Selling direct

Selling direct means the player buys the game from you: your website, your convention booth, or your crowdfunding campaign. You keep the full retail price minus payment processing, shipping, and fulfillment costs, which makes it the highest-margin channel available to a small publisher by a wide margin. A game with an MSRP of 40 dollars might net you 30 to 34 dollars sold direct, versus roughly 16 dollars sold to a distributor.

The tradeoff is that every direct sale is one you had to generate yourself. There is no store shelf doing the selling for you, no distributor catalog putting your game in front of thousands of retailers. Direct sales run on your audience: your mailing list, your social media following, your crowdfunding backers, and word of mouth. Small publishers who thrive on direct sales usually built that audience over months or years before launch.

Direct also means you own the customer relationship. You see who is buying, you can email them when the expansion ships, and you learn what messaging actually converts. Publishers who go straight into distribution never get that data. Many successful small publishers deliberately keep a meaningful share of their print run for direct sales even after entering distribution, because the direct margin funds the business while distribution builds reach.

The practical work of direct selling is fulfillment: storing inventory, packing boxes, and shipping them without losing money on postage. For a few hundred copies you can do this from a garage. Beyond that, most publishers hand the work to a fulfillment partner and pay a per-order fee.