2022 Behind-the-Scenes Stakeholder Report for Stonemaier Games

With our 2022 taxes now complete, it’s time for me to share the annual Stonemaier Games stakeholder 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 transparency in this post is out of respect and appreciation 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.

2022 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, 85% of our revenue was from retailers, distributors, localization partners, and digital games versus 15% directly from consumers.

• Revenue: $20.7 million
• Full-time employees: 4 (Jamey, Joe, Alex, Dave)
• Part-time employees: 2 (Alan and Susannah)
• Every day contractors/partners: 4 (Christine, Morten, Dave, and Shannon)
• Number of cats: 10
• Independent contractors: 100+
• New games: 2 (plus 1 new edition and 1 stand-alone expansion)
• New expansions: 2
• New accessories: 4
• Kickstarter campaigns: 0
• Preorder campaigns: 4
• Shareholders: 25

For comparison, revenue was $24.7 million in 2021. 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 2022. Inflation played a big role in the economics of the game industry last year (and continuing this year).

We have no external debt, nor did we take any loans in 2022. 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 recently transitioned from warehousing and fulfillment at Greater Than Games to Miniature Market for our products in the US and from Hubtrotter to Asmodee for our products in Canada, and we continue to work with Spiral Galaxy in the UK and Aetherworks in Australia. I still run Stonemaier Games out of my home office, and my coworkers mostly work from home, though we now rent part of a coworking space here in St. Louis.

Susannah joined us at the beginning of 2022 as our retailer relationship manager, and we hired Dave–who was handling replacement parts–as our full-time customer outreach manager.  Here’s a longer list of everyone who has an impact on Stonemaier Games, including demographics (photos of many of them are here).

Games in Print

Our core products are 14 games (15 with the upcoming release of Expeditions). 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 2022 or before, and the BGG rankings are as of today. If you haven’t rated our games, you can do so here!

• Viticulture: 234,826 units (BGG rank: 32)
• Euphoria: 42,000 units (BGG rank: 529)
• Between Two Cities: 52,900 units (BGG rank: 730)
• Scythe: 544,102 units (BGG rank: 16)
• Charterstone: 97,500 units (BGG rank: 453)
• My Little Scythe: 62,500 units (BGG rank: 699)
• Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig: 50,000 units (BGG rank: 647)
• Wingspan: 1,690,537 units* (BGG rank: 25)
• Tapestry: 84,650 units (BGG rank: 260)
• Pendulum: 49,200 units (BGG rank: 3076)
• Red Rising: 154,800 units (BGG rank: 883)
• Rolling Realms: 43,000 units (BGG rank: 1183)
• Libertalia: 61,584 units (BGG rank: 630)
• Smitten: 10,000 units (BGG rank: 6976)

*Nearly 140,000 units of Wingspan Asia–an expansion, but also a standalone game for 1-2 players–also entered circulation over the last year. Those units are not included in the Wingspan core game sale total listed here.

The new products we introduced in 2022 were Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, the Wingspan jigsaw puzzles, Viticulture World, Between Two Cities Essential Edition, Smitten, Wingspan Nesting Box, Wingspan Asia, natural rubber playmats for Red Rising and Tapestry, as well as promos for Rolling Realms. 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 2.

• e-newsletter subscribers: 45,597 (62% open rate)
• Facebook fans: 36,225 (though most interactions are in our Facebook groups, which have over 71,000 members)
• Twitter followers: 26,139
• YouTube subscribers: 44,908
• Instagram followers: 44,967
• Stonemaier Champions: 13,675
• ambassadors (active volunteers): 480
• retailer/distributor mailing list: 923
• reviewers (active): 313
• international localization partners: 35
• Stonemaier Games Design Day attendees: 95
• game submissions: 244
• funds donated to charities (annual auction, Ukraine, preorder launch signup donations, and reproductive rights): $70,541

With Joe as our Director of Communications, Alex as our Director of Sales & Logistics (distributors, retailers, and localization partners), Susannah as our Retailer Relationship Manager, and Dave as our Customer Outreach Manager, we have people specializing in different interactions on various platforms in service of you.

New in 2022

I covered most of this topic in a month-by-month breakdown of major events and initiatives in 2022; here are just a few notes:

• 10th Anniversary: This was a really special occasion for us–Stonemaier Games has been a company for 10 years! We celebrated this by giving a free copy of a 1-2 player cooperative game I designed (Smitten) to anyone who placed a webstore order in September, and we also announced and started selling 3 new Rolling Reams promos and Between Two Cities Essential Edition. I feel incredibly fortunate for the support over the last 10 years, and hopefully we’ve brought some joy to you and your table during that time.
• Score Calculator App: We commissioned developer Paul Hart to create a free Stonemaier-specific app to calculate and record scores. We’re continually rolling out updates and improvements.
• Eco-Friendly Improvements: We’ve been working with Panda to improve the eco-friendliness of our games, and several of those endeavors started appearing in Wingspan and other games in 2022. They included pulp sugarcane trays, biodegradable bags, FSC certified cardboard and wood tokens (including eggs), and the use of natural rubber instead of neoprene for playmats. We also shifted expansion boxes to the recyclable varnished coating (opposed to standard laminate, which isn’t recyclable) and to external stickers (opposed to shrinkwrap).
• Direct Retail Program: We officially launched a major initiative for local retailers to purchase directly from Stonemaier Games, ensuring they can get exactly what they want from us to serve their customers.
• Inflation: Inflation had a major impact on the world in 2022. I viewed this as an opportunity to serve our customers better by trying not to raising prices and to serve any contractor who provides paid services to Stonemaier Games by increasing the minimum hourly payment to $25/hour.
• Nesting Box and Wingspan Asia: We sold all 10,000 first-printing Nesting Boxes within a few days (many within the first 6 hours), plus another 8,000 copies of Wingspan Asia by itself. The difference between supply and demand led to some great discussions about how we can better serve customers, particularly those who don’t mind preordering prior to production based on minimal information, and we’ve since selected some products for preorders in advance of production (e.g., the third printing of the Nesting Box and the first printing of Expeditions).

Looking Ahead to 2023

After Tapestry: Fantasies & Futures and Expeditions, our lineup for 2023 includes another new game, Wingspan vision-friendly cards, Wingspan golden eggs, most likely the Tapestry civ revisions and the Wingspan fan art cards, more Rolling Realms promos, and a few surprises. You can sign up for our monthly e-newsletter to receive notifications about these announcements. We have a pretty good idea of our 2024 and 2025 lineups as well.

2022 was an unpredictable year with big swings in demand and costs, and we’re hoping to achieve better stability this year. As noted above, for some products we’re testing preorders in advance of production, and we really appreciate distributors and retailers who participate in such endeavors.

In 2023, I want to better elevate the designers who spend so much time and talent creating our products, to engage ambassadors in reviewing our rulebooks for clarity well before we announce new products, to increase the number of our games that are available digitally, to welcome both new and experienced gamers into the gaming community, to support my amazing coworkers, and to lead with kindness, compassion, and empathy.

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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 2023.

Also read:

• 2021 Stakeholder Report
• 2020 Stakeholder Report
• 2019 Stakeholder Report
• 2018 Stakeholder Report
• 2017 Stakeholder Report
• 2016 Stakeholder Report

If you gain value from the 100 articles Jamey publishes on this blog each year, please consider championing this content! You can also listen to posts like this in the audio version of the blog.

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