Over the last few years, inspired by Steve Jackson Games, I’ve released stakeholder reports for Stonemaier Games. With our taxes now complete, it’s time for the 2021 report.
A “stakeholder” in Stonemaier Games is anyone who has an impact on our company and a stake in our success, whether it’s employees, contractors, customers, Champions, Ambassadors, retailers, distributors, artists, designers, backers, readers, etc. So if you’re reading this, the report is for you.
Joy is always our goal–we don’t measure success by money, units sold, rankings, followers, or awards. Those are just metrics. So all of the data aside, I truly hope we were able to create some joy for you in the last year, and I’m grateful for your connection to Stonemaier Games.
2021 Revenue and Personnel
We use the accrual method for accounting (expenses and revenue count in the year when we ship the products to the customer). Last year, 91% of our revenue was from distributors, localization partners, and digital games versus 9% directly from consumers.
- Revenue: $24.7 million
- Full-time employees: 3 (Jamey, Joe, Alex)
- Part-time employees: 3 (Alan, Morten, Susannah)
- Number of cats (between Jamey, Joe, Alan, Morten, Alex, and Susannah): 11
- Independent contractors: 100+
- New games: 2
- New expansions: 2
- New accessories: 0
- Kickstarter campaigns: 0
- Preorder campaigns: 4
- Shareholders: 25
For comparison, revenue was $17.9 million in 2020. Profit, of course, was significantly less than revenue. We consistently reprint almost all of our games, so the majority of our profits are reinvested into reprints, and freight shipping was incredibly expensive in 2021 (and continues to be).
We have no external debt, nor did we take any loans in 2021. As usual, cash flow was tight at certain times of the year due to the gap between when we need to pay Panda (our manufacturer) and when distributors pay us, but we made it work.
We continue to contract Greater Than Games (a fellow St. Louis company) to provide warehousing and fulfillment for our products in the US, as well as Spiral Galaxy in the UK, Aetherworks in Australia, and (for the first time) Hubtrotter in Canada. I still run Stonemaier Games out of my home office, and both Joe and Alex work from home as well.
Morten works part time from his home in Denmark (he focuses on solo play), Alan continues to handle submissions and health care, and Christine is our wonderful graphic designer. Susannah recently joined us part-time as our retailer relationship manager. We also work very closely with Shannon (our production project manager at Panda) and Dave (our web developer). Here’s a longer list of everyone who has an impact on Stonemaier Games (photos of many of them are here).
Our ongoing discussions with shareholders has been very fruitful, especially in terms of their insights and unique perspectives regarding some big decisions.
Among our 120+ employees, independent contractors, and shareholders, 65% are men and 35% are women. 83% are White and 17% are BIPOC. We will continue our efforts to actively improve the diversity of Stonemaier Games.
Games in Print
Our core products are 12 games (13 with the upcoming release of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest). The quantities below are the lifetime units in circulation for each game (just the game, not expansions, accessories, or promos) in all languages released in 2021 or before, and the BGG rankings are as of today.
- Viticulture: 204,326 units (BGG rank: 26)
- Euphoria: 42,000 units (BGG rank: 464)
- Between Two Cities: 45,900 units (BGG rank: 656)
- Scythe: 517,102 units (BGG rank: 14)
- Charterstone: 92,500 units (BGG rank: 391)
- My Little Scythe: 57,500 units (BGG rank: 651)
- Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig: 45,000 units (BGG rank: 609)
- Wingspan: 1,410,539 units (BGG rank: 23)
- Tapestry: 75,650 units (BGG rank: 250)
- Pendulum: 49,200 units (BGG rank: 2886)
- Red Rising: 154,800 units (BGG rank: 828)
- Rolling Realms: 36,000 units (BGG rank: 1494)
The new products we introduced in 2021 were Red Rising, Secrets & Soirees (Between Two Castles expansion), Rolling Realms, and Arts & Architecture (Tapestry expansion). As usual, we’ve tried to keep our release schedule streamlined and focused so we can shine a big spotlight on everything we make.
Social Media, Contacts, and Other Metrics
This data is as of April 1.
- e-newsletter subscribers: 44,088 (62% open rate)
- Facebook fans: 33,000 (though most interactions are in our Facebook groups, which have over 72,000 members)
- Twitter followers: 23,536
- YouTube subscribers: 38,294
- Instagram followers: 40,266
- Stonemaier Champions: 10,854
- ambassadors (active volunteers): 402
- retailer/distributor mailing list: 924
- reviewers (active): 284
- international localization partners: 35
- website Alexa ranking: 175,222 (avg. 9,238 views per day in 2021)
- Stonemaier Games Design Day attendees: 75
- game submissions: 208
- funds donated to charities (annual auction and preorder launch signup donations): $32,307
With Joe as our Director of Communications, Alex as our Director of Sales (distributors, retailers, and localization partners), Morten running Automa Factory, and Susannah as our Retailer Relationship Manager, we have people specializing in different interactions on these platforms in service of you.
Biggest Changes, Observations, and Mistakes
I covered most of this topic in a month-by-month breakdown on major events and initiatives in 2021; here are just a few notes in addition to those:
- Four Webstores: To better serve customers in their respective regions (US, Canada, Australia/NZ, and Europe), we created a webstore for each region with prices listed in that region’s currency and inventory specific to that region.
- Board Game Arena: Thanks to the developers at BGA, both Viticulture and Tapestry are available on this digital platform (in addition to the other ways to play our games digitally). BGA is working on several other games, and we’re hoping they add even more!
- Rolling Realms liveplays: Starting in 2021 and continuing every other week, I’ve played 21 games of Rolling Realms live on Facebook (posted immediately after to YouTube). It’s been even more fun than I’d hoped to play along with other people–Rolling Realms was designed specifically to be remotely playable and scale for any player count or schedule.
- Stuff We Love: As you can probably tell from our YouTube channel, Instagram, this blog, etc, Stonemaier Games tries to add positivity to the community and industry, well beyond our games. One small addition to that philosophy this year is the Stuff We Love page of our website, where we share stuff we’re into right now (even beyond games).
- Freight Shipping Costs: The sky-high cost of freight shipping in 2021 was a big problem, and it continues to be a major issue, particularly for larger products.
Looking Ahead to 2022
2022 is Stonemaier Games’ 10th anniversary! We have some surprises planned this fall to commemorate the occasion. I discussed many of our 2022 goals in this article; below are a few additional notes.
- New Products: After Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest and custom disc golf discs, our lineup for 2022 includes a major expansion to Viticulture (announcement coming on April 13), a Wingspan expansion the Wingspan box/organizer, and more Rolling Realms promos, and an unannounced non-game product and some other surprises. We have a pretty good idea of our 2023 and 2024 lineups as well.
- Eco-Friendly Trays: We have several eco-friendly initiatives in motion (and some already in effect), and later this year you’ll start to see some of our plastic trays replaced by cardboard pulp trays.
- Direct Retailer Program and More Focused Distribution: We continue to sell through various distributors into different retail channels (as well as directly to retailers who sign up for our direct program), but for the hobby channel in certain regions, we’re focusing our efforts on a specific distributor in those regions so we can ensure that every local game store who wants to carry our games can get them on an ongoing basis.
- Leaderboards: As a little experiment, for a few games we’re inviting people to share their scores on a form, and at the end of each month I’ll post the high scores that month at each player count.
***
Thanks for joining Stonemaier Games on this journey, and if there’s anything we can do to add joy to your tabletop experiences, please let us know.
Do you have any thoughts, observations, or questions about this report? I want to continue to learn from mistakes and successes, experiment, and listen to our stakeholders in 2022.
Also read:
- 2020 Stakeholder Report
- 2019 Stakeholder Report
- 2018 Stakeholder Report
- 2017 Stakeholder Report
- 2016 Stakeholder Report
Frank West’s stakeholder report for The City of Kings.
If you gain value from the 100 articles Jamey publishes on this blog each year, please consider championing this content!
33 Comments on “2021 Behind-the-Scenes Stakeholder Report for Stonemaier Games”
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[…] I’ve recently been consuming a ton of content by Jamey Stegmaier. He is the founder of tabletop game publisher Stonemaier who put out Wingspan. Jamey is a prolific sharer. His YT channel is outstanding and he talks about everything from nerdy game design topics, to life, to his business. His video A Brief History of Stonemaier Games is, to use that pedo-cringe term, “open kimono”. Even though his company is private he volunteers information that would be impossible to find. See 2021 Behind-the-Scenes Stakeholder Report for Stonemaier Games. […]
[…] I’ve recently been consuming a ton of content by Jamey Stegmaier. He is the founder of tabletop game publisher Stonemaier who put out Wingspan. Jamey is a prolific sharer. His YT channel is outstanding and he talks about everything from nerdy game design topics, to life, to his business. His video A Brief History of Stonemaier Games is, to use that pedo-cringe term, “open kimono”. Even though his company is private he volunteers information that would be impossible to find. See 2021 Behind-the-Scenes Stakeholder Report for Stonemaier Games. […]
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How someone does one thing, is how someone does everything.
This report is just a reflection on a person and a company that believes in 100 percent transparency.
His contributions, roles, and essential character has been the single greatest influencer on my journey to make board games… and deliver little fun engines to the world.
His report mentions the direct impact of his company but there’s so much indirect impact he has on the industry that you cannot capture in a single report.
Thanks Jamey for making us all better versions of ourselves in an industry where you lead the way.
I appreciate that, Tom, and I’m honored to have been influential for your journey to make board games!
[…] usability. Game publishers have taken note of Wingspan’s exceptional success, with over 1.4 million copies sold in barely over 3 years. They would do well to also take note of how Wingspan succeeded, including […]
[…] years later and inspired by the annual reports from Steve Jackson Games and Stonemaier Games, I wanted to share my own data with […]
Jamey,
As always, I appreciate your transparency and I discuss Stonemaier Games with great admiration at any lectures and talks I give on the subject of board gaming, the industry, and the community of gamers. I’m privileged to have been a part of a number of SM products over the past decade.
Two things stopped me in my tracks…first, I’m surprised that the number of copies of Viticulture is only double that of Charterstone, a title that came out years later. By all accounts, I would have thought Viticulture would have surpassed the 500K threshold. Second, you still list # of Kickstarters even though you haven’t conducted one in a number of years…I know you mentioned both in passing ad more directly on your blog that KS served its purpose then…but do you feel that there may be a future need to return to KS?
Cheers,
Joe
That’s an interesting question. The reason I do that is to remind people that there are other methods to bring new products to people without using crowdfunding (not that there’s anything wrong with crowdfunding–I just think it’s all too often assumed that now that the primary way to make something new is to crowdfund it). I can’t see the benefit of us ever returning to Kickstarter/crowdfunding instead of just making a well-tested product we believe in, revealing it, and shipping to people within a few weeks after they preorder it.
Thanks Jamey. Stonemaier games has definitely added joy to my life over the last couple of years. How refreshing to see a company valuing this and not solely looking at profit as the definition of success. Tapestry’s currently on my gaming table, complete with Arts and Architecture. Looking forward to seeing what’s in the new Viticulture expansion. Boardgaming is essential to my mental health because it gives me a safe space to spend time and build resilience for dealing with the current state of the world. It’s magical how therapeutic a few bits of well designed cardboard and plastic can be!
Thank you for sharing this, Lesley–I’m so happy to hear that our games have brought you joy in this way.
Get you cats to playtest to expense their food (chickens can play tic-tac-toe)
I’m a CIMA and IPA member (accountancy and advertising respectively)
I wish more game companies were as open as you. Thanks for helping continue to improve the board game industry.
What does “open rate” mean?
That’s how many subscribers actually open the e-newsletter to read.
Ah, ok. Now I feel dumb 😆
I love the idea of score leaderboards.
Jamey,
You might find it useful for your marketing strategy to look at how and where 3rd parties are mentioning Stonemaier Games in articles, blogs and stores. These mentions highlight the amazing rise of Stonemaier over the past decade.
One way to get such data is with the Google historical search. For example, you can go to google.com, search for “stonemaier” “game” -site:stonemaiergames.com (with the quotes around stonemaier and games), then use the Tools button to filter by a date range. If you click forward to the last page of results, Google tells you near the bottom of the page how many unique site results it found. This search generally won’t pick up *most* random comments on Facebook or Twitter, but it does pick up articles/blogs/etc outside of your own site. In addition, Google *usually* consolidates multiple hits within the same site into a single unit for the purpose of counting unique site results — so it’s estimating approximately how many unique places you’re being mentioned.
I performed this search from Oregon (your results may differ based on your own location), and here are a few of the 11 years that I looked at:
2012: 64 unique site results
2017: 105 unique site results
2020: 125 unique site results
2022: 110 unique site results
You’re on track this year to easily exceed the mentions that you obtained in any prior year, including between 2018 and 2021, when your annual mentions were especially high.
A cursory review of your mentions in different years generated few interesting insights, which I’ll just summarize quickly.
(1) Although Libertalia is generating a lot of buzz now, many of your mentions still come from older games that people continue talking about (notably Wingspan, Scythe and Tapestry). This may be a good signal about which games will continue to sell well in the next year. The ratio of ongoing mentions versus the game’s age may correlate with a game’s potential to remain evergreen (I’m speculating — I haven’t done that specific calculation using your historical sales data at this point).
(2) I’m noticing a few trends, over the years, in the proportions of mentions that could be categorized as (i) interviews, (ii) press release copy-paste, (iii) influencer commentary (including reviews), (iv) organic player discussion, and (v) storefront advertisements.
(2a) I think I see an improving return over the years for you, over the years, in terms of (iv) organic discussion and (iii) influencer commentary versus (i) interviews. A more detailed analysis probably (?) would suggest that over the years, you’ve been getting a better return in buzz, in response to your outreach efforts — more bang for your buck, so to speak.
(2b) I’m also not surprised to see distributor sales playing such a significant role in reaching customers, considering the rise in storefront mentions. I notice a broad range of different business sizes that are now advertising your products, which wasn’t as much the case a few years ago.
Anyway, that’s just a slice of what the Google historical data can do for you, so I thought you might find it interesting and useful.
Happy Anniversary!
This is a really interesting analysis–thank you so much! I’m happy to see that some of our older titles are still part of the discussion. :)
Thank you for the 2021 Stakeholder Report.
I should like to give thanks to Christine Santana for the excellent Graphic Design work. I only have two Stonemaier games (Scythe and Flügelschlag – both with all the expansions). In both games, I find the choice of typefaces, gameplay-friendly typography, balanced colour-palettes and harmonious layouts to be absolutely awesome.
Naturally the themes, artwork and game design in both Scythe and Flügelschlag are the primary reasons for their success and popularity, I just feel it is also necessary to recognise the importance of solid Graphic Design.
Absolutely! Christine is amazing, and I’m happy to mention her in this post.
Jamey, I appreciate these reports each year. I am curious regarding the increase in sales for Wingspan or Red Rising as part of the Target partnership. Did you see a substantive increase in sales on those titles based on them being available at Target physical and online?
Adrian: Definitely! Whenever we add a new retailer, our sales increase. :)
I love to see you’re trying the Leaderboard concept. Time to go enter scores for this month. :-)
Thanks Jason! :)
I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind sharing the reason for being uncomfortable with disclosing overall profit for the company.
Not asking you to do so, since it is your blog and your decision, but I am curious why profitability of the company and profit/revenue numbers are where you draw the line.
It’s just a feeling, and I appreciate you respecting it. I’m on the fence about even posting revenue, but because I’ve done it since the first stakeholder report, I feel odd about suddenly omitting that data point.
Great summary Jamey, thank you. Curious if the 72k Facebook group members is with duplicates removed (I know I’m a member of more than 1 of the FB groups)?
It’s for total members (I don’t have a way to calculate total unique members).