Slashdot Mirror
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."
Internet crowdfunding has done the same thing for game designers that blogging platforms did for writers: turned them into publishers.
Perhaps, but most of the board game Kickstarters I see are from publishers; and often large ones at that. Most designers will tell you, if you are interested in being a board game designer, do not attempt to publish your game. The amount of work involved is all-consuming as publishers do far more than simple distribution. As a designer board game enthusiast, I listen to a fair amount of podcasts on the subject like The Dice Tower and The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast. Board Games Insider, however, is by the CEOs of Portal Games and Stronghold Games, and is all about the business of board games not the playing of them. It's a really interesting look behind the curtain and I highly recommend it.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
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.
Except this "fad" has had a huge resurgence/boom in recent years, and has truly been going strongly for the past twenty years (in the U.S.), with the introduction of Eurogames (German games) to the American audience. (Settlers of Catan usually gets the credit for being the first big Eurogame to hit it big in the States back in 1995.) Board games were always something Americans played, but all we knew were the likes of games like Monopoly, Risk, Sorry, etc... Those games can be fun for a bit, but they often outlast their welcome before long. The world was simply waiting for designer board games...
Games are much more refined now and there is a ton of variety, so basically anyone can find something they like. Wargames? Sure, we have plenty... Deep strategy games?... yup! Amerithrashy fun with lots of minis and dice?... of course! Card games?... well, duh. Abstract games? Word games? Party games? Yes, yes, and yes! We are currently in the real golden age of boardgaming. There has never been a better time to be a fan of board games. I play in a gaming group weekly and we don't have any people I would label as hipsters... we're basically all geeks/nerds. heh Everyone there is a programmer or works with computers in some way. The hobby seems to attract that type. :-)
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
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.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
That's obviously not the case. The GP gave very specific examples of Hipsterism. These are traits that are very specific to the Millennial generation; those who are now between 20 and 35 years old. We typically don't see people older than that engaging in these behaviors, nor do we see younger people engaging in them, as well. As a Hipster, it's understandable that you may not recognize the fact that your behaviors are, to put it nicely, pretty fucking idiotic. But it's irrelevant that you choose to ignore the fact that Hipsters are a specific, identifiable group who collectively fall for really dumb fads. The reality will remain reality regardless of what you mistakenly believe.
Looks like the proliferation of Kickstarter games has started trickling down to related projects.
For example, somebody made meeple pillows (Meepillows) and put them on Kickstarter: The project exceeded its five-figure goal in under three days. And per Kikcktraq, its trending to over $80,000. (https://www.kicktraq.com/projects/faust1138/meepillows-an-assortment-of-colorful-large-plush-m/)
So now we're talking almost six figures worth of demand for game-related pillows, which leads me to think there may be six-figure demand for other game-related projects as well. Would other pillow projects bring in six figures? Maybe at this point they would!
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm not sure that's right, at least in this case.
I'm in my 30's and I know plenty of people, both older and younger, that DO play board games and card games, because they grew up with those and are passing them on to the kids in the family.
It's not an all-consuming thing, nor something we talk about a lot when we're not actually planning for a game night, but we don't really regard playing games as a metric of social status. Maybe it's because a lot of us are engineers or programmers or (in my night life) athletic types that enjoy competition, but it seems to me a lot of people I know just like games.
But go ahead and bag on what everyone else likes as being "uncool", hipster.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
I suspect the results aren't balanced since Exploding Kittens came out this year.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Well, the obvious thing to do in this thread is to rave about your favorite game right?
I have a 7yr old, so we needed to find a game we'd all like, and the whole "who wins?" bit turned into an issue with a kid that age.
We finally stumbled on "Castle Panic" which is quite frankly an amazing game.
Dice Tower review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's actually incredibly fun despite being cooperative. Everyone gets to talk about how they should approach defeating the monsters. Kids get super excited when they kill monsters. I highly recommend it. And yes, even adults enjoy this games.
...somebody is selling you a game based only on a list of components and a "theme". Except for a few that have been vetted by serious publishers, most "kickstarter" games I've played have been dreadful. Most should have been trashed after the first playtest. Many probably didn't GET a first playtest. Why bother, if everyone has ponied up their cash already?
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Ye olde pen and pap'r role playing games are thriving in the crowdfunding environment. White Wolf's classic World of Darkness line, which ended over a decade ago making way for their new revamped (rimshot) 2.0 version has been resurrected (groan), bought and licensed from the clueless buffoons at CCP games who absorbed WW. Under the Onyx Path label many original authors and developers have used Kickstarter campaigns amazingly effectively producing some excellent quality stuff that's at least as good as the original, I think even better in some cases. Projects usually get 100% funding within hours and most of the projects I followed and sent money to capped off at ~ 200-300% or more. Shadowrun, BattleTech and Call of Cthulhu are all doing well in crowdfunded ecosystem plus the massive amount of independent projects and project lines is staggering. Even better, the [total dogshit]:[pretty good] ratio has been steadily rising as well.
check out BoardGameGeek.com, it contains a list of nearly 80,000 games/components/expansions.
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/b...
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
It certainly doesn't help that the established industry has basically turned into a card game business in the last 5 years. The deck-building game concept was fun and novel back when Dominion landed, but it seems to be 90% of the 'new' product now. Even worse, card games lend themselves much more naturally to expansions, and people are repeating the same mistakes that were made decades ago with Netrunner and Magic.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
Don't forget the big (flagship) Wizards of the Coast product... Magic: The Gathering. Most people lump card games in with board games, so that one counts, as well. ;-) Definitely one of the most successful games of all time... and is responsible for keeping many a game shop in business today.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
The difference between "hipster" and some other interest is that hipster things seem to be done for some sort of style statement. Wearing pointless glasses, or riding old bikes or being a "lumbersexual" is just a style, not a hobby or an interest.
I suppose you could have fad board games, but actually playing board games doesn't mesh with a "hipster" style over substance mentality. People have been playing things like Eurogames for years, and for other games like Axis and Allies and more adult themed board/card games, people have been playing those games for decades.
When I was younger I liked playing board games of that type, the only real problem was finding people to play them with. Now that I'm an adult, I can find people who I can enjoy them with. There's absolutely nothing hipster about it because it doesn't really impart any sort of style statement. And for the most part, its the same old gamers who I was used to playing games with in the past. I haven't noted anyone sporting style statements at game night, unless you consider the black t-shirt to be a hipster style.
Now, if people who identify as hipsters happen to have become interested in board games, good for them. But saying that board gaming is a hipster trend would be like calling steak a hipster trend because hipsters all started to like steak. Both board games and steak pretty much stand alone from those who are actually partaking of them.
As someone who has been playing board games more than 40 years, the present generation are brilliant compared with the old ones. Having spend many an interesting evening 30 years ago over what are now obsolete ones, I can promise you that the new generation ones are worth finding out about; we got a taste of the good stuff in the past - but now the same things that took 10 hours are packed into 2 without ANY loss of interest.
You don't even need Kickstarter, there are print-on-demand self-publishing for board games. Generally, board game publishing requires minimum runs in the thousands. A few years ago, I worked on the first version of TheGameCrafter, which makes it even easier. Then, once you've got a few prototypes, you can move it onto Kickstarter for a full production run.
I suppose you could have fad board games, but actually playing board games doesn't mesh with a "hipster" style over substance mentality.
Shouldn't it? It used to be big in America a while back, and it's less convenient than video gaming. Sounds right up their alley.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, put that way, I can see why they'd be interested in it.
For all of that, I don't see much in the way of hipsters when I play. It's mostly people who grew up in the 80's and 90's who used to play games like this when we were younger.
Now that they have kids, they can't always commit to RPG campaigns or things like that. They want to have a reason to be social and have people over that is a lot more fun than a cocktail party or whatever else adults might do to be social when they invite people over. :)
I don't have the problem of children, but since most of my friends now have them, it's something to do when visiting and socializing and it's a lot more likely that the women will play too, if you pick the right game.
I just found out about it the other day. I'm sure I was the last one.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Wearing pointless glasses, or riding old bikes or being a "lumbersexual" is just a style, not a hobby or an interest.
No. A style is something that you do or wear that tells the world what you are and shows your individuality. All of that is just a fashion; it's people saying, "Me too!"
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Ah! Yes, Splendor is also in my collection. :-) Definitely a fun one. I also like how zippy and easy it is. Definitely a good "gateway" game that you can easily get non-gamers to play too. Then they become gaming junkies before long and have 5 huge bookshelves full of games inside of a year. heh ;-)
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^