From VPG:
Once again, The Little Game Company that Could is rolling down the tracks and heading for an important switch, so once again we are asking for your input about how to steer the train. Allow us to explain:
As our customers and game reviewers never fail to notice, our games are packaged in clear, resealable plastic bags. These containers have served as an honorable, small publisher’s game storage medium for decades. They enjoy the advantages of actually being to see and, when opened and resealed, inspect the game inside without “breaking the shrinkwrap.” Games packaged in plastic bags “travel well” (they’re much easier to put in a backpack, suit case or briefcase than a 2” thick boxed product) and, having less weight than a boxed game, they save the purchaser some money on shipping.
For those advantages, losing the beauty and protection of a box makes them harder to display in stores and on home shelves; having no box also contributes to a perception of qualitative inferiority that is palpable among the judge-a-book-by-its-cover-and-game-by-its-box crowd (whose numbers appear legion among this hobby’s chattering classes).
With that said, Victory Point Games is not considering putting our games in 2” cardboard boxes; for that we have our amazing allies at GMT who weigh the merits our individual games and sagaciously assume the risks involved in such packaging (i.e., the long print runs and warehousing of thousands of games to support their level of component quality). VPG shall remain a print-on-demand publisher of titles, especially those that we are fairly certain would be turned down by Big Box Publishers (c’mon, Hero of Weehawken… that’s probably not the next game that Hasbro is likely to add to their production queue). But for all this, gamers want (and, really, deserve) everything – including our avant garde product line in boxes. It’s been a vexing issue for us, but we may have dialed into a workable solution: “clamshells.”
A Pearl of an idea?
A clamshell is the trade name for those clear plastic boxes with an attached lid that folds over and snaps shut. One example is shown below, with our No Retreat 2 game featured in it – shown side-by-side with its bagged cousin. It has been often suggested to us by our customers (and, in particular, our retail outlet customers), that such a measured improvement in packaging between the bag and the box would be well-regarded all around – and that may be, but there is a nominal cost involved, and so we turn to you, the faithful readers of this column and our loyal supporters, for your advice on the matter.
Here are the relevant facts:
The clamshell packaging we’re looking at is very nice and our front-and-back game covers show through perfectly (as you can see, above). For retailers, they also have a built-in pegboard “hanging hole” at the top, which is a great feature. Because the “stock sizes” available are not exactly suited to our products, we would have to have custom dies made to get boxes that were the correct dimensions, particularly their depth. While a 1/2″ thick box gives a snug fit with a game in it, once it’s punched out, getting it back into that thin clamshell can be problematic; conversely a 1” box has plenty of “air” inside, which is great for storing components, but these are more easily crushed in shipping and don’t “hang” as well on a display hook as the contents inside can droop. We believe that a custom 3/4″ deep clamshell box (with a nice VPG logo embossed on it) is the ticket, but to keep the costs down to a remotely reasonable level we would have to buy them in hefty quantities from (you guessed it) China.
For The Little Game Company that Could, this is a considerable capital outlay and a bit of dedicated warehousing space that we would be committing. It would also mean the end of selling games in bags for us, as we really don’t need the confusion to ourselves and our customers of offering two different packaging versions (SKUs) of every single game – that’s just not going to work. So, if we went with clamshell packaging, it would happen like turning on a light switch: one moment every game is sold in a bag and then, bam!, the next moment the website is updated and every game is sold in a clamshell, and that’s how all our games would be packaged going forward (you would have plenty of warning about when that day would be, and it would be weeks away, at least). We would, of course, offer empty clamshell boxes as a separate sales item if you wanted to repackage your previous VPG game purchases, and we could still offer “travel bags” as separate items for customers seeking what would become our “classic” packaging containers.
And the cost? We would have to raise the price of every boxed game product (not expansion kits; they will continue to be packaged in envelopes) by $1 per regular size (6” x 9”) game and $2 per deluxe size (9” x 11.5”) game. Now… knowing all of the above, do you think that switching all of our game packaging to clamshell boxes is something we should do? Is a VPG game product in a classier, more protective package worth the extra buck or two that it would cost?
If you would kindly post your opinion here, at this ConsimWorld Forum page or this Boardgame Geek page, we are anxious to weigh it in our decision. This is a very big deal for our very small game company; your support has got us this far, and now we need your council. Thank you so much, and we promise that there is more great gaming ahead!
For that cost increase it should at least be as good as the old steve jackson plastic boxes. I think this clamshell still looks cheap.
I’d say if it comes down to having VPG get more exposure and their titles into more locations then I’m all for the clamshells. I’ll point out I’m not a huge fan of the clamshell because I agree they do look kind of cheesy, but if that’s what it takes, then that’s what it takes.
I’d prefer something more along the lines of a snap case, like some of the old SJG games came in, but those would add even more to the price of the game.
It would give retailers a second way to display the product.