SO YOU INVENTED A BOARD GAME, NOW WHAT?

One of the best features of the Board Game business is that the barriers to entry are fairly low. You can come up with a new gameplay mechanic, get some graphic design done, or potentially do it yourself. You then find a factory, send them the specifications and the artwork files, and then you are ready to place an order and get your Game manufactured.

Sounds easy right…? Well we may have summarised a lot of different steps and difficult decisions and creative developments here for the sake of brevity, but the point is this – from a commercial perspective, developing the Game is the easy part!

The easiest thing to do in the business of Board Games is to press the button & write a purchase order for inventory of your Game. The hard part is to actually sell it.

Number one point here – please think very carefully about manufacturing your Game. You can easily create a mock up, or prototype of your Game, you can even today produce a more or less final looking and working version of your Game at a comparatively affordable cost. You may want to go and try to sell that sample to potential customers first before you even think about starting a manufacturing run.

Imagine if the feedback you get is a). that might work, but here’s some things you need to change or b). That product has no chance of working, we would never buy it. If you get this feedback, you will feel silly to have run manufacturing and to be sat on thousands of copies of a Game that nobody wants to buy, or which could have been saleable if you had presented it to the market first and then taken on board the market feedback to tweak your product to make it a much more compelling proposition.

We have advised plenty of companies who have run production and then failed to secure any Sales for the Game. Over the decade and a half we have been in this business of Consulting on the Board Games business, we have had plenty of people pay us to run, in effect, a post mortem for their Game. And routinely within seconds of looking at the Game we spot various critical flaws or misconceptions which make the product commercially unviable.

But that’s not just us, we aren’t saying that we know everything – far from it! But ANY industry person can tell you if your packaging size/format is a problem, if your theme is off, if your gameplay has fundamental flaws, if your product is likely to have any commercial appeal or not. You don’t have to come to us for (paid for) advice and feedback on your product, although you can if you want, but there are many industry source you can validate your Game with first before you start incurring major costs and ordering inventory.

The bottom line then is this: the answer to the question of ‘So you invented a Board Game, Now What?’ is that you need to validate the potential for the Game and seek feedback from the market – both consumers and where relevant to your proposed business model, from Retailers as well. The ‘Now What’ should not lightly be the fact that YOU like your Game so much that you’re going to order 5,000 units of it, at least not until you find out if other people share your enthusiasm for your Game!

If you want to check our Board Games Business Consultancy services, just click here: https://www.boardgamebiz.com/game-business-consultancy

Four Proven Ways To Extend Board Games Brands

BOARD GAME BRAND EXTENSIONS

One of the best aspects of the board games industry from a business model point of view is that once you have established a successful board game in the market you can often spin off different versions of that game which stand a better chance of succeeding each time versus launching an entirely new game. This is because both consumers and retailers know and trust both the quality & experience that the brand will deliver.

Taking a quick look at the board games market, it is easy to observe four fairly straightforward ways to extend board games brands:

1.       Spec/price point variance

This way of extending board games brands is simple. You add or remove contents to increase or decrease the price point. Obviously you need to adapt the gameplay & instructions accordingly! This method of brand extension can open up new distribution opportunities: for instance, if you have a premium brand, you may open up discount/bargain retail channels via a down specced version of your game. Or conversely, if you sell primarily in budget retail you might be able to secure listings in upmarket department store chains by creating a special version with a higher specification and higher price point.

2.       Different gameplay format

If the original version of your game is a full board game, maybe you could extend via a dice game version or a cards only game. This way you can add some incremental sales opportunities. Beware though of cannibalisation with this method i.e. if you sell a new dice game version of your game successfully but people just buy that instead of buying the original version of the game that hasn’t necessarily helped you to move forward!

3.       Themed/Licensed editions

The classic example of a board games brand with ‘themed’ editions would be Monopoly. Whether it’s a new version for the Olympics or for a new movie, Monopoly has long since proven that one board game brand can sustain many iterations with a different theme.

4.       Digital versions

Digital gaming is a major business. Digital extensions of board games can be successful and bring new people into playing the original version of the board game. The major challenge though is that the digital world goes far deeper in terms of interactivity, depth and physical environments versus a board game. We’ve seen some dreadful ‘ports’ of board games which just take the same game & stick it onto mobile, console or online gaming. The game then tends to play badly because it is too shallow and basically not a compelling experience on a digital platform, so it can be easy to deliver a bad experience with a digital extension to an established board game.

We run a Consultancy business helping board games companies to grow. We have experience of most major board games markets around the world and our team has developed more than 200 board games including versions of classic games like Monopoly, Clue/do, Risk, Game of Life etc. For more information on our services (including our Export sales Consultancy) please just click here: https://www.kidsbrandinsight.com/services/ 

Sign up now for our free BoardGameBiz newsletter offering insights, news and analysis of the business of Board Games. We’ll also send you a free copy of our book ’55 Features of Best Selling Board Games’ – just click here to sign up 

The Important Role Of Nostalgia In The Board Games Business

If you received a €uro for every news article you could find with a quick Google search promoting the idea that ‘board games are back’ or that nostalgia is set to see the board games business boom you would have at least €37 based on a quick Google search we conducted.

Board games have obviously never gone away, they have continued to sell as technology has creeped into most aspects of our lives. Nostalgia is such a big part of that longevity. Nostalgia is a sentimental view of the past based more on positive memories and emotions associated with certain past events or past times than actual reality.

Those golden family or friendship group moments that we remember based on playing board games either with our parents growing up or with our friends create a strong emotional driver for the urge to buy and play board games.

As the same Google news search would reveal, this is not just about those classic iconic board games like Monopoly and Scrabble though, it is the entire play pattern based on face to face social interaction in a world where we are all buried in screens most of the day, and certainly for much of our leisure time.

Future generations will probably laugh at how ridiculous our behaviour has been walking round staring at a tiny screen. Technology is heading towards some kind of cyborg humanity where the technology will be much more practical and physically less harmful and risky than staring at a tiny screen all day.

The more that technology ensnares us, the more that nostalgic feeling for the old way of interacting with each other over a board game becomes attractive. So, while many pundits and journalists have been predicting the end of the board games industry since video games came to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s, the board games category is a massive beneficiary of increased tech addiction and consumption.

Anyone who has been in the games business for a while will have discussed what they do with someone at a dinner party or social gathering and been asked ‘Does anyone still play board games any more’, and the answer of course has always been yes. The good news though is that technology trends are increasing the desire of human beings for real old-fashioned social fun, and that’s only going to help the board games business.

We run a Consultancy business helping board games companies to grow. We have experience of most major board games markets around the world and our team has developed more than 200 board games including versions of classic games like Monopoly, Clue/do, Risk, Game of Life etc. For more information on our services (including our Export sales Consultancy) please just click here: https://www.kidsbrandinsight.com/services/

Sign up now for our free BoardGameBiz newsletter offering insights, news and analysis of the business of Board Games. We’ll also send you a free copy of our book ’55 Features of Best Selling Board Games’ – just click here to sign up