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Why Board Games Sell Better In Some Countries Vs Others

Board Games are a cultural product. Like books, movies or music they come from somewhere and someone. Therefore, each game is heavily influenced by the culture of the creator and of the company publishing the game.

Of the many reasons why board games succeed or fail, one of the most important is cultural fit. Board games are most often based on a combination of a). social interaction dynamic i.e. the process of playing the game and b). content. Both factors vary from country to country and from culture to culture. In terms of the gameplay dynamic for instance, we could compare the mass market gamer of Germany with the average person who buys and plays a game in the UK. In Germany, what would be considered a family game which children could play and enjoy is (taking a general view) far more complex than what would be seen as the right level of complexity in the UK. From a content point of view also, culture can have a massive impact. Games with trivia content for instance only tend to work on a global basis when they are based on a global entertainment franchise which is all about the show, or when the topic is universal…but even then the content may need some local tweaking.

Artwork is another cultural point of difference. Quite often when we work with companies looking to sell more games outside their own country we have to help them to understand that artwork styles vary a lot by country – the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Japan – these may all be markets in which you want to sell your game but if you are using an illustrated box front it can be quite hard to find a global pack design which appeals equally in each market and does not look out of place.

The media landscape also varies significantly by country and therefore by culture. This can have a massive impact – product placement for instance offers great opportunities to promote some types of board game – for instance advertising a gameshow based game during the gameshow itself or in the advertising break can be extremely effective in terms of driving sales. The challenge though is that media and advertising regulations vary by country.

Therefore, if one of your primary goals is to secure global distribution for a game, you need to incorporate this into your planning and product development process from the start to ensure you end up with a product which meets those goals.

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/

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Why Embracing & Managing Product Launch Failure Is The Key To Success In The Board Games Business

It shouldn’t be news to anyone who has been the board games business for a while that most new games launched don’t stick around very long. Thousands of new games launch each year, and apart from a bit of stock residue most fade away into the distant memory or onto the web pages of Board Game Geek!

Dealing with product launch failure is a fundamental part of the board games business. If you are crestfallen and deflated, if your team are so mortified that they can’t move on and if your company is financially crippled by a single product launch failure then you are doing something wrong! Failure is a frequent visitor in this business, like it or not so you need to aim for the upside scenario while planning for and managing the downside.

Clearly we don’t intend to order ridiculously excessive quantities of stock, but when a game fails to sell off the shelf from the start, and retailers start to revise their forecasts down we can find ourselves looking at a considerable over stock and a suddenly reduced sales forecast.

One of the things we can learn from the major stock market listed companies in our industry is that they are absolutely brutal about managing inventory levels. If new products don’t perform they are exorcised and written off early so that the company can move on into the next sales cycle as efficiently as possible.

Practically speaking, if you are paying $4usd per unit for manufacturing costs, you can probably sell it via closeout and clearance channels for $2 or so (even on a disastrous flop). So in the end, aside from the opportunity cost and the reduced sales forecast you needn’t lose that much.

When launch failure becomes damaging and risky for a company is when they have invested way beyond manageable levels in terms of R&D, tooling and marketing spend. For each and every product, your company should be asking whether they can afford for the launch to fail – if the answer is no, then the product should never go ahead, because otherwise you are gambling not building a successful business. Smaller companies tend to lack the formal greenlight/milestone approval process within their product development that the bigger companies have, and as such they sometimes let things slip through that should have been binned early or end up taking risks by accident that should have been screened out.

Classic disasters include betting the house on a TV advertising campaign when that is not the usual model of the company or listening to retailers demanding massive stock orders on risky and unknown items – these two factors should be managed with extreme caution.

The reality is that most successful board games companies run a portfolio approach, with risk managed across a broad range of products. Understandably when you are starting out you won’t have that, but the sooner you can build a portfolio approach into your operating framework the more likely it is you will succeed over time.

Above all, painful experience from our side suggests that you don’t trust your own product success predictions. We have seen games we thought were rubbish to the core become perennial performers while many clear and obvious ‘winners’ have fallen by the wayside. There are so many uncontrollable factors affecting the success or failure of a new game that you really can’t expect to be right all the time, or even most of the time. Therefore, by presuming that there is a high risk of failure and managing accordingly you are more likely to build a board game business that lasts.

The Importance Of Board Game Inventors To The Board Games Business

The unsung heroes of the board games business are board game inventors! In so many cases, classic games which are now cultural icons came from the minds of independent or start up inventors before being taken onto a bigger commercial stage by more established board games publishers.

The challenge for board games publishers with highly experienced staff is that there is often a feeling of seen it all before and of doing things a certain way. Creatively speaking, outside inspiration often stretches what a board games company will do and makes the company look at things in a different way.

In some ways board games publishers have the easiest R&D model of nearly any business out there – there is a vast array of tested and honed board game play concepts out there. The average small to medium sized games company will review many hundreds of new concepts each year, bigger companies may review more than a thousand. And from this mighty array of options they can whittle the options down to as few as they can viably launch. That is not to say that there is no work required from that point on – far from it, things need to be tweaked, artwork needs to be developed and any plastic components designed, engineered and manufactured, but nevertheless the pool of creativity available to board game companies is close to unparalleled.

Many games companies hit a rough patch and have a bad year or two, but there can be no excuse that they didn’t have enough ideas to develop! The trick for board game companies is to develop strong filtration systems and processes which can sort the wheat from the chaff. This can take some effort, and every established games company has somewhere along the line turned down a game that became a top seller elsewhere, this is because games publishers can bring in way more concepts than they have time to properly review and it is difficult to predict which games will take off and which will fail spectacularly.

This of course is the main challenge for even professional board game inventors – the high level of competing games concepts and the high quality of many of those concepts makes it hard to place even strong games from originators who really know what they are doing. Therefore, the business model for games inventors is massively stacked with upfront opportunity cost and emotional investment based on faith and love of the game. All this effort and energy needs to be expended well ahead of actually selling anything and making a living. Nobody knows exactly how many board games get published globally each year, but it is in the thousands at least, maybe even ten thousand or more. So, despite heavy competition there is ongoing demand for the output of board game inventors.

For those still unconvinced of the need for or importance of board game inventors in the games business, consider this – all of the following popular and iconic games were created by independent inventors: Monopoly, Clue/do, Trivial Pursuit, Settlers of Catan, Operation, Cranium, Scrabble, Dobble…and many more. So, here’s to those plucky game creators and their glorious output!

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