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[hanako]

So, we're just back from displaying at Fanime and selling our games in boxes we printed up ourselves. I've got the full data on my blog here but to sum up: about 100 copies sold (at either $5, $10, or $20). Certainly pays for costs, but sitting on your ass for eight hours smiling at people is more exhausting than you'd think.

I'm not sure what the equivalent would be for indie games outside of comics/anime. Afaik there's no such thing as a cheap indie booth section at the big gaming shows, and I would NOT recommend trying to hold down a booth at a random street fair. I think a couple GM kids sold little games at flea markets, but I don't know if anyone's ever tried doing it seriously with proper equipment and full-length games.

[mankoon]

I wish there was an indie game con in the scope of an anime con.  I've sat at artist alley tables before... it is exhausting to talk to that many people for 3 days straight while keeping a smile. In the times that I've gone it's always been to sell my own art we haven't gone the extra step to sell games there yet but I know there's potential. We released Legend of Fae on steam the same week as Otakon last year - It would have been awesome if we prepared more but that was a rough week .  
Since then I considered printing Keys on Moo.com cards since moo allows you to do a print run of completely unique cards ( like this project:http://us.moo.com/ideas/perch.html). A box however sounds way more attractive. I'd love to see what they looked like!! Also congrats on doing so well!

[Bambino2012]

That was great for you
How and where did you print your boxes ?
Any chance we can see them ?

[hanako]

There are a few blurry photographs of some of them floating around the net; we'll have to get around to remaking most of them before we can take new pictures though. If you scroll down to the bottom of this old blog post:
http://whineaboutgames.blogspot.com/2011/06/magical-diary-trailer.html
you can see one of the boxes for Magical Diary.

We used a professional printing company (discmakers) to get the box-cover inserts (That particular style of glossy paper is expensive enough that it would cost us MORE to print them ourselves, at least where we were looking) and then bought piles of blank DVD cases and hub-printable discs, which went into an inkjet for surface designs, then burned the content on.

Discmakers will happily do the whole thing for you, including a fancier non-inky CD printing technique, but honestly the inkjet version tends to look a little sharper (once it's calibrated right) and unless you pour water over your discs who's to know? They also have lots and lots of nice packaging options if you want to make things fancier. If you only have one product to order you may be happier letting them do the whole shebang and save you the trouble of setting up a home factory.

[mankoon]

Awesome!  I didn't know there was a website for this service. Thanks for sharing all of this :D Do you plan to do more cons?

[hanako]

Only if they're convenient enough and offer a reasonable chance of covering costs. We used to do YaoiCon (despite not actually selling yaoi) but it moved to LA and we don't want to go there.