The fundamental difference between a board game and a video game is that the board game is a physical good, which needs to be produced, transported, and stocked. All of that has a cost of money and time. Buying a video game is easy, because my "copy" of the game is produced the moment I buy it, and all the transport needed is a download of a few minutes. Steam doesn't have "out of stock" signs, and the only thing that could prevent you from playing a freshly bought video game is if you bought an online multiplayer game on launch day and the login servers can't handle the load. Buying a board game is more complicated, because somebody needs to have made a correct guess of how many copies the game will sell, and produced enough physical copies of it. Thus the popularity of crowdfunding in the board game domain: While paying for a game a year or two before you receive it might look like a very bad deal, it actually enables the game company to produce the correct number of physical copies of the game, and guarantees you to receive one of them.

Board games are more of a niche than video games. Video games sometimes sell millions of copies; Frosthaven, one of the top funded board games on Kickstarter, had 83,193 backers. Crowdfunded board games with just a few thousand backers are the norm, not the exception. Of course, if you have 8,000 backers, you have enough money to produce let's say 10,000 games, and have some extra for sale later. But sometimes games become popular only after they have already been produced, and thus it can easily happen for a board game to sell out. Board games that aren't crowdfunded have to rely on the experience of the game company to predict how many copies of the game will sell, and sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes it is very hard to get hold of a game, and in other cases you'll see a game discounted in every shop you go to, because it has been produced in too large a print run. Popular retail games can reach print runs much larger than crowdfunded games, for example Wingspan sold over 1 million copies.

Board games thus don't always follow the declining price trajectory of video games. Yes, it can happen that you can get a game that didn't sell very well at a discount. But it can also happen that prices go up because of the rarity of a game, and even more frequently a board game can be sold out and impossible to get. Not every board game shop even trades in crowdfunded games, and it is totally possible that a game you hear a lot about online never shows up in your local store. For me that causes a bit of a moral dilemma, because I am playing at my local board game shop every Wednesday night, and would very much like to support them by buying my board games from them. But for many crowdfunding games I end up backing the game directly, because there is no way to tell whether I would ever be able to buy it locally.

If you can't get a game locally, there are websites like Board Game Oracle or TableTopFinder, which allow you to search for a game and see which online shops have that board game available, and at what price. It took me some time to realize that sometimes there is a better way: Most board game companies, even small ones, have their own web shop, and those aren't listed on the price comparison sites. If a game is hard to get, it can be both cheaper and faster to order it directly from the company that made the game.

Physical copies that need to be produced, small print runs, shipping cost, problems of availability, all of this results board games being a lot more expensive than video games. Triple A video games cost maybe €70 at most, with more expensive editions usually including future DLCs. I could spend €130 for the founders edition of Civilization VII, not that I wanted to. Big crowdfunding games easily have €100+ core game pledges, and €200+ all in pledges. And normally you get more hours of gameplay out of a video game, due to the difficulty of getting people around a table to play a board game. Ultimately buying board games, especially crowdfunded ones, has a lot more to do with building up a collection than with just the utility of being able to play a game.

Where the collector's hobby of buying board games again converges with video games is in the modern video game trend of in-game shops selling cosmetics. When I buy a board game, I often need to consider which version I want, because deluxified editions with upgraded game components exist. Of course the game plays the same with a cardboard standee or a plastic miniature, but the table presence isn't the same. And one could say exactly the same thing about buying a skin for your favorite video game character.