Duplication Equipment

I worked for a software company that did lots of CD duplication in house. They used thermal printers for CD labels.

linky

~don

What did you think of the quality and durability of the printing? Was it very economical?

The durability was excellent. We made disks for enterprise customers such as banks and hospitals. The printing didn't didn't rub off, smear, or fade.

costs: the printers aren't cheap. I think that one i linked to was about $2,500, but they are very durable printers. The main consumables were the rolls of thermal ink. I'm not sure how much the rolls cost, but they did need to be replaced often. You might be able to find the the price for replacement rolls on that site with the printer.

Is there a particular reason you are wanting to self publish rather than strike a deal with a traditional publisher? I could see self publishing working for maybe a mail order company, but to get disks onto retail shevles is pretty difficult without the backing of a big publishing company. Also, is there a reason that digital distribution wouldn't work for your product/service?

regards,

~PD

I'm tyring to self publish my game in an attempt to cut out every possible middle man so that I can get the maximum profit out of my game. Equipment costs are within reason, and marketing costs to get the game to retail shelves also seems feasable, considering the payback. Digital distribution would be nice but it doesn't get to as many customers as retail does.

If your talking about doing a few copies for sending to publishers or other promo purposes then your approach is fine. If you're talking about attempting to duplicate disks for a retail launch then that it totally different. It isn't worth the time and effort involved in duplicating all the disks, printing them, building the boxes, storing them and shipping them. - plus you simply won't make enough use of the duplication equipment to make it worth your while.

You and you staff have better things to do than make disks. You would be much better off outsourcing that service to a fullfilment company. They will do it quicker and cheaper and better than you can and that will leave you free to do your proper job - running the company and making games.

I disagree. I don't plan on using pre-made duplication towers. You can by the controller board and make your own at a fraction of the cost. (Controller board/$250 Burners/10 x $20 Case/$50) That's $500 per burning tower, compared to $1000+ for one bought at retail. Get about 10 of these and you have some serious output. Get half a dozen or so printers to match the burning tower output and your production line should run smoothly. For cases I plan on using DVD case. Cheap, small, and the customers like them. For the cover insert I plan on using just inkjet printers then running them through an automated paper cutting machine for accuracy and consistancy throught the project. I have friends that will stand around for minimum wage feeding CDs into burners and printers. After the CD is made just place it in the case, put an insert in, then send if off to a DVD overwrapping machine that automatically wraps it and spits it out at 1200 units per hour. All media would be handled with latex gloves to prevent smears, dirt, and fingerprints. Once packaged in a box it would be sent out to a storage unit, which can be found quite cheaply. And since the DVD cases are smaller than regular cardboard cases more can be stored than the traditional case.

You don't appear to have understood my post. I didn't say "buy something else" I said "don't buy anything at all"

You will spend X years making a game, then a couple of weeks duplicating disks and then all that equipment sits around unused for X years while you make your next game. It it a waste of money to buy something you will get so little use from when you could outsource that service.

A fullfilment service will almost certainly work out cheaper because they buy in much larger quantities than you, they run their equipment full time (and thus its cheaper) and in addition they are experts and will be more efficient.

That leaves you free to do a more valuable job - running your company.

$ equipement for a single use

+

$cost of materials and ink to pump out 1200 units an hour

+

$Storage costs

+

0$ coming in

+

0$ from not getting your product on retail shelves because you aren't one of the big established guys

[sad]Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Quote:

Original post by I_Smell_Tuna I'm tyring to self publish my game in an attempt to cut out every possible middle man so that I can get the maximum profit out of my game. Equipment costs are within reason, and marketing costs to get the game to retail shelves also seems feasable, considering the payback. Digital distribution would be nice but it doesn't get to as many customers as retail does.

The company i worked for produced thousands of disks weekly. You could further reduce costs by purchasing a robot to insert the disks into the drives, move them from drives to the printers, and stack them after printing. We had two of these and they work 24/7, never complain about the long hours, and never take bathroom breaks. The last one we bought was just under 20k and it had 4 drives. I don't remember how many disks it would produce per hour, but it was alot.

If you really wanted to cut out every possible middleman, why stop there? A $50 game at your local retailer is sold for about $33 wholesale. Assuming you could get $33/box what would your unit cost be? Media, sleeves, plastic cases, labor to run your packaging/distro business, on and you have to pay to ship your goods as well. While none of those costs in isolation are a lot, taken together they become a substantial part of that $33.

If you went digital distribution, there are still upfront/fixed costs, but the unit costs go down substantially. The unit costs for digital distribution are mostly limited transaction costs for credit card orders. Servers are sunk cost, and while bandwidth is not yet free, it is becoming less an issue all the time. Infact we rent servers in florida for testing, and each dedicated server comes with a terabyte of bandwidth per month for only $59. If your game was even 500 megs it you could still 2000 downloads through that connection per month. The unit cost (for bandwith) would then be 2.9 cents per unit sold. If you game was, say, 100 megs or less the unit costs become negligible.

Sure digital distribution reaches a smaller audience than traditional brick-and-mortar stores, but keeping almost 100% of a $29 online download price means you need to sell substantially fewer units than if you are collecting say 50% of a $33 retail box price. There is another big advantage; selling your game online would not only net you substantially more per unit, but it would also cost your customers substantially less. The retail copies would cost consumers $50 each while the download ones would only cost $29. That's more than 40% discount for your customers which will translate into higher sales. If you really think your game is worth $50 as a download you would keep nearly all of the $50 price per unit sold. This means you would only need to sell 1/4 to 1/3 as many units and still make the same net revenue.

Perhaps the biggist reason against going into the publishing business is that it's and old-boys club. The music industry is dominated by 5 companies that control more than 90% of all retail music sales. Best Buy, Circuit City, or Walmart wouldn't even talk to you if you were a startup record company wanting to get them to stock your CDs.

The same is true in the Movie industry. There's a reason that independant films almost never make it to the big movie chains. The movie chains have very close ties with the big studios and those are the movies they show on their screens. Again if you were a startup movie studio Lowes, cineplex, etc wouldn't even let you in the door to talk to them about showing your indipendant film. It's a very closed market to newcomers.

Game distribution at gamestop, EB, best buy, and walmart is just the same. The big publishers (EA, Take 2, VU, etc) already have a stranglehold on the distribution channel. None of those companies are going to talk to someone with only 1 game to sell who's making CDs in their garage. It's a billion-dollar industry and unless you have billions of dollars already you won't be invited to the party. Worse yet, often times publishers actually PAY retailers to stock their games. Instead of the retailer paying you to stock your game you are actually paying them for shelf space. You want your game on that endcap or your standalone cardboard stand it will cost you.

It sucks but the days of indie game studios and indie publishers has largely passed. One an industry becomes sufficiently large (last year americans spent 7.3 billion on retail games -- that doesn't include hardware, just software) big companies move into the space. The bigger the industry gets, the higher the barrier to entry becomes. Big companies often complain about the high costs of making games and the high costs of getting them to retail, but don't let them fool you. They are happy that the barriers to entry are so high because it substantially lessens the chance that new competitors will enter the market. It's much better to "compete" against a few other top-heavy, bloated billion-dollar corporations than it is to compete against small agile companies.

My advice, if you really want to get into the publishing business, then go into the digital publishing business. Retail distribution of video games is as antiquated as selling music on CD-Roms. Sure some people still buy them, but their days are numbered. Instead of trying to break into a dying distribuation channels, take the fight to an arena where the big publishers don't already dominate: the web. I'm not saying it would be a cakewalk, but your chances to create a successful portal to distribute games is much higher than creating a successful brick-and-mortar game publishing company.

regards,
~don

The automated duplication machines are too expensive for my project, and they just don't have throughput that I need. Obscure, I understood your post I was just stating my case. In the long run a fullfillment service will not be the best solution. I do plan on offering online distribution, but I need to do retail to get to the biggest area of the market. After googling duplication services I noticed that they charge about double what it would cost me. When you're going to be making large quantities it's cheaper to do it in house, even after factoring in equipment, storage, and employee costs.

200,000 copies. If they make a profit of $1 on each copy then thats approximately $200,000 out the door. Where it would cost me $40k in equipment + $10k in wages. Then the expense per copy which as stated will be less than $1.

Fullfillment $400,000 approx.
In-house $250,000 approx.

For future publishing I only have the per-unit cost and employee costs ($10k). Am I still wrong, or is the old adage of "there is no reward without risk" not true anymore?

[Edited by - I_Smell_Tuna on October 30, 2005 9:10:49 PM]