I paid to manufacture Crazier Eights and send copies out for Kickstarter Rewards from the Game Crafter ($2329.74) and AdMagic (2,742.75).  The total cost of manufacturing and fulfilling rewards will be $5072.49. (That does not include the costs of prototypes, copies to reviewers, advertising, etc.) The Game Crafter is charging about $6.76 for each copy of the regular version and $7.77 for each copy of the Limited Edition (without shipping), and AdMagic is charging around $5.50 for each copy of the game (including shipping).

I raised $5,099 on Kickstarter, and ended up getting $4625.41 after paying the Kickstarter & Amazon Payments fees. Manufacturing and order fulfillment will cost me  $447.08 out of pocket.

The Game Crafter will manufacture about 250 decks & ship around 150 out for Kickstarter rewards.

Admagic will manufacture 500 decks. For the price I paid AdMagic, The Game Crafter would produce about 390 decks, so AdMagic has a better bulk discount. Even so, The Game Crafter has free order fulfillment (other than the shipping costs).

AdMagic would produce even more decks at a greater discount, but I had to decide how much of my money to invest. It is risky to produce too many copies of something when you are self-publishing. It takes time and hard work to get word out, get a reputation, and so on.

The retail value of Crazier Eights is $22. I had to decide how much I would have to charge considering that I would have to sell copies to stores at about 50% the retail value and to distributors at about 40% of the retail value. I also have to keep in mind that I have to try to make money from the game beyond other costs (like advertising), and that there are often costs you might not consider (like damaged copies of the game that need to be replaced).

If I sold all 600 copies that I have manufactured to sell to a distributor (for $8.80 per copy), I will end up making about $5280, which isn’t much more than the costs to manufacture the game and mail reward copies out.

Keep in mind that self-publishing actually costs a lot more per copy than they do for big companies because they can afford to produce thousands or millions of copies more than people who self-publish, and it costs a lot less to produce each copy when more are manufactured.