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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/

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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.

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.

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