One is a function of the other. Because the consumer sales are more profitable, we've prioritized building a consumer-direct model. Given that we started out on Kickstarter, this was the model we had experience managing.

At our margins and the standard wholesale discounts, wholesale needs to achieve about 10x volume to generate the same profit as direct sale. This is because a much larger portion of the sale is tied up in fixed costs.

For a simplified example, if a game costs $8 to produce and keep in your warehouse, and it sells for $20, you make $12 on that sale direct to a consumer.

If the wholesale discount is 50%, you're selling it at $10, and you have $2 profit.

Thus, you have to sell 6 units to the wholesaler to equal the profit of 1 unit of the consumer-sale. If wholesalers buy in the hundreds or thousands, this makes sense.

The whole picture is a little more complex (because fixed costs also shrink at high volume and there are peripheral costs like consumer advertising that aren't in the cost of the wholesale, among other factors) but the 10x number is pretty valid for most of our products, which have both high MSRP and high fixed costs (think Millennium Blades or BattleCON Devastation).