We are looking forward to the re-opening of the Singaporean economy on 4th of May when the bombshell dropped... The lock-down is to be extended by one more month.
Previously, we were running a COVID-19 promotion to boost our sales from e-commerce and the results were encouraging. In the midst of this campaign, we had a chat with fellow game publisher Lilian, the brainchild behind "Say What" series of games and threw ideas at each other on how to boost the sales of our products respectively on our e-commerce site.
Some of the ideas include:
· Doing giveaways to promote awareness of the game
· Working with other publishers to give away coupons across publishers who have their own e-commerce sites
· Cross marketing of each other games on social media
The idea that stuck onto us is to start a consolidated e-commerce site consist of only Singapore designed games and helping to raise awareness of Singaporean designed board games in a market long dominated by imported games. We can extend our experience of running ads for our own products to the consolidated site and help newer indie designers who have relatively little experience in marketing or e-commerce.
So we created an informal collaboration called "Singapore Boardgame Design" using Shopee as our e-commerce platform and attempt to get various Singaporean designers to participate .
We are hopeful that a consolidated effort from the participating designers and publishers can help to deliver a loud enough punch to create more awareness among Singaporeans, which a low budget Facebook advertising campaign can never hope to achieve on its own. We also do not have a portal in Singapore to consolidate all the Singaporean board games under one roof, and by doing so, we can help bring attention to the less well known titles designed by indie Singaporean designers who may not have the resources to run marketing campaigns or have linked ups with friendly local board game stores.
As of now, there is no plan to extend this initiative past the COVID-19 lockdown period as the amount of work to maintain this platform is beyond the capability of our small team, who probably will have to be busy again with day to day battle once the economy re-opens.
In any case, we can only hope to focus on the present and do what we can to help everyone to survive past this difficult period.
So.... if you are looking for other activities that does not involve binge watching Netflix or playing computer games, you can consider board game as a form of medium of entertainment during this lockdown period!
Stay Home... Support Local Games!
Check out the newly started store https://shopee.sg/singaporeboardgamedesign
If you are a fellow tabletop game designer who wishes to participate in this initiative, do drop us an email at info@capitalgainsgroup.com .
