Since the indie boom of the 2010s, one piece of advice commonly given to smaller studios has been the value of merchandise.
The logic broadly goes as follows: game development is a risky business, and even if your game is a success, it’s not uncommon for the studio to still struggle financially. Merchandise is a way for a community to support the developer and provide a revenue stream that isn’t tied to game releases.
It’s a simple pitch, but delivery can be very complex. Stellar Jockeys, the developer of the Brigador series of isometric mech tactical shooters, began selling merchandise in 2018 after seeing initiatives like Pinny Arcade on the convention circuit, where studios at the Penny Arcade trade show produce enamel pins that can be collected by visiting booths across the floor.
“I just knew that was something that I wanted to tap into,” studio head and co-founder Hugh Monahan explains. “Anything you can do as a supplementary income stream for game development. Our first game took five years to make; our second game took ten, so any support structures you can develop along the way can help a lot. People kept asking whether there were additional ways they could support us. I wanted that to come with something, and so merch was a good way to do that.”
Initially, Stellar Jockeys turned to third-parties that specialise in games merchandise, like Fangamer and Indiebox, but that didn’t work out. “So the only recourse was to just do it ourselves.”
Part of the reason for doing merchandise was to help with the cost of exhibiting at trade shows. Monahan looked to Californian studio The Behemoth for inspiration after wondering how the maker of Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers was able to sustain a huge footprint on the floor at shows like Penny Arcade.
“I couldn’t figure it out – this was such an expensive operation,” he says. “Then I really started digging in and spoke to some of the guys who work there. They do it because they have such a strong merch operation. It mostly defrays the cost of exhibiting, or ends up being profitable for them.”
Hidden complexity
One of the first pieces of merchandise that Stellar Jockeys made was T-shirts. As a result, Monahan has some to-the-point advice: “Don’t do T-shirts as your first piece of merch.”
Why? There’s a huge amount of depth and complexity in creating clothing, making it an incredibly complicated enterprise to run.
“It’s awful,” Monahan laughs. “You’ve got to learn about fabrics. There are a load of different T-shirt styles. You have to learn about printing – are you going to screen print or use another technique? – and then you have split across all these different sizes. There’s a huge variety of SKUs. I jumped in on one of the hardest pieces of merch to get into.
“And then on top of that, Brigador has a very male audience, as we have come to learn. In my naivety, I thought we were going to do unisex shirts and women’s shirts. We still have inventory of the original run of women’s shirts. So if any ladies out there want any skull and laurel T-shirts, I would love to sell them.”
By contrast, something simple like a pin is “fabulous”, Monahan says.
“Anything that is a single item that you can have control over or are more direct in the fabrication end, where there’s not all these different variables that you are working through,” he continues. He got a useful introduction to this after Stellar Jockeys was accepted into the Pinny Arcade program at PAX. “I learned a tonne about enamel pin manufacturing. The nice thing was that we just gave them a design, they approved it, and then they handled all of the backend. There were fewer failure points, and we were able to piggyback on their brand. Those did pretty well for us.”
Following those first steps, Stellar Jockeys now has an extensive merchandise operation that’s now a consistent source of revenue. One of the merchandise lines that the team are most proud of is a branded lighter produced by Zippo.
“They were really nice to work with. We iterated with them on a design and did the branded lighter,” Monahan explains, adding that manufacturing was more expensive when compared with pins, but the lighters sold “extraordinarily well.”
“That was the part where I started to understand the appeal – fans will buy your stuff, but you can have stuff that has a broader appeal than just this very niche connection to your game. It was a black Zippo lighter with a skull on it. That ended up doing really well for us and started to teach me more about how to position merchandise relative to our audience and audiences in general.”
Among other things, the firm has learned just how wide its remit is when it comes to setting prices that the audience will pay, which goes well beyond the level that it would accept for the game. Stellar Jockeys producer Benjamin Glover says there are hugely different “price expectations” for actual goods versus games. For example, the studio started selling pewter figures of some of Brigador’s vehicles in 2023, which cost much more than the game they are from.
“People are willing to pay more for less,” he says. “Some of our merch packs are between $25 and $35, but our first game, which took ages to make, can be bought on sale for $5.” The lesson: people will happily pay more money for “a physical, tangible thing.”
Legislative battles
Selling merchandise hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing, with lessons learned about what type of product will sell and how exactly it should be brought to market. Since Stellar Jockeys entered the merch game, the geopolitical landscape has made the logistics increasingly complicated. “Legislation has changed a lot since we started selling merchandise,” Monahan explains. “You’ve had the evolving position of what can be sent where.”
For example, it is no longer possible for them to sell the aforementioned lighters overeseas due to new legislation introduced by the US Department of Transportation, which states that you cannot send flammable materials on a plane (the government body argues that the sparker on a Zippo lighter falls under this rule). So the company can only sell domestically.
“Brexit was a huge pain in the backside”
Prior to that, “Brexit was a huge pain in the backside,” says Monahan, “because we couldn’t sell stuff directly to the UK anymore. Eventually, they got it so you just need an import agent, but they are insanely expensive.
“The only real solution for that is either having an enormous merchandise operation that warrants someone to handle all that for you, or having a UK distribution centre. And then that is its own complication; we’ve got a pretty decent merchandise operation for an independent studio [but] for a global merchandise operation, we’re a tiny speck.” The firm still doesn’t offer its range in the UK.
Lessons learned
What advice does Stellar Jockey have for indie studios looking to enter the merchandise business? First and foremost, don’t sell posters.
“We cut ourselves off at the knees on that,” Monahan says. “There’s a reason why posters are a very specific set of dimensions. It’s because of shipping tubes. When we made our first poster, it was this giant square that didn’t fit any format, so we had to fold it, which was awful. Nobody wants a hand-folded poster… We learnt the hard way why a lot of these things are done the way that they are done, and it pretty much burnt almost all of our initial poster run.”
Second, when you level up and start offering T-shirts, Monahan says it’s important to have a proper understanding of concepts like sizing distribution.
“There’s a standard bell curve of sizes that’s the general population expectation of what sizes are going to sell,” he explains. “Ours was completely shifted off of that.”
Above all, the Stellar Jockeys team says it’s crucial to recognise that merchandise is an “all in” enterprise, rather than something that can be left to one side.
“There are no half measure here,” Monahan says. “It’s one thing to bring stuff to a convention and sell it. That’s very doable, especially a small thing like a patch. You can fill a backpack with enough of those and sell them throughout the event. But if you actually want to do an in-house operation, it is a full commitment. This is a long-term relationship. There’s no dipping in and dipping out.”
He also advises that studios focus should focus on just delivering a single item in the first instance and expand once that’s successful, rather than launching a full range right out of the gate.
“It’s about finding one piece that is your entry point, that you are passionate about or know enough about to get it right, and then just focus on doing that one thing really well,” Monahan says. “And then if you find you still have an appetite for it and if there’s an audience that is willing to purchase this stuff, then you can start building out from there. You don’t want to jump into dealing with multiple sizes or all of those kinds of things.”
Glover adds that for studios that already have a community, there is no harm in simply asking your fans. “You can survey your own audience and ask them what they’d buy,” he says. “Some people can be very forthright.”
Monahan also points out that while there are considerable upsides to selling physical merchandise, you can open yourself up to big issues if you don’t take the process seriously.
“The opportunity to damage your reputation is significant if you are not committed to the process,” he says. “If you’re not properly representing what you are selling.”
Looking back, Monahan regrets starting out with T-shirts, and laments the mistakes with posters. Yet despite all the bumps in the road that Stellar Jockeys has faced when it comes to merchandising, he says that the venture has “absolutely” been worth it for the studio.
“I went into this always thinking of it in terms of merchandise as marketing,” he says. “I would rather spend $10,000 making some cool merch and selling it, even if we’re not making a profit off of it between the labour and cost of goods, because [it results in] a cool piece that someone has on their desk. That’s something that keeps hitting.”
