I often wonder “why don’t board games
sell like video games?” Now, I know that there have been a few tabletop games
that have sold a million or more copies (many of the ones that have, took
decades to do so) but none of them sell with the speed that video games do. Why
not?
After some observation and thought
(and experience as I have been playing and creating tabletop games and video
games my whole life), I came to the following conclusion: Videogame players are the same audience as movie audiences while boardgame
players are the same audience as books readers.
You just have to look at the success
of board games in retail spaces like Barnes and Noble – and the decline of
their movie section – to see this in action. However, I think there is something
else going on and it has to do with each media’s respective audiences. In terms
of attention span and temperament, these audiences for these media are very different.
Each media has several factors that appeal to or turn off an audience. I call
these factors the barriers to entry.
Movies and video games have a “low” barrier to entry while books and board games
have a “higher” barrier to entry.
Let’s look at the barrier of entry
to watch a movie. A movie viewer needs the time (roughly 90-120 min) and money
(or access if we including today’s streaming services) to watch the movie. If
you want to be pedantic, you can include attention span to that. However, once
the movie has started, the audience member’s gratification can be almost
immediate. Remember back to the first time you saw Star Wars (Star Wars: Episode
IV: A New Hope to those of you who didn’t watch it in 1977) and when that
Star Destroyer can rumbling by. I don’t know about you but I was enthrall from
that opening scene. Immediate gratification.
The barrier of entry to video games is higher than a movie’s but the time to gratification can be the same. Audience members require (if they are playing a console game) the money for the game system (several hundred dollars) and the software ($40-60), the ability/dexterity to play the game (which can often be a factor is why someone doesn’t play or finish a game) and, of course, the time to play the game (the average is 6 – 20 hours) – however, if you are playing a mobile game then the time commitment is much, much shorter: closer to minutes than hours. However, players put up with these factored because, just like movie audiences, a video game player can get almost immediate gratification from playing a game.
The book reader’s barrier of entry
is almost the opposite to a movie/video game. The product is far less expensive
than video games (closer in the case of a movie) but the time commitment can be
considerably longer (depending on the length of the book) and, more
importantly, requires constant engagement from the reader. Unlike movies –
which is a completely passive experience, if book readers stop reader, the
experience stops. The same is true for many video games, but it is possible to “play”
a video game absent-mindedly. Another barrier to entry is that book readers
have to make their engagement in the content based solely on faith. Movies and
video games have trailers – it is easy for audiences to make a decision to
engage in the content based solely on the trailer. With a book, there’s the
cover and, if you are willing, you might read a few pages in the store or
on-line. There’s a reason that the saying “you can’t judge a book by its cover”
exists!
Gratification for book readers is much
more delayed than a movie or a video game - sometimes substantially- often a reader
might have to finish a book before they know whether they liked it. Or in my
own experience, it might require revisiting to form an opinion.
The barrier of entry for tabletop gaming
requires more money than a book (of course, this depends on the game. A game
like The Mind is only $9.99 at
Target, while Mansions of Madness costs
$99.99), and require the same level of trust as a book reader to discover
whether a game is “good” or not. The maxim “You can’t judge a book by its cover”
applies to board games as well and you can watch all of the “watch it played”
videos you’d like - but just like a video game - you just won’t know whether
you like a tabletop game until you play it. The forums of BoardGameGeek.Com are
littered with reviews stating “I thought I’d like this more.”
As with video games, the time
commitment for tabletop games varies – minutes to hours – but modern hobbyist
games often trend towards hours. And don’t get me started on campaign games
like Gloomhaven, Kingdom Death: Monster and Dungeons
and Dragons. (I have a friend who has been playing the same D&D
campaign for decades!)
Of all of the entertainment mediums,
the game rules offer the highest barrier of entry. Designer Rob Daviau has noted
that “the best moment of owning a game is when you open the box and the worst
moment is when you read the rules.” I don’t know about you but there have been
many times where I have read the rules to a game, thought I understood how to
play it and still “played it wrong”?).
Finally, there is one last barrier
of entry to tabletop gaming: other people. Most games require other players to
even engage – all other forms of media we’ve discussed are solitary – and it
can be challenging, if not difficult to gather the players necessary to play a tabletop
game. This is one of the reasons why I think “solo modes” have taken off in
board gaming.
So will “board games ever sell like
video games?” My research points to “no”. The barriers of entry for board games
is just to high for the mass market. But does it need to sell like video games?
I think this starts the discussion for an even more relevant question, “why do board games
need to be compared to video games or movies or books at all?”
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