Wargame Publishing Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars developing each new game did lead to a number of computer wargame publishers going bankrupt. The largest manual wargames never cost more than a tenth of that. Computer games are more expensive because the people working on them get paid a lot more. These higher pay scales exist because your average game programmer could be making even more money working on non-game software.
Games are fun, so many programmers take the pay cut.
The people designing manual wargames make half that, or less. If the games didn't sell in sufficient quantity, you lost money. Returns and Other Risks Returns are the policy whereby stores buy the games from the publisher with the understanding that they can ship back what they can't sell. The bright side of this is that the store owners don't have to take on a large financial risk to carry a game, the down side is that publishers in these circumstances do. If too many unsold games are returned, the publisher takes a big fiscal hit.