Streemerz bundle

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infiniteneslives
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by infiniteneslives »

Here are the numbers, and one giant post...

Code: Select all

Sales:
14 contributor carts sold
33 general public carts sold
EDIT: $71.13 in paypal fees
$35*14 + $40*33 - 71.13 = $1738.87 earned on sales for run 1.

Expenses:
Digikey:
cic    	0.468
22uF		0.04608
10uF		0.04853
1nF		 0.02139
reg		 0.2166
36XL		1.18
sram      1.129
sales tax  6%	0.158496
shipping 		 0.16

Other:			
pcb	        	2.03
eprom 512K       2
case	          4
screws		     0.3
label            free

total/game	11.758096
games	     50
TOTAL EXP:   587.9048

Profit:
$1738.87 - $587.91 = $1150.96

2011 Prize money
Some prizes were paid by koitsu out of pocket so we'll pay him back and payout remaining prizes
$100 + $50 + $25 = $175

Profit - 2011 prizes:
=$975.96
So that's how much money we've got right now.

Things that may change or are pending with another run:
  1. Case cost might change a little, I've yet to pay shipping or get the cases in hand. I'll hopefully have these around the end of the month. They will come with screws however...
  2. Labels: I'd buy these pre-cut this time around, not sure how much that'll cost.
  3. Parts: pretty comparable in overall price, I'm not paying ID sales tax anymore. But overall this would be fairly constant cost.
  4. Labor: I assembled the first 50 on my own time. This was the main contributor to the delay of the release. This time I'd hire out the labor which will cost us ~$3 a board. This should include programming, as well.
Note: the I've rounded numbers for the following estimates:
So carts will cost us around $15 each roughly once again. Selling them at $40 each would mean we'd earn $25 per cart. If we dumped all ~$1150 our available funds into carts right now we could cover ~65 carts. Resale of those 65 carts is all earnings since we don't have to payback expenses to me once it's all over. We'd have around $2.6k in the bank assuming they all sold. If we were ambitious, and listed up 100 for pre-sale it would give us a little extra buffer allowing us to be more flexible. Those 45 extra carts wouldn't have to be assembled unless they were expected to all sell. And if those extra 45 sold we'd earn $25/cart for ~$1100 more earned.

Breakdown of potential end balances assuming all carts sell:
  1. we now have: $1150
  2. if we do a run of 65 we'd have $2.6k afterwards
  3. if we sold 100 with presale we'd have $3.7k afterwards
So one question is how many can we sell? Based on the first 30-50 only lasting 10min and the number of people emailing me asking to sell them a cart which doesn't exist currently, I'd say we can easily sell 50-65 carts in under a month. I if we did the 100 I think it'd give people a chance to buy carts that may not have heard about it until after the fact. Will we sell all 100 carts? IDK, but over the summer I'd expect we could.

If we can commit to a run of 30-100 I can commit to an expected ship date of the first 30 carts at the end of August. The cart would be expected to trickle out the door over the next month or so depending on how many there were. Cases and labels are still pending mind you, but end of August is reasonable. Once we settle on a number I'll list em on my site for pre-sale if that's the route we'd like to go.

The bigger question is what would we like to do with this money, and how much money do we think we NEED? The $1150 we have right now is great, but we will spend it quickly on another compo and limited number cart release.
  1. Compo prizes: $100-25 last time, I think we can do better than that next time. Doing this would resolve some of the issue of reimbursing the contributors for their long/hard/great work on games. Something like $500/250/100 sounds better to me, maybe even higher. That would be $850 in prizes, and I think we should pay those out immediately upon posting winners. I think this would get a lot of people to pick up the keyboard and start making great homebrew games, it's easy to pass off $100 prize. But $500+ is very enticing I think.
  2. Compo entires: Free carts to all entries that are 'greater than pong' It's got to be something more than a demo for us to include it in the action53. This would cost us ~$15/entry = 20-40 entries? = $300-600?. To make this a little better we could have the limited edition carts be the contributor carts. Collectors would have to put in the effort to make a game if they wanted a special edition 'numbered' release of the cart. This motivates people to get involved that don't expect to take 1st,2nd,3rd place, but will put in the effort to create a novel game/tool. It might be helpful to have per-registeration to get a feel for how many entries we'll have, but I don't think we should require it.
  3. Cart release for volume 2: One of the main difficulties right now is cases in large volume. I've worked with Retrozone to get runs of cases in quantities of 500 or more. Best part is we can get ANY color for the most part. It takes awhile to get them though, and price can depend on lead time. Last time they quoted $3.50-$3.75 each for 6week-6month lead time respectively. So ideally we could order a batch of 500 cases for ~$1750-$1875. That would cover us pretty well for release of volume 2 which would include the next compo's entries. If we don't have this money before the compo ends, we'll have difficulty obtaining cases with issues of limited and/or delayed releases like we're dealing with right now.
  4. Cartridge cost for release of volume 2. Things may change a few dollars depending on how we handle things, but $15 is a pretty good estimate. Increasing game data may require more expense, but increasing volume can save us money too. I think it's safe to say we'd easily sell 100-200 carts for volume 2. But if we're biting off 500 cases maybe we just want to go for 500 games. This number gets kind of big, but one thing we may be able to do is pre-sell volume 2 once the compo is nearing or is over and we've got the hardware design nailed down. $15/cart: release 100-$1500, release 200-$3000, release 500-$7500. Maybe we make sure we've got enough for 200 carts, and pre-sale could allow a buffered judgement on more copies. If we have a bunch of left over cases, we can hang on to them for the next release.
  5. Printed material like boxes/manuals? I'm not certain at the moment, but I'd expect if we were interested in doing this we'd have to pay a $100-300 depending on initial print quantity. This could in turn earn us more money though effectively paying for itself.
  6. Other expenses? It'd be nice for income like this to cover our hosting expenses, although I don't know what that currently entails.
TL;DR above summary;
Pending everyone else's thoughts, my estimates for volume 2 with next compo's entries would be:
  1. Prizes: $850-1000
  2. Special edition carts to compo entrants: $300-600
  3. 500 cases (min qty): ~$1800
  4. Parts/assembly: 200=$3k 500=7.5k
  5. Others? $500?
That's like $6k for a 'low' estimate.

There are quite a few high thoughts and wants more than NEEDS for a release of volume 2 with the next compo. Doing 100 carts right now would get us ~$3.7k which is a pretty good start. That'd cover immediate prize payout, and purchase of cases and get things started on assembly. A release of 200-500 carts would require pre-sale or several cascading releases. Pre-sale is nice and all, but it requires trust from the people who are paying for a cart, and expecting it to materialize at a later date. The release of these first 50 carts, and another followup run of 50-100 carts gives us some experience and building of trust. Good execution of this current release builds trust for subsequent ones. And having cash on hand give compo entrants trust that they'll receive their sizable prize promptly without it coming out of other members pockets with little in return.

What do y'all think? If there are no objections from contributors, my gut says go for it and post up 100 carts right now for pre-sale. The community just wants carts because they were unable to get the first 50, so it sounds like their vote is yes for any extra release that lets them buy something. If that's the plan, then I'll use the money to start buying parts needed and get things in place to start shipping carts (at least the first 30) by end of August.
Last edited by infiniteneslives on Sun Jul 21, 2013 7:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
3gengames
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by 3gengames »

TL;DR not even the DR part, but I'd doubt you couldn't sell at least 50 more carts. Take pre-orders and I bet you'd be able to sell 100 too. I'd say if possible, I'd try the 100 carts. So many games pull that many copies, I doubt this cart with tons of games and new parts couldn't at least sell that. Maybe put another topic up on NA, maybe one on sega-16, SA, etc. to see who else will take one.
tepples
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by tepples »

infiniteneslives wrote:Having a wiki for the text [of the manuals of Action 53 volumes] sounds like a good idea, that will us something to work with to get started at least. It would also allow easy addition by new games added for future compos/releases as a living document.
I can see three ways to proceed:
  1. You install MediaWiki on infiniteneslives.com, as you're handling the distribution
  2. I open up some space on my wiki, as I'm handling the menu software development
  3. We do this on WhoaMan's NES wiki
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infiniteneslives
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by infiniteneslives »

tepples wrote: I can see three ways to proceed:
  1. You install MediaWiki on infiniteneslives.com, as you're handling the distribution
  2. I open up some space on my wiki, as I'm handling the menu software development
  3. We do this on WhoaMan's NES wiki
I'd suggest one of the latter two. I'm a lot better at installing a link from my site to another than I am installing a wiki... Not that I couldn't figure it out, but would be preferred if one of you two are willing to take care of it.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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NESHomebrew
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by NESHomebrew »

I agree, I think a pre-sale is the way to go. Also, a prize like that should get some more attention to the NESDev community.

Way to go everyone!
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qbradq
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by qbradq »

Please open pre-sale! I've got my money waiting since Saturday :)
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Nioreh
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by Nioreh »

I just saw that there was a concern about contributors. Just wanted to say: Feel free to include and sell Mineshaft on any future runs.
Tom
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by Tom »

Got my cartridge today. It looks great! And I'm fine with my game being included in a second run.
-Tom
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infiniteneslives
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by infiniteneslives »

The first 20 carts including all contributor carts shipped out last week before I left town. So everyone in the U.S. in that group should already have their cart in hand, international purchases should trickle through to your door over the next couple weeks. I'll get the remaining shipped out next week when I get back.

We've got permission from most of the contributors for another run of 100 non-numbered grey shelled carts. There are only a few we haven't heard back from. So I went ahead and listed up the 100 carts for 'pre-sale' I'm getting things setup now so the first batch of ~30 carts will ship out by the end of August. The remaining carts should follow shortly afterwards.

There at the same place of purchase that they were previously.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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chromableedstudios
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by chromableedstudios »

thanks for opening up another run! pretty neat to get some homebrew and support the community at the same time
incrediblehark
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by incrediblehark »

Just wanted to say I would love to get a box/manual for my copy if you decide to go that route.
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infiniteneslives
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by infiniteneslives »

So far so good. We've sold ~20 of the carts for the second release so far.

One other thing I just realized going over the numbers is I neglected to include the paypal fees. It was ~$70, I've modified the numbers from my previous post to reflect the final earnings. To make things easy, I'm just going to consider the 3 contributor copies as part as the second run as that's still being sorted out.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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Nioreh
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by Nioreh »

Woo, got mine in the mail today!
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thefox
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by thefox »

I got my cart today, looks good! Thanks to everybody involved in putting this thing together.

Tried playing through Driar on a whim, but died on level 29 :oops:. I have to say it's a lot more fun to play this game on the real hardware.
Download STREEMERZ for NES from fauxgame.com! — Some other stuff I've done: fo.aspekt.fi
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infiniteneslives
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Re: Streemerz bundle

Post by infiniteneslives »

Well it took me a little longer than I hoped, but finally the ENTIRE first release of action53 streemerz bundle is out the door! general public carts are all in the mail.

Things are going well with the second release and presale. We've sold ~30 carts so far, and I'm getting ready to whip those up right now. So if you've got a cart by now (or do so shortly) you can expect to be included in the initial batch that should ship end of August.

New grey cases have arrived, the only detail to iron out is labels. I'm shooting for something I don't have to cut by hand this time around... I've got some leads on that so we're looking like smooth sailing from here.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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