How Fireside Games Became a Household Name in Board Gaming

Jason Hsieh (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed. Today we have a special guest, Justin, co-founder of Fireside Games. Back in 2007, Justin and his wife took their passion for board games and turned it into a striving company. From the creation of Castle Panic to their expanding lineup of different board games, Fireside Games has really become a household name among the game enthusiasts. So thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today, Justin.

Justin De Witt (00:24)
Thank you for having me, Jason. It’s pleasure to be here.

Jason Hsieh (00:26)
Yeah, so first of all, can you share with our audience, back, you know, I know you have been ⁓ running this company for over decades. What was the moment that way back then that you decided to turn your passion for board game into a business?

Justin De Witt (00:39)
Well, my wife and I had always wanted to run our own business. We weren’t sure what that was going to be, but we wanted to do something. And I had fallen back in love with board games, loved them when I was a kid, fell in love with them again after playing Settlers of Catan in like 2000, like a German version of it, and realized, ⁓ games have changed a lot. And I started fiddling with it on my evenings and weekends. And long story short, after…

working on games and working for another game company and all that, we realized we had something pretty cool in this one prototype of mine and we decided we would go ahead and start our own company with it. So we did everything it took to put the business together. We contacted a factory and we printed our first game Castle Panic in 2009 actually. And that was the beginning of the whole thing. Ever since then we have been keeping up with it. So it was a combination of wanting to do the entrepreneurial thing. We wanted to run a business and then

pretty soon it became like, this game thing seems like it’s working pretty well. Why don’t we do that? being a creative person with a background in graphic design and arts, I really wanted to do that. Her backgrounds in writing and storytelling, it meshed very, very well together. So that was what got us all started.

Jason Hsieh (01:40)
I see. OK, thank you for sharing that. And I think you have an actual copy of the.

Justin De Witt (01:45)
I do, yes. This is a copy of the newest version of Castle Panic. So yeah, this is our baby. This is what started it. Unlike a lot of other companies, we didn’t have to keep looking and looking. Our first game was our biggest hit. It still is. It’s a cooperative tower defense game where players are essentially trying to defend. Whoops, sorry, it’s backwards. we go. Defend this castle right here from these big scary monsters that come in on the edge. And you’re playing as a team. You’re working together to fight these monsters. They move in at the end of every player’s turn. So it’s a very, very sll for one, one for all kind of experience.

Jason Hsieh (02:16)
I see. How long is the gameplay usually?

Justin De Witt (02:18)
About 45 minutes usually, it’s fairly quick.

Jason Hsieh (02:20)
Okay, that’s not too bad. And can you explain on the rule just a little bit further? You mentioned how it’s kind of like a tall defense, but how do you focus that?

Justin De Witt (02:29)
Yeah, so one of the things that takes players a little bit of getting used to is first off, you’re not fighting other players, you’re fighting the game and you don’t have a piece on the board. That castle in the middle is like, it’s the whole team, it’s everyone. You lose the game if all six towers in the middle get destroyed. And so those are like your life points, essentially. If you lose all six towers, game’s over, monsters win. You are trying to use cards in your hand that match spaces on the board.

and play them to catch those monsters and slay them and get them off the board. Very Lord of the Rings kind of style. So you’re battling these monsters. You’re also, because it’s cooperative, you’re talking to other players, you’re coordinating how you might want to trade cards with them, and then you’re attacking these monsters, doing damage to them. If they get too close, they’ll come inside, smash the castle and tear down the walls and towers. You can rebuild the walls outside the castle, but the towers inside, when they’re gone, they’re gone.

So you’re all working to like just keep this thing alive until the end of the pile of monsters. Once the last monster is out, you just have to clean the board and survive and you win. But if the monsters take out all six towers, game ends, players lose.

Jason Hsieh (03:28)
Interesting. Okay, okay. So the team against the monster that’s attacked? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any like variation of the game where it’s also player against player?

Justin De Witt (03:40)
There is actually, yeah. We included in the back of the rules a couple of variations and the one that works that way we call Overlord.

In case, one player takes a few of the monster tokens as their hand and they’re playing as the villain. They’re trying to destroy the castle. Everyone else still plays together against them, but on their turn, they’re putting out the monster. So they’re now using their brain instead of just rolling dice and putting the monsters randomly. Now you’ve got monsters coming in specifically where you know they don’t have any blue cards or something. Yeah, it’s one of my favorite versions to play because it really does take the game from being a little bit more like semi random to, oh no, our friend Joe over there is really good at this.

Jason Hsieh (04:15)
I see. Okay, okay. Yeah, I was wondering if you have the like a PvP version, but it sounds like you do. okay. And looking back, what was some of the biggest challenge when you like first launched that game?

Justin De Witt (04:26)
The biggest thing honestly was the business side of stuff. As a designer, I will back up and say getting the balance of that game right was really tough, especially because I was pretty early in my design career. I’d only made a couple of games before them that didn’t usually get finished. Being able to have a game that would fight back hard enough against the players but not be unwinnable was a of a challenge. That took some work. But then after that, it really got down to the business end of things. How were we going to get the products distributed? How are we going to get into game stores?

We had to make a lot of phone calls to a lot of people. I like to say I asked a of smart people a lot of really dumb questions and they were good answers about here’s how you should market things. Here’s what the distributors you need to work with. And I contacted them. We’ve made deals. We actually work with a fulfillment company that is really great because I can send all my product to one warehouse. They will then send it to all the distribution channels we need. They were one of the first contacts we made that really, really helped us a lot.

Jason Hsieh (05:20)
I see. And I know the company has really grown over the years. How many different SKUs do you carry as a company?

Justin De Witt (05:26)
Oh my gosh. At one point we had, think it was 16. We’ve sunset a few of those, some of the slower sellers, and we keep bringing new ones out. I think our current list of products is like 10 or 11, if I remember right. And some of those will be going away. Some of those are permanent evergreens we’ll keep forever. And we have new ones coming out all the time. We’re releasing one, in fact, next month, basically.

Jason Hsieh (05:46)
I see, For the new one you’re working on, is that also going to be a Kickstarter campaign?

Justin De Witt (05:50)
No, we’ve only done one Kickstarter in the entire company’s history. We started because we started so long ago before Kickstarter existed that we’ve just sold games into distribution the old fashioned way. And because of that, literally Kickstarter didn’t come around. So we’d in the industry for like seven or eight years. We had such a good relationship with stores and distribution that we didn’t really need Kickstarter until our super deluxe version of Castle Panic, where for part of the 10 year anniversary, we started work on

a giant version that has plastic miniatures instead of cardboard tokens and all that. And it includes all the expansions. So it’s actually up above me. I don’t think I could point to it, but it’s a giant box. It’s the size of a suitcase. It’s huge. And that’s why we took it to Kickstarter. It was really expensive. It was really a big, it’s a shelf monster. It’s a big game. It’s a big investment. It was $350 out there.

Jason Hsieh (06:29)
Okay.

Justin De Witt (06:41)
That was something where we knew we can’t just put this into stores. This is for the super fans who have been with us and really wanted to. And they showed up. Because part of the problem for us was if there is enough interest, we just won’t do it. It’s too expensive. It’s too ridiculous. But it turns out we had thousands of people that wanted it. So we printed a bunch of them. yeah, was a pretty big hit. But that’s the only Kickstarter we’ve done. And probably the only one we will, just because our distribution channel is so strong otherwise. And Kickstarter, there’s a lot of

There are lot of issues around Kickstarter and challenges that for our market, not quite what we need to do. We don’t tend to make games a lot of very fancy, elaborate miniature pieces and stuff like that that tend to get a lot of the excitement on Kickstarter. Our stuff is more very accessible. won’t say, I mean, family friendly to a degree, but we tend to be a little more on the budget side of things too, where we want to keep our stuff really affordable and Kickstarter doesn’t really get super excited about those kinds of

Jason Hsieh (07:33)
Yeah, I think the just like you say, the sound I think the Kickstarter product usually the fancier the more component.

Justin De Witt (07:41)
You want their shiny bits you want you’re paying for all the fancy stuff. I totally get it.

Jason Hsieh (07:45)
Yeah, exactly. So that’s a really good point. And I think your game often, like in your current catalog, really emphasize on collaborative play. Why is that so important as part of the game design for you and for your company?

Justin De Witt (07:59)
Yeah, well, originally with Castle Panic, it was because it was something we hadn’t seen. So this is back in 2009. At that point, Reiner Knizia’s Lord of the Rings game was out and our game came out a few months after pandemic. So this is back before, but there were a lot of co-op games. And as a designer, I had seen moments when players would work together on games that weren’t cooperative. They would just team up. A lot of times team up to hit another player.

But it was really fascinating when that would happen. And you could see the excitement as they worked together. And just there’s a certain thrill. And again, back then, this was unheard of. You didn’t have this in board games. And I really wanted to double down on that and make a game where that was the entire intent. And so that’s where Castle Panic came from. The intent was, how do I make a game that you have to work together or the game will beat you? And then afterwards, now there’s hundreds of them out there.

it’s become quite a thing. I still, my gut level a lot of times is to design cooperative because I like the idea of people being able to like rely on each other and use skills in a different way and then fight against a common enemy. And part of that is also just, I think there’s something to be said for sitting down at a table, knowing my whole plan is just beat my friends in a submission. And for a lot of us, that’s fun, but we have bumped into a lot of people, myself, a lot of friends, all people we tested with, they didn’t really like games cause they didn’t want to either.

be the one beating up or be the one being beat up on. So there’s like an emotional engagement there that I think for some people turns them off to these really competitive games. And there’s a skill question of, you any good at it? So when we make it something where everyone is on the same team, it’s okay if you don’t quite have the best play or you don’t quite know what you’re doing. Your friends can help you and they’re not cheating. They’re helping you win the game. So I find that when I’m gonna sit down at table after a long day and play games with my friends, I’d rather play with them than against them. So I lean that way on a lot. Doesn’t mean we don’t have competitive games, but that’s kind of their special man. There’s a special sauce there. There’s magic.

Jason Hsieh (09:48)
I see, see, I see. So I think you share a very good reason behind your design. I guess my follow-up question is based on your experience, what are some of the things the entrepreneurs and the designers in the game space can make the game experience even better and how do you balance between fun and strategy in your design?

Justin De Witt (10:09)
Yeah, mean, that’s a lot of is I think the question there is audience. There are different game companies that make all kinds of different games. And if you have an audience that really wants to be involved with a lot of thinking and number crunching and making sure every bit is in the right place, then you should go for that. If that’s what they will come to you for, make those kind of games. But if you’re trying to go for something that’s more engaging, maybe on like an emotional level, then I think it comes down to remove the barriers between you and the fun.

You know, how quick can I get a player having fun? And where are the moments when they’re either not having fun or they’re checking out, or they’re going on their phone or what? Take those out. That’s one the things we’re doing with the new design we’re working on right now. We found some points where players are expressing frustration. It’s like, we need to take those out. We want to make sure the game is as fun as possible and that the frustration is at least leading to something fun. If there’s a little bit of, you can’t just get everything you want. If it’s okay to earn it, that’s one thing. But if it’s just something that’s annoying, makes people feel bad, we try and take that off. So I would say…

Pay attention to players’ emotional responses almost more, I would say, than some of their cerebral ones. They may tell you, don’t like this rule or something, but when you see someone get upset at having to discard a card or losing something or an attack that wasn’t fair, pay attention to that. You want to get that feedback clarified so that they are having the most fun possible with your game still doing what it needs to do.

Jason Hsieh (11:22)
Okay, got it. Thank you for sharing that. And I know you have been in the industry for a while now, and as the board game industry grows, are some of the changes that you notice in consumer expectations over the years?

Justin De Witt (11:34)
So I think one of the biggest ones is that the industry has just grown in terms of its audience. Like COVID was massive. It brought so many people into this hobby that we now have even more people with even more things they want. So if you make a weird game about collecting ducks and putting them in a stack, somebody’s going to want it. They’re going to love it. It’s going be their favorite game. So that’s been really neat to see the range of ideas that can now be sold as games that a long time ago might not have been able to. They weren’t good enough.

And I think the biggest thing I’ve seen is the explosion of Kickstarter in general with the idea not only that you can fund these projects that would normally be like ours, like too risky to do on their own, but somebody in their basement can make a game and get it out there. That was not all that easy to do all those years ago. You had to pay all the costs upfront and everything. And now you can have that work. That has changed so much how games are made, how they’re marketed, how they’re paid for. And then also,

for retail stores that sell games, they have to decide how much shelf space they wanna give to Kickstarters, because they’re popular, people want them, versus games coming from company like me that are more like, hey, here’s our new release, you know us, you trust us, blah, blah. So I think it’s up and down the stream from creator to distribution to sales. They’ve all been impacted by this and it’s been pretty revolutionary. I’m not sure there’s a lot of other industries other than maybe video games that have been redefined the way Kickstarter influenced ours.

Jason Hsieh (12:51)
I see. Thank you for sharing that. just back to your point about how much it was actually much easier to launch your own games nowadays than before. I had the privilege to interview the founder of Gamecrafter and their entire website is designing everything with their website that you can launch a game with like one minute.

Justin De Witt (13:10)
And they will just put it in a box. They have the best bits too. I love Gamecrafter. Yeah, those guys are great.

Jason Hsieh (13:14)
Yeah,

so there’s also companies out there to enable designers to really create a prototype really quickly and really test the concept. So that kind of leads directly to my next question. Based on your experience, what are some of the roles that in community feedback and also play testing that is part of your design process? Do you do a lot of play testing still for any of the new products that you are launching?

Justin De Witt (13:40)
Yeah, it’s huge for us. Yeah, we usually the way our process tends to work is we will do in-house play testing where it’s just played by my wife and I and anybody else we bring in until we know we’ve got something that’s pretty solid. Then we’ll take it outside and we’ll start testing like, does this work for you guys? Are you having a good time? And sometimes that’s the make or break moment. I have a handful of games that once we took them out, we’re like, nah, this is thing you can do. It’s not a fun game. Let’s get rid of it. But if it does pass that, then you move on. You do more testing. You revise. You take people’s feedback. And that’s

One of the challenges is people are always gonna give feedback. Sometimes their feedback is gonna be very emotional based, sometimes more cerebral. Sometimes they wanna suggest a change they want and all feedback is valuable, but you have to weigh it because sometimes what they wanna do is make a different game and you have to decide as a designer, is that the game you wanna make or what? If everyone is telling you they want that change, you probably should take that seriously. But if one guy wants it to be about chickens instead of koalas, that may not matter. And then the big thing though after that is then you take it out,

and you start doing rules testing. That’s the most important part where you take a prototype of the game and a copy of the rules that you’ve put together and you hand it to someone and then you sort of sit back and take notes. they play it like they just brought it home from the store and that’s where you realize, our rules don’t explain how to ⁓ deal the cards or, people are really confused on this one rule or this one effect and you can start cleaning it up. if you’ve ever played a game that the rule book is just a hot mess, they probably didn’t do a lot of rules testing. It’s literally that easy to spot. yeah, everything from individual player feedback during the early testing to late stage rules testing is crucial. I think everybody needs to do it and you need to do a lot, probably more than you want to, I will say.

Jason Hsieh (15:16)
I see. Yeah, thank you for sharing that as well. So, but based on your experience, how long does it like, how long do you usually take to do those kinds of playtesting and getting feedback before you launch? Like a few months?

Justin De Witt (15:28)
Right. Yeah, it’s usually a couple of months depending on where we’re at in development and all that. And also what kind of feedback we get. If we end up running into big problems, then we may have to take it back a step and redesign. Yeah, I’ve had games that we tested for a couple of weeks and they were done. They would tend to be simpler games. I’ve had other games where we have been testing for months and months and months and months and months while we work on other projects kind of thing. And they’re still not done.

of some of them. We also had ones that we’ve tested up to a certain point and then decided, nope, this game’s just not working. Let’s kill it. It’s not necessarily the first test. But I would say, yeah, if you’re really lucky, it’s going to be a couple of tests a few weeks and you’re done, especially if you’ve really done your work and cleaned it out good before you started public testing. But it can also go on for a long time.

Jason Hsieh (16:11)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I want to kind of switch focus and talk a little bit about the marketing aspect of the business. You mentioned about like how you’re really strong with the distribution channel, with the business. about digital marketing? What has been some of the strategy you’re doing in 2025 that’s working for the brand to make sure you can continue to grow and get into the hands of more potential customers?

Justin De Witt (16:35)
Yeah, great question. first off, we have done almost all forms of digital marketing. We used to, because we started from so long ago, there used to be a lot more print advertising that was popular for board games. There were different magazines, publications like that. We have scaled that back and moved almost exclusively to digital with a few print ads here and there. And most of those are kind of industry publications. They’re meant for people who own a game store, maybe, rather than advertising to consumer.

Consumer advertising and some retail is definitely digital. we use Facebook, we do TikTok, we’ve done Instagram, all that stuff. We definitely find different audiences in those channels. You know, there are some that we can target certain age ranges and experiences better than others. That’s been huge. We use Google AdWords. We’re pretty embedded in all that stuff. are constantly changing or constantly looking at it. Because that’s the other thing is these things evolve very quickly. We will oftentimes

week to week have to make adjustments where certain marketing campaigns are working in one way and not in another. And you want to have fresh content, of course, like that. You want to be trying to find new audiences, because there’s so many neat things you can do in the back on finding people who like this and might like that. And if it turns out they love it, those guys don’t. It’s very interesting. But yeah, I think the biggest thing there is, just keep trying new stuff and push for new ways to get it in front of people. That’s the biggest thing.

Jason Hsieh (17:50)
How about Amazon? How do you handle Amazon as a channel?

Justin De Witt (17:53)
⁓ We, Amazon is a little bit weird for us. We sell our games to Amazon primarily. That’s how most for us sales are. We have an Amazon store. It’s not very active. We use it more as kind of a, it gets a little complicated, but because we have an Amazon store, we have certain things we can do on Amazon. And that’s really more valuable for us rather than us trying to sell it. We would rather sell games to Amazon and let them sell for us. That works really well. As far as marketing goes, yeah, we do a lot of marketing. We drive a mix of

consumer contact to like regional game stores. We don’t drive much for our website for various reasons, but we do. then, and then Amazon. like we’ll be like, you know, Hey, go to your local game store and buy this or go to your local game store and play, play a copy because it’s in their store. Or, and then then we do some Amazon links, obviously, we, we do allow reselling on Amazon to a limit there. So you will see other people selling our games on Amazon now and then.

Usually though Amazon honestly owns the buy box most of the time they if they don’t have it we do 90 % of the time there can be weird outages with inventory sometimes Because we don’t store games with Amazon. We just sell them what they want. We don’t have it It’s not FBA. It’s actually sales to Amazon. So yeah, they’re definitely one of our biggest channels though mean Amazon is by far and away the biggest consumer the biggest sales channel for us. Yeah

Jason Hsieh (19:06)
Are you also running ads using the Amazon channel as in to the vendor portal?

Justin De Witt (19:12)
I believe yes, yes, we are actually we do some of that. Sorry, that’s more Anne-Marie’s end of things than mine. But yeah, we do. We do run those as well too. And those are constantly changing too, because that’s really interesting. You can get real time feedback on we ran this ad and 10 people bought a copy versus like we run this app for two weeks and no one’s bought kill it. I said that it’s nice to have that dynamic. That feedback is amazing. I wish I could get that feedback with my normal sales that are out to stores that I don’t know what’s happening. I just know a certain amount of games sold this month into distribution. Where they are, how many sold, I don’t know. It’s really hard to get those data.

Jason Hsieh (19:43)
I got it. And I think with the rise of digital gaming, like you mentioned, video game, what has been some of the key things that you are doing right now to keep board games more relevant and still attractive to new players because they also have other options to play video game.

Justin De Witt (20:00)
yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s a challenge, I think. ⁓ Getting people to get off their screens is tough. But I will say, we try to meet them where they are. Like, we will put ads on Facebook and TikTok, et cetera. And we try to make them very colorful and obviously game-oriented. Not even necessarily like, here, look at all my pieces. It’s more like, here’s this fun thing you’re going to do. And you’ll roll some dice and move pieces to do it. we don’t oftentimes, we may use like animated intros and things like that, you animate the cover art and stuff. So we try and make it obviously more playful and not

quite so obvious that this is an unplugged experience. I mean, we do. It’s a board game at the end. We usually show it covered the box, but try to make it more playful and engaging rather than just going, look at all these fancy pieces. Cause that works great for like Kickstarter people. But if you are a video gamer that doesn’t want to put down the controller and I show you 300 plastic minis and all these things you’re to have to do, they don’t want that. They literally like, yeah, it’s too hard. I’ll just go click, click, click. It’s easier. And I get it. I game too. So I understand. Yeah. I think that’s the trick is,

hitting them where they’re going to be. again, different age ranges, different types of gamers are on different channels and platforms. And then hit them with something that makes it look super appealing as a gamer versus as a consumer. Like what’s going to make it shiny for somebody who wants to see the certain kind of shine.

Jason Hsieh (21:08)
I see. Thank you for sharing that. So I guess the next question I want to ask is like, what is your vision for the company for the years to come? Like what is next?

Justin De Witt (21:18)
Right. Well, our vision has been and still continues to be essentially keep growing the company We’re looking for the next evergreen if we can. We want all of our products to be permanent. So we’ve been really lucky. We have like three or four that are permanently on reprint. We just constantly have them going. And then, you know, the new games, sometimes they hit, sometimes they miss, sometimes they trickle. Sometimes it takes a certain like celebrity or something to jump in and make them go up. But yeah.

We’re not looking, Fireside has never been about being a giant rule-the-world company. We’ve had like a max five employees. We’re back down to just my wife and I now. And that’s just, partly is this industry. It’s not stable enough for that kind of growth and that level of employment at our scale with the kind of games we do. I think there are some Kickstarter companies that can do that, but we’re more, that family-friendly element keeps us a little smaller. Plus we are very conservative when it comes to risk. We’re not big on like,

hiring people that we have to let go or anything. We don’t want to do that. yeah, the growth primarily has been look for new markets, look for new players specifically. And that’s where I think we have a nice advantage in that a lot of our games are really accessible. They’re very family friendly. They’re very easy to learn. They play short. Their game play is short. So we have a really good chance of bringing people into this industry, getting them hooked and then selling them more games kind of thing. that’s probably the biggest growth I would say. We definitely want to push a little further into Europe. We know we’re underrepresented there.

and foreign language licensed versions, we could do more. We definitely only have a few right now that are big. But in the States, it really comes down to make amazing games. That’s what we want to be known for is people want people to pick up our games. Have you played this or people referring to Castle Panic and saying, my gosh, you’ve got to try this kind of thing. So that’s probably the biggest way I would say we’re focusing our growth. That we’re being very careful. We’re not taking out a lot of loans. We’re not dealing with a lot of like funding issues we have to pay back. We’re very clean on our credit and stuff like that. So yeah.

Jason Hsieh (23:01)
Okay, got it, got it, got it. And as well wrapping up today’s interview, the last question I always like to ask the guests is if you had to share just one piece of advice with someone that’s getting started within the toys and game industry, what would that be?

Justin De Witt (23:14)
I think the most important thing, especially from a game point of view, if you’re coming up with a game and you think it’s neat, the biggest decision you need to make is do you want to be a game designer or do you want to be a business owner? And that’s a huge difference. If you’re a game designer, you’re probably selling your games to other companies. You’re signing them with other companies. They will give you checks for free every month. It’s great, but you are going to have to work to get those games signed. If you want to make your own game, and this includes Kickstarter, once you run a Kickstarter, you started a business.

And that involves everything like safety testing, international shipping. You will have nightmares about tariffs very, very personally. You have to deal with distribution. When a train goes off a rail somewhere and your freight can’t get from A to B, you’re going to know about it. When the Panama Canal gets blocked, you’re going to have a heart attack. There’s all this stuff that happens. And it’s one of those things where it is fun, but it is very little design. my days are a struggle to claw back design from all the other stuff we have to do to keep the company running.

So that’s one of my biggest things when I talk to somebody, especially they’re getting into it. It’s like if you want to run a business and you’re ready to do all that takes accounting taxes, all that great, have fun, but understand your day will no longer be 100 % design. It will will be 20, 30 % design and 80 % running a company. So that’s probably the biggest thing I would say. Make your decision. They’re both valid, but they feel very different at the end of the day. And then, know, work your butt off for it.

Jason Hsieh (24:32)
For sure, for sure. Some people is built for that and myself included, would definitely enjoy being an entrepreneur. Just a designer. But obviously, you also come with different level of stress. Yes. Well, a whole bunch of different balls you need to juggle 100%. Not even balls, more like eggs that you need to juggle

Justin De Witt (24:49)
Don’t drop them. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it. Yeah. Well, and it’s the constant change too, is what’s funny. It’s like even before the current turmoil we’re in right now, the industry is constantly changing. taste change, styles change, art styles get updated. You’re never just sitting back making the same thing again. You are always pushing for the next new thing and all that. And while it’s exciting, it can get exhausting. I wasn’t gray haired when we started the company.

Jason Hsieh (25:12)
For sure. And also, think the other thing people didn’t realize, even if they choose the design route, usually the industry only pay you 5 % royalty, sometimes even less. So all the work you put in for like less than 5%.

Justin De Witt (25:25)
Yeah, and that depends on what to how big are the sales. That’s why if you talk to any of the guys who’ve done this for a living before, you’ll realize they have like 30 or 40 games they’re getting paid for not one or two. That’s why they’re able to make a living and a lot of them I know successful designers out there. They still have a day job, but they love what they do and they make these games, but they’re not paying the bills with it. It’s more like helping and the plan is to eventually pay the bills. So yeah, but you have none of the

chaos and stress about it and you can just, you can help as much as you want kind of thing. So I don’t know. There’s definitely trade-offs. Yeah.

Jason Hsieh (25:55)
Yeah, that’s some pros and cons people want to consider, but that’s definitely a very common crossroad that people need to make their decisions.

Justin De Witt (26:02)
Yeah, creator versus owner operator is a big deal.

Jason Hsieh (26:05)
Yeah, 100%. So, okay. So where is the best place for people to find you online?

Justin De Witt (26:11)
The best place is probably honestly, check out our website firesidegames.com. We’re also on TikTok. We have some fun ones up there. We’re on Blue Sky. We’re on Instagram. can get us, and it’s all a variation of fireside games. Is that usually one word? It’s very easy to find us like that. And we’re really good. We have a newsletter too, if people are genuinely interested in what we’re doing. The newsletter is super, super focused. We only announce like new things that are happening, events we’re running, like doing things in person, that kind of stuff.

It’s not just a spam of like, hey, buy our stuff. It’s always, here’s the latest thing we’re working on. So I’d advise it. And you can sign up on our website.

Jason Hsieh (26:44)
What are some of the trade show that people can find you at?

Justin De Witt (26:46)
We go to all the big ones in the US. Origins, GenCon, we’ll be at Pax Unplugged. I think that’s the ones for this year. Sometimes we’ll do some of the smaller ones time to time. We kind of rotate through those. This year, that’s going to be about it, I think, for us. then, yeah, next year we’ll see. There may be more ones we add. We’re always experimenting.

Last year we did a couple of international ones. We’re going to probably make those every other year kind of things for us. see. We’re still figuring a few things out. But yeah, if you’re at any of the big ones, we’ll be there.

Jason Hsieh (27:13)
I see. Okay. Thank you so much for sharing and thank you again for being on our podcast and sharing your experiences. The strategy. Yeah, you’re welcome. And for our listeners thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. We hope you really have enjoyed today’s conversation and find it insightful and inspiring. If you’d like what you have heard, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform so you never miss an episode. We really appreciate your support.

and we’d love it if you can leave us a review and share the podcast with your friend and colleague. For more resource tips and the latest update within the toys and game industry, visit our website at toy-launch.com. Join the conversation and connect with us on social media using #toybusinessunboxed. We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future episodes. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joy to toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the Toy Business Unboxed podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much.