Musings on the game business
November 2nd, 2011 Posted in businessA lot has changed in the gaming business since our launch in 2007. I thought I’d give my own perspective on changes that we’ve personally seen / felt and some trends that might continue.
The Explosion of Deck Builders
By far, the biggest change has been the creation of the entire category of deck-builders starting with Dominion. It’s a category that continues to grow, with sales quite robust for most of the new releases in this category. Deck-builders seem to be the new ‘gateway’ game to the hobby. It’ll be interesting to see where this category goes with new ideas and gameplay mechanics & themes.
Better inventory control by publishers
Stock-outs by many of the publishers are becoming less common; and when they do, are generally refilled within a few months at most. When we first started, games could go out-of-print for months at a time. Most memorably – Settlers of Catan during it’s changeover to the 4th Edition during Christmas.
This of course relates to the major publishers – we still have issues with some of the smaller publisher games (e.g. Slugfest and Asmodee being great examples).
More Exclusive Sales
There are two parts to this – firstly, exclusive sales to brick & mortar stores that we’ve discussed before (e.g. Alien Frontiers). It’s an interesting trend that obviously hurts our business; who knows how that affects publishers though they obviously feel there are benefits to exclusively selling to B&M’s.
More importantly, there has been a trend for certain publishers to go exclusive with distributors. This is in fact more problematical for us – we’ve had to open new distributor accounts and has increased the cost of our games at times because of this. When a distributor has a $400 free ship limit, and you only need 1 game (or line of games) from them; you either have to split your normal order up or stock-up a huge amount of that 1 game.
Kickstarter as Financing
There’s a new trend (within the last year) to use Kickstarter as a financing method for board games. Backers get some additional benefits for backing the games, while publishers get their funding upfront from customers. It’s an innovative method that has seen some great new games launched; but it’s also another area we have to keep an eye out for potential new games. We’ve taken part in a few Kickstarter projects, so we’ll see how sales for those games work out. There’s always the question of whether the Kickstarter backers have ‘drained’ the pool of potential customers already, leaving few customers for us retailers.
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