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Tuesday, March 08, 2022
Overlapping hobbies
If you visit your friendly local games store, you will probably find a lot of different products there: Board games, role-playing games, trading card games, wargames, miniatures, and a lot of other stuff. The reason why this is all in the same store is that there is some overlap between different hobbies, and it isn't unreasonable to think that somebody who is interested in one of them might also have some interest in some of the other stuff. There are some historical relations, like Dungeons & Dragons starting life as a squad-based fantasy wargame. Brands like Warhammer or Dungeons & Dragons frequently end up on products from different genres, from board games to videogames. And it isn't unusual for people to start out with one type of hobby, and over time migrate to something else. I was heavily into Magic the Gathering in the 90's, but am far more interested in board games these days.
The problem arises when an assumption is being made that if a customer likes A, he *must* also like B. A product is launched hoping to attract both the fans of hobby A and the fans of hobby B, when in fact the product is only really interesting to the intersecting set of people who like both A and B.
In particular there are a lot of Kickstarter board games that assume that because you like board games, you must be a fan of miniatures. That is simply not true. Yes, in any board game community you will find people who like miniatures, and who display with pride their painted board game miniatures. But there are also a lot of people like me, who don't really care about miniatures. Some companies have realized that and offer the same game either with cheap standees or with expensive miniatures. But other games only have the expensive miniature version.
If you don't paint miniatures, they are usually just grey. On a game board a set of color standees often looks better and is easier to distinguish one figure from another than unpainted miniatures. But miniatures are expensive. So even the core pledge of a miniature-heavy game like Kingdoms Forlorn is €139 / $152 without shipping (I don't believe their estimated shipping costs of just around €30, especially since they don't say how it varies with the size of your pledge), and the all-in pledge is €429 / $467. Yes, that all-in pledge is going to be an impressive big box full of plastic. But it certainly isn't going to be as much game as you could have bought if you had spent the $500 for a stack full of different games with cardboard standees or wooden meeples.
While I am certainly not poor, I do watch what I am spending. And so I have skipped a lot of games over the past year, from Descent to Kingdoms Forlorn, which simply seemed too expensive because of their miniatures. The prices and shipping costs of board games have gone up a lot over the course of the pandemic. This leads to some people being priced out of the hobby, or at least having to be far more selective in what they are backing. A lot of games would have done better if they had been on offer also as a cheaper version, without miniatures. Hobbies overlap, but the overlap is never 100%.
Labels: Board Games
- posted by Tobold @ 11:50 AM Permanent Link
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I have another example. Playing PC games and building your own PC are two related but different hobbies. Unfortunately many online posters seem to assume that you cannot enjoy one without the other. Anyone who innocently asks for advice about which gaming PC to buy on reddit or similar is sure to be overwhelmed with replies saying "you have to build your own PC.".
We haven't seen any updates of your 3d printing activities recently. Anything interesting? Or has that fallen by the wayside?
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