The financials of megagames, or 'don't do this for the money'

It's an unfortunate truth of megagames that no game happens without money and, typically, a good deal of it. We're fortunate that we've been able to front the money to run our games for the first year without additional sources, so I won't be discussing ways of fundraising. That said, some of the megagames run by student groups that we help promote (Don't Panic! at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities and First Contact: 2035 at University of Wisconsin - La Crosse, both in Spring 2025) run on grants from their schools or other organizations, so that is definitely a valid pathway to hosting a game.

For what it's worth, my own background is in project and program management and I hold a Master's degree in Business Administration. On paper, I'm qualified to discuss and break this topic down but this is only speaking to my own experiences. As with the other posts I've written for this blog, I intend this to be a conversational piece discussing things at a high level rather than breaking down each individual expense. Where appropriate, I'll give costs in GBP (£) and USD ($) using the most current exchange rates with the original currency listed first. Some costs have gone up since we paid them and I'll try to mark off where that's the case. Most megagames are produced in the United States and United Kingdom, so those are the most common currencies involved.

The Plan

Our goal was to organize and host a minimum of 4 games per year - initial research into the community size and demand of our area shows that this is a great starting point so that we can grow organically and not have to spend too much on marketing right off the bat.

Few businesses will make money the first year. Our objective was to both host 4 games in the year and end the year without taking a financial loss. Nowhere in that statement does it state a profitability target, nor is profit our aim. We intend for any profit from one game to roll into production costs for the next game, promotions for expanding our player base, and eventually incentives for our amazing volunteer facilitators.

We planned 4 games through Midwest Megagames to date: Watch the Skies in Fall 2024, Fae's Anatomy in Spring 2025, Touched by Darkness in late Spring 2025, and the yet-to-be-officially-announced The Generalissimo is Dead, which will be our Summer 2025 game.

At the most basic level, hosting an in-person megagame requires 4 things:

1. The game

2. The materials for the game

3. The venue in which to play the game

4. The People - Players and Control/Facilitators

The Game

Purchase of a game usually includes a license for commercial production of the game with the purchased materials, so I'll speak about the game IP, digital files to produce physical materials, and the commercial license interchangeably. The Megagame Assembly maintains a list of games that are ready to play and available for download or purchase.

Purchasing a ready-made game can cost anywhere from $30 USD in the case of God Emperor or Den of Wolves: New Eden on up to £300 GBP (nearly $400 USD at the time of writing this article). To date, this is the total cost of licenses that we've purchased outright for games we intend to run in the near future.

Watch the Skies: £72 GBP / $96 USD for the core game + add-on scenarios

Fae's Anatomy: £80 GBP / $110 USD

Touched by Darkness: $226.40 USD / £171 GBP

The Generalissimo is Dead*: $125 USD / £94 GBP

*The price of this game has increased since we purchased our license to $150 USD

To date, we have a total expense of ~$560 USD / £423 GBP for games/licenses.

At the time we were planning our first game of Watch the Skies, the total expense was $142 USD (we'd purchased a couple other of Stone Paper Scissors' games as well for an extra $50 of expense).

The Materials

The materials cost for games can vary wildly from game to game. This is where you have the most latitude to get creative to minimize the total cost of running the game. You can purchase just about any game component from a print service, but your money will go so much further the more you're able to do at home or do yourself.

We invested a great deal in general supplies to create the game materials for Watch the Skies. Each country (and the UN) had their own flags (cost: $67.89, purchased on Amazon). Each also had a binder with color printouts of their country reference, and a number of color printed, laminated tokens. Each player had a lanyard and clear badge with their role and the game itself used a large printed and laminated 40"x60" map from Office Depot (cost: $108.11). Aside from those expenses, we also paid $118 for general supplies (lanyards, badges, dry erase markers, index cards, etc).

In order to keep costs down for the tokens, cards, and remaining game materials, we purchased a color laser printer, lamination sleeves, and a high quality paper cutter. I already owned a thermal laminator, so that helped as well. Including the new set of toner cartridges for the printer, all of that totaled ~$984. All in all, it took us just under $1300 of expenses to get to the point where we could run the game. Even discounting the printer, toner, paper cutter, and other materials not DIRECTLY used in the game, we still had over $400 of expenses for materials.

In the case of Watch the Skies, we had invested just over $1,400 in materials and tools to produce them.

The Venue

This was the hardest one to figure out and was the biggest reason that it took us from Winter 2023 to Fall 2024 to finalize our plans and host our first game. We looked into community centers, civic groups, and a large number of other spaces. Places that were economical to run a game of 40+ people in often had restrictions on the commercial use of the space (e.g. you were not allowed to charge if you used the space). Places that did not have restrictions on commercial use were often too expensive to rent for a game running from 9am-5pm with an hour of setup on either side of the schedule.

We ended up partnering with Wicked Wort Brewing for our first couple games and have since found other venues that we plan to host games in. We have been able to negotiate very reasonable host expenses. Since I do not have an explicit agreement with our partner venues, I won't disclose exact amounts or agreements, but on average our hosting expense is ~$500 USD.

Our 2025 venues all serve food and beverages, so having a captive group of people there for a day-long event means that the lower rental cost of the space can be offset a bit by how much the participants will spend at the venue. Your mileage may vary on this category. For the purposes of this discussion, we'll use $500 for the venue cost.

The People

This one is straightforward, but marketing for games is a huge discussion in itself. The expenses here relate mostly to the web hosting, ticketing, and tools. In researching platforms for us, we found that Wix offered the best value for us as an all-in-one source to purchase a domain, host our website, coordinate events, sell tickets, manage payments for the tickets, as well as a number of other handy modules we could add later (like this blog, for example).

Total up-front cost for Wix services was $350 USD for the first year, beginning in September 2024. Due to additional services that we've begun to use, it'll be approximately a $500 annual expense for us. Our facilitators/control are all volunteers, but there are also credit card and other processing fees for payments. Out of a $40 ticket, we can incur anywhere from $1-$6 in expenses and fees. These fees and sales tax won't be broken out separately in this discussion of expense or revenue.

The Bottom Line

Without getting too deep into the weeds, we paid right around $2,250 in direct expenses to get to the point where we had a website and tools, a game, materials for the game, and a venue. The revenue from the game for 34 players (40 tickets sold, 2 no-show, 4 cancellations with refund/credit for future game) was around $1,400 after sales tax and expenses.

If you're keeping track, we ended the first game with about $850 in expenses that weren't covered. This got worse with the nearly $250 invested in Fae's Anatomy, which had to be cancelled and all tickets were refunded.

The Bright Side

In business, you have some expenses (overhead) that are spread around (amortized) in a number of different ways. The in/out cash flow discussed here is just the most basic and straightforward way to have this discussion.

The good news is that as of writing this post, we've nearly sold out of our next game, Touched by Darkness. The great part about Touched by Darkness is that there's very little that a game runner needs to add for materials expense beyond the purchase of the game itself - when you purchase the game, you get a physical copy of all the dice, cards, and player aids required to play the game. In total, we will have spent about $3,050 to produce two megagames (with the license fee and roughly half the materials expense for Fae's Anatomy lumped in there as well).

So after hosting Touched by Darkness, we'll have broken even with a few extra dollars and some other tools (printer, paper cutter) and consumables (whiteboard markers, lanyards, dry erase wipes) as assets going into our next game. Generalissimo will also be an economical game to run as there's no giant maps or specialized equipment required by other games.

All in all, we're on track to achieve our objectives. It's still early in the year, though. I'll follow up with another post at the end of the year to discuss how we did and what that means for our 2026 season!