![]() ![]() Bananagrams has a company behind it, who promote it and push to get it in the public eye. Bananagrams has a funny name and is packaged in a canvass banana. How did it get so huge? Well, there are two differences between Pick Two and Bananagrams:ġ. The game is a slightly tweaked version of an old public domain game called Pick Two. There’s nothing original about it, and before it was sold as Bananagrams, the game wasn’t nearly as popular. If quality isn’t enough, what else do you need?Ĭonsider the curious case of Bananagrams, the best-selling new word game of the millennium. Surely you need some level of quality in your core product to compete, but beyond that quality isn’t decisive. Are Lady Gaga or Miley Cyrus among the best, most mind-blowing musicians you’ve ever heard? Are they even in the top 50? Are Monopoly or Connect4 the best games you’ve ever played? Yet all are massive best-sellers. This is true both in board games and every other saturated market. It seems obvious that, whatever the answer, quality isn’t enough, and is probably best thought of as a prerequisite rather than a determining factor. Let’s start by trying to answer the question: what’s the difference between games that achieve mass market success and those that don’t? The answer might provide guidance. What do you do? Well, aim for mass-market success. So, if you’re a board game publisher, you’re competing in a saturated market that only admits a minuscule number of games into the charmed circle of mass-market success, and your business will be toil and trouble unless you get admitted to that circle. Large and increasing numbers of published games are good, and they’re all competing for our limited attention. From a profit point of view, most board games aren’t great business.įact #2 – The board game market is increasingly saturated.īoardgamegeek’s database has more than 100,000 games in it, and they’re not all dreck. ![]() In addition, a game without sufficient mass-market penetration is far less likely to be sustained by word of mouth, which means you have to market it, which cuts further into what little margin you have. Board games have thin margins and you need economies of scale to make them profitable. These same factors which encourage long life-cycles create a tall barrier to entry for new games, which keeps the total number of mass-market successes low.įurthermore, games that don’t reach mass-market success are weak business. They generally talk about and play these games only, which spreads them further, which is why the sales of the very best-sellers are self-sustaining. Non-gamers don’t like learning rules and have emotional attachments to games they already know. The reason such games have long life cycles is that the non-gamer public only has so much attention for games and most of that attention is on games they already know. Settlers of Catan has achieved this, for example, as has Ticket to Ride.īut this also means only a minuscule fraction of published games reach mass market success. This means there’s a gold ring available for a company that can achieve mass-market success: large, self-sustaining annual sales in perpetuity, without a huge marketing layout. …the big difference is how long they last. To put some things in perspective, the best selling board game today, in terms of number of units sold, if not profit, is still a game called “Monopoly,” which was the best selling title back in 1935. Now that’s kind of like if Errol Flynn was making more money this year than Brad Pitt. Or if Cole Porter was outselling Lady Gaga… In my view, there are two facts about the board games market that strongly shape its dynamics:įact #1 – The lifecycle of a board game which has crossed over into mass market success is often very long.Īs Eric Hautemont, CEO of Days of Wonder says (in this talk): ![]()
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