I played Sentinels with some buddies yesterday and both of them expressed the desire to acquire this game... excepts they would loved to have it translated so they can play with their familly, child, wife.
That make about 10 people that I know (and 2 shop owner) that would be interested in acquiring the game if it was avaliable in french.
Do you have plan to have the game translated/printed in Europe ? Do you need translators (I can help here) ? Do you need people to contact european/french publishers or retail shops ?
Let me know, there is a market out there for your superb game.
I can't add much to this, but for what it's worth I know that at Essen last year >G got the message loud and clear that there is a market for Sentinels for various language versions (German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) They also have an inkling of interest in other locales due to purchases from distributors in other places. If I remember correctly, Singapore, for instance, purchases a large amount. [1]
At the time they had bigger fish to fry, and I'd guess that they still do (launching Galactic Strike Force, designing Vengeance), but they are certainly aware that there is at least some interest.
[1] Tangent -- consider the route traveled by a game purchased in Singapore. It was manufactured in China and then shipped to the U.S. before being shipped back to Singapore. I wouldn't be too surprised to find that from there it was shipped to another country in Asia, too.
We eventually hope to release European localizations of our games (French, German, maybe Spanish). The main difficulty is that the market is substantially smaller than the English market. When we print games, we print between 5K and 10K copies at a time. This lets us keep the costs down, so we can afford to sell our games at reasonable prices. Unfortunately, that sized print run would be incredibly risky for a French or German version, so we have the option of either 1) sinking a lot of capital into inventory that we might not be able to move or 2) selling the French or German version for significantly more than the English version of the game. Neither option is great, and since we are still a small startup, gambling with that much capital would be tough.
Having said that however, we are definitely looking into our options! And who knows, maybe at Essen this year some European distributor will express interest in buying several thousand games right off the bat, and these concerns will evaporate :)
Why dont you take an agreement with a european publisher, like Nexus or Ubik so they publish the games directly in Europe (and in several language) so they can draft smaller series that what you use to do.
They are printing localised version of LCG and thus so I dont think Sentinels would be too much an hassle for them to add to their own catalog.
Interesting question. Don't know the answer. That would mean shipping directly from the producer to a distributor w/out the product ever being touched/seen by >G. That means some concerns, I think, about maintaining quality control. Given all of the issues about cards being cut to the wrong length and having to be re-produced, this seems like a real potential issue.
As a tangent, one of the interesting things I heard the guys talking about was the possibility of leveraging what they've learned as game producers to help other small game producers. I don't think they've formalized anything, but the general idea seemed to be that a designer/producer could lean on >G for as many or as few parts of the process – from as little as just getting some advice to as much as >G possibly handling warehousing and fulfillment.
I too have no idea about the inner workings of manufacturing and distributing, but, I reckon that even when the crates of games were sent to >G HQ, they don't physically open them to check either. For purposes of quality control, they'll maybe open a box or two here and there. Then, ship out the rest of the unopened boxes to the distributors.
That, to me, feels no different than to ship from factory to distributor directly.
Again, I have no idea how this works, so I might (and probably am) wrong about the whole supply chain process.
1) We are looking into all sorts of localization opportunities. It is important to us that any deal we make be well thought out and result in our customers getting a quality product while also making business sense for us. If we have not moved on this by October, I will *certainly* be speaking with various European publishers in Essen to see if we can come to an accord.
2) In certain situations, it can definitely make sense to ship directly from the factory in China to a given eastern-hemisphere destination. In fact, it is possible that we will wind up doing this very thing for PAX Australia. However, if a distributor places a relatively small order involving a large number of products, we are in a much better position to put this together properly than the factory. In addition, all of our international distributors have US-based freight forwarders, so we only wind up paying outbound shipping to a US address.