Cards Against Humanity
The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.
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Cards Against Humanity is a private, for-profit company that makes a popular party game by the same name. Founded in 2011 in the U.S.
Revenue model: charging for physical copies
Interview date: February 3, 2016
Interviewee: Max Temkin, cofounder
Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson
If you ask cofounder Max Temkin, there is nothing particularly interesting about the Cards Against Humanity business model. “We make a product. We sell it for money. Then we spend less money than we make,” Max said.
He is right. Cards Against Humanity is a simple party game, modeled after the game Apples to Apples. To play, one player asks a question or fill-in-the-blank statement from a black card, and the other players submit their funniest white card in response. The catch is that all of the cards are filled with crude, gruesome, and otherwise awful things. For the right kind of people (“horrible people,” according to Cards Against Humanity advertising), this makes for a hilarious and fun game.
The revenue model is simple. Physical copies of the game are sold for a profit. And it works. At the time of this writing, Cards Against Humanity is the number-one best-selling item out of all toys and games on Amazon. There are official expansion packs available, and several official themed packs and international editions as well.
But Cards Against Humanity is also available for free. Anyone can download a digital version of the game on the Cards Against Humanity website. More than one million people have downloaded the game since the company began tracking the numbers.
The game is available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (CC BY-NC-SA). That means, in addition to copying the game, anyone can create new versions of the game as long as they make it available under the same noncommercial terms. The ability to adapt the game is like an entire new game unto itself.
All together, these factors — the crass tone of the game and company, the free download, the
openness to fans remixing the game — give
the game a massive cult following.
Their success is not the result of a grand plan. Instead, Cards Against Humanity was the last in a long line of games and comedy projects that Max Temkin and his friends put together for their own amusement. As Max tells the story, they made the game so they could play it themselves on New Year’s Eve because they were too nerdy to be invited to other parties. The game was a hit, so they decided to put it up online as a free PDF. People started asking if they could pay to have the game printed for them, and eventually they decided to run a Kickstarter to fund the printing. They set their Kickstarter goal at $4,000 — and raised $15,000. The game was officially released in May 2011.
The game caught on quickly, and it has only grown more popular over time. Max says the eight founders never had a meeting where they decided to make it an ongoing business. “It kind of just happened,” he said.
But this tale of a “happy accident” belies marketing genius. Just like the game, the Cards Against Humanity brand is irreverent and memorable. It is hard to forget a company that calls the FAQ on their website “Your dumb questions.”
Like most quality satire, however, there is more to the joke than vulgarity and shock value. The company’s marketing efforts around Black Friday illustrate this particularly well. For those outside the United States, Black Friday is the term for the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, the biggest shopping day of the year. It is an incredibly important day for Cards Against Humanity, like it is for all U.S. retailers. Max said they struggled with what to do on Black Friday because they didn’t want to support what he called the “orgy of consumerism” the day has become, particularly since it follows a day that is about being grateful for what you have. In 2013, after deliberating, they decided to have an Everything Costs $5 More sale.
“We sweated it out the night before Black Friday, wondering if our fans were going to hate us for it,” he said. “But it made us laugh so we went with it. People totally caught the joke.”
This sort of bold transparency delights the media, but more importantly, it engages their fans. “One of the most surprising things you can do in capitalism is just be honest with people,” Max said. “It shocks people that there is transparency about what you are doing.”
Max also likened it to a grand improv scene. “If we do something a little subversive and unexpected, the public wants to be a part of the joke.” One year they did a Give Cards Against Humanity $5 event, where people literally paid them five dollars for no reason. Their fans wanted to make the joke funnier by making it successful. They made $70,000 in a single day.
This remarkable trust they have in their customers is what inspired their decision to apply a Creative Commons license to the game. Trusting your customers to reuse and remix your work requires a leap of faith. Cards Against Humanity obviously isn’t afraid of doing the unexpected, but there are lines even they do not want to cross. Before applying the license, Max said they worried that some fans would adapt the game to include all of the jokes they intentionally never made because they crossed that line. “It happened, and the world didn’t end,” Max said. “If that is the worst cost of using CC, I’d pay that a hundred times over because there are so many benefits.”
Any successful product inspires its biggest fans to create remixes of it, but unsanctioned adaptations are more likely to fly under the radar. The Creative Commons license gives fans of Cards Against Humanity the freedom to run with the game and copy, adapt, and promote their creations openly. Today there are thousands of fan expansions of the game.
Max said,
CC was a no-brainer for us because it gets the most people involved. Making the game free and available under a CC license led to the unbelievable situation where we are one of the best-marketed games in the world, and we have never spent a dime on marketing.
Of course, there are limits to what the company allows its customers to do with the game. They chose the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license because it restricts people from using the game to make money. It also requires that adaptations of the game be made available under the same licensing terms if they are shared publicly. Cards Against Humanity also polices its brand. “We feel like we’re the only ones who can use our brand and our game and make money off of it,” Max said. About 99.9 percent of the time, they just send an email to those making commercial use of the game, and that is the end of it. There have only been a handful of instances where they had to get a lawyer involved.
Just as there is more than meets the eye to the Cards Against Humanity business model, the same can be said of the game itself. To be playable, every white card has to work syntactically with enough black cards. The eight creators invest an incredible amount of work into creating new cards for the game. “We have daylong arguments about commas,” Max said. “The slacker tone of the cards gives people the impression that it is easy to write them, but it is actually a lot of work and quibbling.”
That means cocreation with their fans really doesn’t work. The company has a submission mechanism on their website, and they get thousands of suggestions, but it is very rare that a submitted card is adopted. Instead, the eight initial creators remain the primary authors of expansion decks and other new products released by the company. Interestingly, the creativity of their customer base is really only an asset to the company once their original work is created and published when people make their own adaptations of the game.
For all of their success, the creators of Cards Against Humanity are only partially motivated by money. Max says they have always been interested in the Walt Disney philosophy of financial success. “We don’t make jokes and games to make money — we make money so we can make more jokes and games,” he said.
In fact, the company has given more than $4 million to various charities and causes. “Cards is not our life plan,” Max said. “We all have other interests and hobbies. We are passionate about other things going on in our lives. A lot of the activism we have done comes out of us taking things from the rest of our lives and channeling some of the excitement from the game into it.”
Seeing money as fuel rather than the ultimate goal is what has enabled them to embrace Creative Commons licensing without reservation. CC licensing ended up being a savvy marketing move for the company, but nonetheless, giving up exclusive control of your work necessarily means giving up some opportunities to extract more money from customers.
“It’s not right for everyone to release everything under CC licensing,” Max said. “If your only goal is to make a lot of money, then CC is not best strategy. This kind of business model, though, speaks to your values, and who you are and why you’re making things.”
