It used to be better even 10 years ago, but my understanding is that the demand for time on the manufacturing machines has gone way up due to Kickstarter and the popularity of D&D, and supply of machines has not gone up because it takes engineers and investors literally begging (and sometimes even threatening to sue from the investor-side) for management to even consider buying new machines (Thanks Lean Six Sigma). I’d say the biggest thing creating cost here is the board itself, the packaging, and the (looks like three or four) decks of cards, not the punch tokens.
That said, I could be way off and they are pushing these babies out for 10 bucks a pop.
I have a buddy that just published a game last year, and his set up isn’t much more complicated than this, with more plastic counters, and his ran for 80 dollars outside of retail, which wasn’t much above cost (according to him).
I think a good comparison would be a game like Dead of Winter which has like at least twice as much papercraft stuff in it as this Storm the Capitol game but at highest I think sold $79.99 retail and was rather profitable.
The difference in your friend’s game is the plastic counters, I think. A pair of my friends have been publishing games for almost a decade now and they try to exclusively design papercraft games because of the difference in cost to produce.
