we can.
As for a realistic schedule for our current announced games to be reprinted, I can only venture an educated guess based on how fast the preorders are coming along. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I would think that we will have cleared through our current crop of games by the end of 2008. I also think that we will have one or perhaps two more games out by the end of this year, along with Container, especially if we continue to see strong preorder support. —Kevin Nesbitt
Posted by W. Eric Martin on Sep 27, 2007 at 12:15 AM in Special Features, Ask the Publisher, Ask Valley Games / 1495
