Legal Issue Precidents | Board Game Designers Forum

don't get me started....

$10K for starters? That sounds about right. But only for stuff that's at the bottom of the Nielsen's. If you want to go above that, the $$ curve is VERY steep. Look for other areas than entertainment.

I have a basic card/dice game design that can be transformed into just about anything, given a set # of objects. Wanted to do an NFL version and a POKEMON version. Don't recall which one was $150K [upfront in cash], but it was the cheap one.

I'll let you do the math.

My one game using licensed logos - EXPRESS LINE, which used a goodly number of train logos - took me a year and a half to get authorized. The Rail folks were all wonderful [once everybody was on board - pun intended] and most charged me little or nothing... but the stipulation was that I was only allowed to run 100 copies. So I produced 100 numbered copies, hoping that one of the big publishers would be interested in snapping up a product that had the permission of all four major Railroads to use their logos in one place. While I got a number of incredulous pats-on-the-back [I was surprised at how many folks were amazed that I had been able to get all the endorsements], no-one was willing to follow up on all my prep work.

So, there you go. If you've got big bucks you can make things happens if you aren't afraid of opening your wallet. On the other hand, even if you can find a genre where the licensees aren't outrageous [RR logos run from $50-$1500 and go up depending on the size of the print-run, but they're flexible depending on the item or project. They were VERY pleased to be ASKED FIRST and were looking forward to seeing themselves in a legitimate game box].

Therefore- even if you can line things up for publishers [doing all the hard work for them], it's no guarantee they're going to be interested. Most of the publishers were polite, but their bottom line was, "We've been doing without them for so long, we're not really interested in the real thing anymore, but thank you anyway."

And that was that.

Needless to say, I won't do licensed items anymore.

Source: http://www.bgdf.com/node/6782

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