Interviews by an Optimist #74 - Chad Ellis: "The board game business is an awful business. The
average sales of a new game are substantially lower than the minimum
number of copies needed to print it at a decent cost. Word of mouth is
great in some ways but awful insofar as many gamers play with a group and
are happy if 'the group' has a copy of any but the best games.
Distributors, to the extent that they push games at all, focus heavily on
what's new, so a game often has a brief window to get traction. That's
just a start. The net result is that there are a small number of
hits, a decent number of games that do OK and a majority of games that
lose money or at least don't make a good return on investment. This is
especially true for smaller companies like us. "