This was in response to the same thread on the Avlone hill boards and I copied and pasted it here for this discussion too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nexus73
What I am curious about is the true production number for AA50. The War Game: World War II was a 2000 unit production run and it still has yet to sell out.
You can’t compare “The War Game” to AA50. The war game is a self published product with little or no distribution chain. AA50 has the backing of Wotc, it’s distribution chain, the Axis & Allies brand name and Larry Harris. Yes the marketing for AA50 has been horrid but let’s look at some numbers:
In publishing, publishers price an item at 5 to 8 times the cost of the item. So if AA50 retails for $100.00 then it costs Wotc $12.50 to manufacture (100/8=12.50). They sell it to a wholesalers for 50% of retail, $50.00 and they make $37.50 (12.50-50=37.50) They give Larry his royalty say 10% of net or $5.00 taking their profit down to $32.50.
Now, I know that for the Minis they like to produce about 50,000 units. This is boxes of minis. So if we guess that they did half that for the AA50 game, which would be 25,000 then we take their profit $32.50 x 25,000 =$812,500. That’s a tidy sum. Now out of that has to come all the expenses of design, game testing etc. but these people are all full time and working on games any way so production of AA50 doesn’t effect the overall cost of running Wotc. After all they are in the business of making and selling games.
You’ll never get a real answer. In publishing, knowing how much to print is a very hard thing to judge and the information is closely kept.
This is my best guess.