The Crowdfunded Board Game Renaissance

An anonymous reader writes: FiveThirtyEight has an article about the surging popularity of new board games, which is being boosted by campaigns on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Since Kickstarter came online in 2009, board games and card games have accrued $196 million in pledges, 93% of which went to successful projects. That's even better than video games have done, at $179 million and 85%. For an industry whose yearly sales don't tend to break $1 billion, those are impressive numbers. The article attempts to explain their success: "Designers show up, explain their game idea on a Web page, often with photos and a video, and ask for pledges. That lets a designer learn, in real time, what the demand for his game is. ... Second, they are democratizing tools. Internet crowdfunding has done the same thing for game designers that blogging platforms did for writers: turned them into publishers."

Comments

Real interaction

[new_01]

People are craving real interaction. A couple decades of staring at screens and we all are realizing we don't want to raise our families by passing on the habit. There's value in gaming, the shared goal of competition. The problem is that we lost something during those years. The face-to-face personal interaction gave way to internet connected walls. No more humanity, replaced with avatars and emojis and the simulation of real human connections. Nothing shows the glaring difference from what we've become than a live game of poker. Where part of the game is to master the art of being human. It's why writers and directors think we'll still be playing the game hundreds of light years from here sitting abort starships across the table from androids and aliens.

Predictable

[Daetrin]

Since Kickstarter came online in 2009, board games and card games have accrued $196 million in pledges, 93% of which went to successful projects. That's even better than video games have done, at $179 million and 85%.

Board games are much more predictable than video games. You need to spend approximately as much person-power figuring out the rules to a board game as you do to a video game. However the art requirements are probably the equivalent to that of a comparatively simple puzzle video game. (Which is not to say that they don't both require good art design to be effective, just that they don't need to come up with designs for dozens of worlds and hundreds of enemies, like you might in an RPG.)

After that however, you're pretty much done with the design. You don't need programmer to develop the entire platform. You need to play test the game itself, but you don't need a QA team continuously checking a whole list of things like "is it still possible to walk through the wall in quadrant three if you do a charge attack while crouching?"

You _do_ need to find a manufacturer to produce the components, but unless you've come up with something really crazy that's pretty much a solved problem. I'm sure that trying to find the best build quality you can for a decent price is a lot of _work_, but you're not going to ask them to change the color of a piece and then be surprised the next day to find that the game now crashes if you try to perform a certain move with that piece.

Board games are also much less prone to feature creep. Too many video games kickstarters get a lot of money and then decide to expand the scope of the game. Or they just fall prey to the natural temptation to add features during development. Very rarely do people working on a board game stop and say something like "but wouldn't it be cool if we also added a mini-game where you capture and train monsters?"

So if you can clearly explain your concept to the audience then they can be very confident that you'll be able to pull it off given proper funding (assuming that your intentions are honest of course) and pretty confident that what comes out at the end is similar to what they were promised at the beginning. That's reflected in the 93% success rate and feeds into the relatively high enthusiasm compared to the size of the total market.

There is a reason...

[Lumpy]

Hasbro has no interest in anything for adults. All the big board game makers are ran by morons. They told the CAH guys to go to hell that nobody would ever buy their card game.

It's proof that large corporations do not have a clue how to bring products to the world anymore and are old worthless dinosaurs that are no longer needed.