Just as someone who works in a board games shop, we’ve actually seen a significant uptick in sales since the lockdowns have ended. A lot of people started playing any board games they owned whilst stuck inside, and are now looking for other games to play now that they can go play with more people.
...Isn't this less about the pandemic killing board games, but more the pandemic highlighting the inherent dangers of an overly centralized production source with little to no competitively priced alternatives? Monocultures in nature rarely due well.
Holy moly, this. Every single business in the world was seemingly running fast and lean on the production and logistics side for decades with everything coming out of one place and it was like we were begging for something to come along and stick a wrench in everything.
Yes exactly, I was gonna comment the same thing. Problems in business are not solved by asking people to support a bad system, they're solved by changing the system.
Fixing the system is so *incredibly* hard. The problem isn’t that we don’t know how. It’s that the West is incredibly bad at deploying new systems. Asia (starting with Japan after WWII) embraced the concepts needed for faster delivery. This became things like the Toyota Way (they’re still kicking everyone’s butt, BTW) and Total Quality Management (TQM). We tried to deploy TQM in the US but *so badly* misunderstood it that we landed on processes like “Six Sigma” and “ISO-9000” which are the exact opposite of the “move fast and break things” approach that TQM is intended to be. We kinda-sorta deployed Agile in the software world, but very few companies are actually Agile. Most just put an Agile face on waterfall and call it a day. Which is the exact same issue we had in manufacturing where we just put a TQM face on the same-old command and control management structures and called it a day. Which means that we found it faster, cheaper, and easier to just send manufacturing to China where they hit us with the double-whammy of inexpensive skilled labor and actually embracing TQM processes. That’s not to say that TQM processes (or at least the spirit of TQM) are fully penetrated everywhere. There’s plenty of poor quality vendors in China. But they have greater local competition and the processes are spread far *enough* to where they’re kicking our butts there. Until we can pull our own heads out and start realizing that change means *actual changes are needed*, we don’t have a chance in hell of undoing the monoculture.
The system used to run with lots of inventory and back stock. But once just-in-time manufacturering caught wind in the 70s and steam in the 80s 90s it was off to the races…
Pandemic was my favorite board game before, because it represented a world coming together and working to overcome a global challenge... I have very mixed feelings now. Still, Legacy 1 & 2 are excellent, it's hard to wait but they'll be worth it.
My group finished Pandemic Legacy Season 2 the week before covid was found in our city and we stared up again with Pandemic Legacy Season 0 once we stared meeting up again. (Spoilers) We initially thought it was going to be interesting to play a Pandemic game without a pandemic as our first legacy game after the pandemic.
I feel that this should be more specific towards physical tabletop roleplaying games; person to person playing, and physical copies are going through major issues, but I feel that not enough was said in this episode about how large online roleplaying is, and how companies should capitalize on the digital space. While in person playing and supply is going down, the amount of people online willing to buy old or new material is growing by the day. Same can be applied to regular board games, although the demand seems to be not as high for these games.
@@BuxtonsWater but it implies that you can meet with your friends to play games whenever you want. for people that never could play boardgames with their friends to begin with, the move to online support is awesome.
@@BuxtonsWater Very true, but in my particular case the friends I play with every week are now in a different country to me, so it's online with them or nothing with them.
Even then, TTRPGs can easily be played face to face with a pdf copy...? So I can't really understand how this impact is so big when the pdf buyers aren't even affected with global printing & shipping. (Unless ofc selling physical books are THAT MUCH profitable compared to pdfs)
We still get a physial copy of our RPG books along with a digital copy and at this point we have far more digtial copies than physical copies in our library. :(
I don't agree with some of the conclusions there. When Apple's suppliers have horrible working conditions, part of the blame is rightfully put on Apple for not demanding more humane conditions, but when games publishers looking for rock-bottom manufacturing costs face the same issue they're just victims? Second, after years of trying to push support for local game stores, now you're throwing them under the bus saying people should buy straight from publishers? The designers are probably largely blameless in this, but supply chain management is part of a publisher's job and this video is very one-sided in painting them as the victims.
Apple and other companies are exceptionally powerful corporate entities. Small/indie game developers shouldn't be held to that same standard because that's nonsense. They should use what little power they have to lobby for better working conditions, but you can't give them the same burden. Your other problems are kinda fine. I don't really support pro-gamestore attitudes.
Local stores of _stuff that you can buy online_ are dying out. Most of the stuff nowadays you buy either directly from the source or from a consolidated platform (Amazon, Steam, etc). Board games are no different.
@@Neeo-u1j Meh, the US publishing industry (which is the sector for tabletop games) makes more than the Movie, Television, Music, and Video Game industry. Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro, who is in turned owned by The Vanguard Group, a multinational investment corp. Not an insignificant entity. And we don't even wanna get into the murky mystery money behind Games Workshop.
People have set exception for the price of the tabletop game, creators can not exceed that without a reasonable excuse. Apple is a multitrillion(?) company with a customer base who have no problem in the yearly increase in price. So yes bias do exist so you should look at the circumstances, people need money to feed themselves and familes
I would be curious to see if there have been any positives in Tabletops because of the pandemic? I.E. digital tools getting more press, the seeming explosion of tabletop podcasts (possibly separate from the pandemic) etc. thank you for this awesome video!
My local game store has reported no losses for the whole pandemic. He's been directly on-target or even above, which is particularly impressive being as there was a substantial period (It may even still be going on) when he couldn't run M:tG tournaments. Admittedly, some of that may be from diversifying into also selling used videogames. As a developer there's also been increased interest on my end in supporting the solo gaming board game niche. It wasn't an angle of the design space I'd considered for a long time - I wanted to make games that brought people together around a table - but it's a need worth filling when it's literally the only safe option and thinking through how to make a good game in that space is a fascinating exercise.
@@BuztererI feel very odd here, since for me the majority of my table top books are digital. I've been in the hobby for over a decade now and after I left high school and have my own disposable income, it just made more sense to buy the cheaper digital version. Same in overall regards to my table top experience, the majority of it has been online first on skype, then on discord. Using various online mediums, mostly roll 20 but also trying things like fantasy grounds. Which this is not a critique of people who buy physical books I get it, I own over 100 books myself, and a few of them are actually ttrpgs, I just felt very differently watching this video perspective wise.
I think part of this is also a correction after years of the market overhearing. Nearly every boardgamer I know had a large stack of unplayed games even at the start of the pandemic and for those that preorder or kickstart games more and more games kept coming and this really highlighted just how many unplayed games they already had so a lot of people started looking at their collections and saying 'do I really need more games?' And looking at your games and seeing how many unplayed game you have really hits boardgamers harder than someone looking at all their unplayed steam games because board games take up so much space, so even when we see everything get back to normal you might see boardgames think a little bit longer about if they really need a 9th game with their 3rd favorite game mechanic or if they should just play the games they have.
One point on domestic (US) paper production. The increasing consolidation of US paper manufacturing from regional, independent mills to a few national-scale companies has resulted in monopolies where the supply has been deliberately constrained to keep prices high to ensure not just a profit, but a large profit. In my own community a profitable paper mill was purchased not for its capacity but merely so the new owners could lay off the workforce, shutter the mill and drive up prices by buying out the competition. This mill sat idle for a couple years before being eventually put up for sale, but new owners insisted that any entity that purchased the site would have to agree to not produce paper as a term of the sales contract. Several perspective buyers attempted to purchase it but were shut out by this no-compete requirement. After about 4 years of simply sitting on a fully functional, yet shuttered mill, the new owners sold much of the machinery to buyers outside the US and cut up the rest for scrap before selling the property for less than they paid for it. In the end, they were able to claim a massive tax write-off for the "loss" of selling the property for less than their purchase price and accomplish the goal of preventing competition.
In terms of shipping I’m surprised you didn’t mention both the Suez incident, which has caused all sorts of issues. Also just general ports not being able to keep up with up with demand. I’ve had a board game wait over a month in a port ~50 miles from me in the US.
I backed the Battletech Clan Invasion Kickstarter. I'm really tired of people complaining about the delays that happened. The timing was just really horrible and things got really delayed. People do need to be understanding of the supply chain issues. I do suggest that game companies start looking for manufacturing partners closer to their markets.
My local game store owner said that after he sells out of his current Battletech products he's refusing to order any more because Catalyst games took so long to get him product and some product was missing. As someone who really enjoys the Battletech IP I feel like it's cursed sometimes.
The problem with getting manufacturing partners closer to their markets is that means massively increasing the prices of the games. One of the projects I backed last year had a lot of people asking them in they would move their production out of Asia and they said they looked into it and it was going to cost them twice as much to make components that would be of significantly lower quality and that is a really hard ask for most people. They said that was also still using a developing country to produce in, as producing the type of large games with lots of nice components that people want in a country like the US would cost so much they it would put the game out of reach of all but their richest and most dedicated fans.
I worked in toys at Target for the first two years of the pandemic. For months, a lot of our board games and puzzles were impossible to find, Monopoly and Jenga were especially popular. While this focused on more complex board games, it's interesting to see the other side of what I saw.
Thanks so much for commenting on this side of things!! I remember walking into a Target and seeing the bare board game shelves! It was a crazy thing to see and I'm happy they're expanding their board game content!
Watched all of these problems happening with the Catalyst Game Labs Battletech kickstarter which had the worst timing. Being hit completely by surprise. They were and still are extremely transparent about EVERYTHING going on, which I and many others appreciated. There was a significant portion of backers that were not as accepting of the situation.
But now they seem to be on the upswing, both in the last of the KS deliveries having gone out a while ago, and lots of thier product are reaching shelves in Game Stores nowadays.
Regarding shipping containers, there's also an issue with supply of containers themselves. This is because a lot of covid related supplies were shipped to parts of the world with little exporting trade, meaning there are yards of empty container that aren't sendt anywhere, cuz very little is exported. This is a symptom of lopsided trade. So when more containers are needed you actually have to send a ship with little on board - which is expensive - then load empty container on the ship to take them where they're needed. Adding two extra trips with little compensation is very slow and expensive.
Yep. I had to read up on this a bit during my Global Supply Chain class last semester. Sadly, there's just no easy fix for the situation because for it to become profitable both ways there has to be something to send back other than just empty containers and the supply chain is crippled in so many areas.
Supporting Kickstarter and buying directly from publishers is in principle a good idea. But some of them become very inflexible if you live out of their comfort zone to ship to. Then they sometimes basically ask you to use one of the retailers since those will then take care of the whole international stuff like tarifs and so forth.
In reply to your suggestion that we contribute to crowdfunding: I and my friends are unlikely to ever back another Kickstarter again as long as KS remains committed to its pivot to crypto. We're avid players of TTRPGs and love backing projects but we want nothing to do with NFT, crypto or the blockchain whatsoever
The way companies are heading blockchain isn't going anywhere. Now I think how most people are using is a scam, but the usefulness is too much to ignore, and the environmental impact is exaggerated. But hey if dumping blockchain means you're going to dump Facebook and Twitter I think you and your friends will be better for it.
the expansion of games to our tablets and phones and whatnot is brilliant, things like gartic and such is a great leap forward in the possibilities we have, but it misses out on the real draw of boardgames.. drawing together and playing with the people we care about and having a shared experience, a memory. They can exist side by side.. but as we've seen before in so many other mediums, eventually it'll just flop to one or the other, and it's not going to be the electronic games.
I think the big problem is that smaller publishers don't have the ability to hire staff or know how to create digital games. This will certainly hold a lot of companies back from creating a game in a digital space.
I actually think its great because we are seeing more digital versions of tabletop games, as someone that don't have a lot of friends living close by to meet to play games, being able to play tabletop style games online is awesome.
I have seen this directly. My husband and I kickstarted a game almost two years ago with a reliable kickstarter, but they have had all of these issues and finally decided to downsize their staff and shell out the increased cost of shipping themselves, just so everyone can get the game they paid for, and so their company can start on their next game.
"What can we, the game playing public, do to help?" @5:23 Be willing to pay local manufacturing cost for things, rather than relying on cheap labor and a delicate global supply chain. Raw materials, if not already in the country, are easier and cheaper to ship than finished goods. I'd be really curious to see how different manufactures, who produce in their primary market, have fared compared to those who rely on China.
You can be willing to pay local manufacturing costs... but are you willing to be the one working in the manufacturing plant? ... Yeah, neither is anyone else. People SAY they want to support changing the system, but aren't willing to actually bite the bullet and be the change itself. And, they aren't willing to allow people to move to America who WOULD be willing to do so. Because of the ongoing idiot idea of "Them illegal aliens are stealing Murica's jobs"... you know, the jobs Americans don't WANT to do in the first place? The irony: America does not represent what it was in the olden days, some ways for good, others for so very bad. It USED to be "The land of the free; bring us your sick, your needy, etc.", but that hasn't been true... for at least the last 22 years. (9/11 combining fearmongering and real fears certainly didn't help matters). Like, why NOT make it absolutely easy to let people move to America and do the work they are willing to do which you DON'T want to do? (Answer: because so many people would rather have someone to hate than to help.)
@@JarieSuicune Americans are willing to work in those manufacturing plant but are going to want to be paid actual wages and not the bare minimum. Also include full benefits as well including lots of time off and maternal leave. The only jobs American are not willing to do are farming jobs as they are very seasonal, very very back breaking. Set the pay at $25 hr and you'll get people to sign up very quickly.
I admit that the big aspect I have been looking at with the tabletop industry needing to reevaluate its production and development priorities has come from the notion of sustainability rather than solvency, but I suppose they might be one and the same soon at this rate. Is there any merit to the notion of tabletop publishers to explore things like downscaling component quality? Maybe utilizing lower grade paper (that could still be sleeved), more generic tokens that don't utilize such meticulous production, assembly, or storage, or in the case of plastics utilizing recycled and reclaimed material for production?
Well said, and offering digital versions of parts of their games, or other workarounds, are a great way to demonstrate to backers that they are working on the product and aren't just taking the money and walking away.
I'm reminded of the story how TomSka and friends tried to get their Muffin Time board game out the door in later 2019 and everything just started popping off. They did a video of it documenting their struggles and how they made that really fun game.
I'm a TTRPG designer going into this year starting to get my book off the ground and thinking about going through a printer, so this is a really important video to me, thank you. I knew there were production and shipping issues, but I wasn't aware that it was quite this bad.
How about publishing online versions of tabletop games? That would completely cut off the issues mentioned in this video, and would even bypass an issue of people not being able to physically meet together to play tabletop games. There is Tabletop Simulator as an example of a base engine that people can make online tabletop games at. Publishers could take something like that and add the adequate level of polish needed for a unique experience!
As someone who loves TTS for design prototypes, demoing, and playing out-of-print products, it's great but it's genuinely a poor substitute in my opinion. I play tabletop specifically for the feeling of playing in person with others, and even if something like VR would be an adequate substitute (it isn't) it would be prohibitively expensive.
Would that still preserve the feeling of meeting up with people to play though? Over the pandemic, I found TTS to be more of a stopgap than a reasonable replacement, personally, though of course it's still quite a young idea
In the last year there has been an uptick in board games moving online! Which is amazing but TTS and Tabletopia are still in their infancy. the UI and HUD are a tough pill to swallow for most players.
I love it when you go off script! It really puts the personal effect in to get that proper empathy across that this is a serious issue affecting real people.
I worked in a completely different industry and I know the exact same problems. No supplies, no money, no workers, and very few people are actually understanding about the situation. It got to the point that several people just gave up. We ended up in a pit of quicksand with any hope of rescue constantly passing us by. In the end we had to shut everything down.
2:20 - So, I think it was around 4-5 months ago, an Extra History episode had another jab at Amazon...but that one was a non sequitur and felt forced. This jab, however, flowed well with the narrative, was subtle, and earned a chuckle as well. Well done.
Hectic. I remember seeing a friend create a tabletop game before my eyes in College. I really hope that this doesn't stop people like her from creating amazing things
mad respect to zoey, i never had the magic touch to work the cotton candy machine. at that job, we had two kinds of employees: the Chosen Few who could consistently make perfect cotton candy, and the unwashed rest of us. The Chosen could not explain how they were chosen, they only knew that they were.
I have a friend that had a Kickstarter last year. Over the course of the Kickstarter, he saw the shipping price for a container almost double. This is while he's watching orders come in for a game. Backers saw his new shipping cost estimates and got ANGRY, accusing him of trying to scam them with a bait and switch, when if he didn't change his initial estimates for shipping the game would basically make him nothing due to the container costs eating up the entire profit margin of his initial estimate.
This seems more like an acceleration of factors that were already putting the industry at risk. That said, I feel that those companies that do survive these problems will be in a place to absorb smaller devs and hopefully lead to a new age in gaming as things pan out over the next decade; so, best of luck to them all.
@Bleh A lot of solo game are very specialized selling people a game appeals directly to them rather than a large market and they frequently use far simpler components, as part of the reason to get all the big expensive figures and metal pieces is to show off to your friends, so they can sell it for more while delivering a less blinged out product meaning that small locally sourced production runs are far more feasible and the costumers are more likely to pay a little extra even if the game is mostly just paper and cardboard.
Their was clearly market saturation prior to Covid, the growth over the last 10 years had been hyperbolic and the excessive production value inflation and exhasustion of creative spaces for genuine inovation are drying up interest in new products. BoardGames after even higher replayablity then videogames so constantly purchasing new chardboard is an extravagance even for people who really love games.
I am aware that a lot of tabletop games have exploded in popularity on table top simulator, so I had a inkling that this was happening. But due to my gaming group being five people I've been playing more board games during covid than ever before in my life. We never stopped as we never exceeded the limit of people advised at social gatherings. To me covid ended up being the "board games revelation" chapter of my life where I realized how amazing they are.
Ron Perlman voice: "... not enough paper to go around. As the powers scrambled for the last precious cellulose resources, came the paperocalypse. The sheet of humanity was nearly wiped clean."
I've bought more board games in the last 2 years than ever before, they should be thriving! Man, externalizing all of the US's production really screwed us over, eh?
@@falconJB I just paid 200 dollars for a board game that's out of print that normally costs 40 (and I am not a wealthy person by any stretch). I am the wrong person to ask that, because I would totally spend my money on American printed board games. But you're not wrong for the average user. :P
@@alwaysfallingshort I just remember back in the day we use to pay $100(adjusted for inflation) for games that were all cardboard and that is what we would likely be looking at if we brought production back to the US and since that would put them out of reach of a lot of people and greatly reduce the number of games even a lot of hardcore boardgamers would buy. Likely meaning that boardgames(outside of the mass produced games made by Hasbro) would retreat back into a niche hobby and we would see far fewer new boardgames coming out.
@@falconJB I think the point is that if there were competitively priced options, and if our nation actually invested in infrastructure and reducing the cost of production domestically, the overall price would be reduced. It's not just a matter of making them here, but our nation incentivizing actual job creators instead of industries that mostly outsource while calling themselves job creators, and that has nothing to do with the games industry specifically.
Ok, I'm going back to school to set myself up with a way to get my own ttrpg store focusing on custom maps, mini figs, character art, etc., so this is really of interest to me...
This seems more like physical copies are suffering but anyone who didnt rely on physical copies and who had online support are doing pretty damn great. WotC is doing great but they're a big company so they had ads on their side.
Just participated in the ATLA Kickstarter. Even with additional hurdles, because I don't pocess a credit card. It's not common where I live. Then the shipping got delayed for at least a couple of months. Pretty much helps being general more on the chill side and living the positive hype without getting sour.
In the spirit of helping a game I believe in, on kickstarter. Deep Rock Galactic is publishing a board game, dwarves fighting bugs with kick arse miniatures in caves.
I am in a family of tabletop gaming enthusiasts, and while I am not one of said enthusiasts myself, I understand that they mostly play online with simulators. You're not describing an industry dying. You're badly describing an industry changing.
I didn't realise that the paper shortage was so acute. I knew it was bad but the closure of the paper mills and the shift in production to packaging explains why several retailers I know have increased non-paper items by 5% but paper items by 10%.
Oh no the pandemic has shown the instabillity in how all our corporate entities are functionally designed as inverted economic pyramids and now its our responsabillity to prop them up at our own expense, where have I heard this one before?
This kind of topic is why I fell in love with extra credit because without Lil being educated on this topic I wouldn't have known it was actually a problem
I would not have played DnD if there was no pandemic. It always struck me as a bridge too far into the nerd kingdom, a perspective I really regret since I found out how fun it is. We play digitally, which helped me ease into it, and now I look forward to trying it irl.
Every time my friends have gotten together we pick a game out of my collection to play. We have a lot of fun playing them but we have been having a hard time getting together consistently…
One option would be to create digital versions of your board game to help weather this time. My wife has a genetic condition that is extremely isolating, but she uses services like board game arena in order to play with friends that she doesn't have that many options to interact with.
One of my favorite table top games, Mystic Vale, actually has a version of their game up on steam. That being said it was apparently there since Jan 2019 and I had no idea. I know it's a very different experience playing your favorite tabletop games online but check and see if they're around and you might be surprised.
I don't have anything coherent to say about the board game problem that hasn't already been mentioned, but it's cool to see Eddie doing other stuff (as an Onyx Path RPG fan, Eddie does a lot of stuff over there too).
I didn't realize how many people have an irrational hate for this channel until after I linked this episode on a tabletop gaming subreddit to be like "Oh hey, this video kind of explains why the prices went up" and the only comments were people saying "I'm not going to watch the video"
From my personal perspective I really can't agree less. I've spent a solid 150 hours playing Twilight imperium IV since the pandemic broke out. Staying home from school with really dorky neighbors will do that.
So, you've been playing a game that was already out and available in stores. This is more about games in production and facing delays before they get to the stores.
Due to the rising costs of electricity in Europe, board games sales skyrocketed here. Also the pandemic made families stay together for long periods of time, so a lot of us turned to analog games
All the best games are being released via Kickstarter, etc, anyway. One thing that still hurts them, though, is unexpected increases in shipping costs. As far as discoverability goes, some game designers are releasing demo versions of their games on Tabletop Simulator.
Here in the Netherlands I am also feel the paper shortage in the price of English books and books in general this also includes the English translation of manga and light novels which have been hard to get or even impossible to reorder
The last mass extinction led to the Cambrian explosion. Many of these issues are temporary, with luck the demand will still be there when industry catches up.
Demand almost certainly won't be an issue. As a general media, tabletop games are a social positive which has only gained strength and acceptance. The problem is more in the companies themselves surviving. Much as I wouldn't be one to particularly complain if the only game like D&D were the one published by Wizards of the Coast (I'm a D&D fan and don't have much chance to play that, let alone trying other games), I know a great many people would be salty to death if their fave publishers lost to Wizards just because Hasbro (which owns Wizards) has enough money to survive the great publisher extinction.
What's crazy is looking over at Wizards Of The Coast anticipating Magic having a downturn due to the pandemic, but then seeing a huge surge in sales and support, and then taking this nice opportunity to not have your game face severe repercussions and following that all up with trying to destroy your game through sheer shittiness on their part.
Speaking of backing Kickstarters for board games, one I backed was the one for the Power Rangers Deck Building Game made by Renegade Game Studios. It was the first time I backed a board game Kickstarter.
I kind of miss regular self-publisher mini get-togethers. Where a local self-publisher would slap down a plastic table with a banner at a brick and mortar book store and playtest/sell their stuff.
So long as Kickstarter campaigns don’t do what stronghold games did with their recent Kickstarter, I have no problem waiting years. It’s a nice surprise when one arrives at our doorstep
I've gotten into the Arkham Horror living card game during the pandemic. I tried to complete a campaign set of cards, but its pretty much impossible finding just the last expansion pack I need. Everywhere is sold out.
Major supply chain problems seem to be the only part of this that have gone wrong. Previous years saw drastic growth in tabletop gaming, and board games have only returned to previous levels - actually distinctly above previous levels but no longer at peak - and the changes have largely been in which type of games are in-demand, with smaller player-count games more popular and ongoing games less obscure. The will to create board games is higher than ever, thanks to the residual effects of the explosive boom in indie board games from crowdfunding, and the demand for board games is high. There are major logistical hurdles that existed before Current Events and have been made drastically moreso recently, and there will have to be a major change in the logistics of the industry - but it's not going to fail, even if it gets very strange for a while and the industry no doubt finds a way to dump as much of the consequences as possible onto designers. It's pretty telling for late capitalism that it can't even coherently organise basic logistics, when the one thing capitalism is meant to be good at is the self-organising efficient allocation of resources.
I'd be happy to support companies who don't call their costumers human garbage, a supply crunch like this is not a time to make potential buyers angry.
The pandemic made us use tabletop simulator much more, which got us to find new boardgames to try out, and discovered a few new favorites, like Disney's villainous, and Azul! Now we just all do a self-test before meeting, and it works quite well! Love a good whole day of 14 point Twilight Imperium on a huge map!
Board games are selling really well based on the numbers we're seeing. The biggest problem has been supply chain issues, but that doesn't equate to "extinction". If anything, scarcity seems to just drive more demand. When supply chains recover I think we'll see a lot of growth in this market.
Just ringing in on Gencon, while the 2021 event wasn't very impressive, the 2022 convention is looking like it's going to be a much harder rebound. The hotel block (which didn't sell out in 2021 and had rooms available downtown until almost just before the event [which itself is kind of a stunner[ ) has done a hard 180, and COMPLETELY sold out within the first three hours. There's rumors and discussion about how the room block was smaller this year because 2021 was a smaller event, and it's likely that hotels were being a little cagey on committing rooms this far forward on an unknown, but this frankly insane demand is suggesting that 2022 is going to be a LOT more like 2019.
Everytime i see the map of our world i only see a big battleground with some countries trying to be the number 1 while enslaving or destroying other countries.
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no
Total War Warhammer
Battletech should have a game similar to Disciples or Heroes of Might and Magic
I do hope those devs find a way to get through this. Anyway, are you interested in talking about evolution games in a future video?
Legend of Korea is not a comic book
So disappointed
Just as someone who works in a board games shop, we’ve actually seen a significant uptick in sales since the lockdowns have ended. A lot of people started playing any board games they owned whilst stuck inside, and are now looking for other games to play now that they can go play with more people.
Yay! That's really good news to hear!
Also work in a board games shop. Can confirm.
I also work in a game store. We're doing pretty well.
I bought a bunch of boardgames at the start of the pandemic, and so did some of my friends. We're just about ready for new games
...Isn't this less about the pandemic killing board games, but more the pandemic highlighting the inherent dangers of an overly centralized production source with little to no competitively priced alternatives? Monocultures in nature rarely due well.
Holy moly, this.
Every single business in the world was seemingly running fast and lean on the production and logistics side for decades with everything coming out of one place and it was like we were begging for something to come along and stick a wrench in everything.
Yes exactly, I was gonna comment the same thing. Problems in business are not solved by asking people to support a bad system, they're solved by changing the system.
Fixing the system is so *incredibly* hard. The problem isn’t that we don’t know how. It’s that the West is incredibly bad at deploying new systems. Asia (starting with Japan after WWII) embraced the concepts needed for faster delivery. This became things like the Toyota Way (they’re still kicking everyone’s butt, BTW) and Total Quality Management (TQM). We tried to deploy TQM in the US but *so badly* misunderstood it that we landed on processes like “Six Sigma” and “ISO-9000” which are the exact opposite of the “move fast and break things” approach that TQM is intended to be.
We kinda-sorta deployed Agile in the software world, but very few companies are actually Agile. Most just put an Agile face on waterfall and call it a day. Which is the exact same issue we had in manufacturing where we just put a TQM face on the same-old command and control management structures and called it a day. Which means that we found it faster, cheaper, and easier to just send manufacturing to China where they hit us with the double-whammy of inexpensive skilled labor and actually embracing TQM processes.
That’s not to say that TQM processes (or at least the spirit of TQM) are fully penetrated everywhere. There’s plenty of poor quality vendors in China. But they have greater local competition and the processes are spread far *enough* to where they’re kicking our butts there. Until we can pull our own heads out and start realizing that change means *actual changes are needed*, we don’t have a chance in hell of undoing the monoculture.
The system used to run with lots of inventory and back stock. But once just-in-time manufacturering caught wind in the 70s and steam in the 80s 90s it was off to the races…
Thank you for wording what I was thinking... the final section of the video really confused me.
Admittedly one of the great ironies of the current Pandemic has been the game of Pandemic Legacy I've been waiting to finish for nearly 2 years now
AWWWWW the Pandemic took out your Pandemic. So sad!
Pandemic was my favorite board game before, because it represented a world coming together and working to overcome a global challenge... I have very mixed feelings now.
Still, Legacy 1 & 2 are excellent, it's hard to wait but they'll be worth it.
My group finished Pandemic Legacy Season 2 the week before covid was found in our city and we stared up again with Pandemic Legacy Season 0 once we stared meeting up again.
(Spoilers)
We initially thought it was going to be interesting to play a Pandemic game without a pandemic as our first legacy game after the pandemic.
I feel that this should be more specific towards physical tabletop roleplaying games; person to person playing, and physical copies are going through major issues, but I feel that not enough was said in this episode about how large online roleplaying is, and how companies should capitalize on the digital space. While in person playing and supply is going down, the amount of people online willing to buy old or new material is growing by the day. Same can be applied to regular board games, although the demand seems to be not as high for these games.
The only thing that sucks is that physical tabletops feel so much better than online ones. You connect more, have more fun, at least in my experience.
@@BuxtonsWater but it implies that you can meet with your friends to play games whenever you want. for people that never could play boardgames with their friends to begin with, the move to online support is awesome.
@@BuxtonsWater
Very true, but in my particular case the friends I play with every week are now in a different country to me, so it's online with them or nothing with them.
Even then, TTRPGs can easily be played face to face with a pdf copy...? So I can't really understand how this impact is so big when the pdf buyers aren't even affected with global printing & shipping. (Unless ofc selling physical books are THAT MUCH profitable compared to pdfs)
We still get a physial copy of our RPG books along with a digital copy and at this point we have far more digtial copies than physical copies in our library. :(
I don't agree with some of the conclusions there.
When Apple's suppliers have horrible working conditions, part of the blame is rightfully put on Apple for not demanding more humane conditions, but when games publishers looking for rock-bottom manufacturing costs face the same issue they're just victims?
Second, after years of trying to push support for local game stores, now you're throwing them under the bus saying people should buy straight from publishers?
The designers are probably largely blameless in this, but supply chain management is part of a publisher's job and this video is very one-sided in painting them as the victims.
I agree with this. Much more holistic view of the issue, and much less pathetic appeal
Apple and other companies are exceptionally powerful corporate entities. Small/indie game developers shouldn't be held to that same standard because that's nonsense. They should use what little power they have to lobby for better working conditions, but you can't give them the same burden.
Your other problems are kinda fine. I don't really support pro-gamestore attitudes.
Local stores of _stuff that you can buy online_ are dying out.
Most of the stuff nowadays you buy either directly from the source or from a consolidated platform (Amazon, Steam, etc).
Board games are no different.
@@Neeo-u1j Meh, the US publishing industry (which is the sector for tabletop games) makes more than the Movie, Television, Music, and Video Game industry.
Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro, who is in turned owned by The Vanguard Group, a multinational investment corp. Not an insignificant entity. And we don't even wanna get into the murky mystery money behind Games Workshop.
People have set exception for the price of the tabletop game, creators can not exceed that without a reasonable excuse.
Apple is a multitrillion(?) company with a customer base who have no problem in the yearly increase in price.
So yes bias do exist so you should look at the circumstances, people need money to feed themselves and familes
I would be curious to see if there have been any positives in Tabletops because of the pandemic? I.E. digital tools getting more press, the seeming explosion of tabletop podcasts (possibly separate from the pandemic) etc. thank you for this awesome video!
There was a huge uptick in online gameplay for Tabletop games however smaller companies don't always have the ability to move their content online.
My local game store has reported no losses for the whole pandemic. He's been directly on-target or even above, which is particularly impressive being as there was a substantial period (It may even still be going on) when he couldn't run M:tG tournaments.
Admittedly, some of that may be from diversifying into also selling used videogames.
As a developer there's also been increased interest on my end in supporting the solo gaming board game niche. It wasn't an angle of the design space I'd considered for a long time - I wanted to make games that brought people together around a table - but it's a need worth filling when it's literally the only safe option and thinking through how to make a good game in that space is a fascinating exercise.
Ehm well I know and more people are playing games… no idea what this people talk about tbh
I also played 3 times as much as 2019
I heard people are starting to play through discord/zoom/etc
@@BuztererI feel very odd here, since for me the majority of my table top books are digital. I've been in the hobby for over a decade now and after I left high school and have my own disposable income, it just made more sense to buy the cheaper digital version.
Same in overall regards to my table top experience, the majority of it has been online first on skype, then on discord. Using various online mediums, mostly roll 20 but also trying things like fantasy grounds.
Which this is not a critique of people who buy physical books I get it, I own over 100 books myself, and a few of them are actually ttrpgs, I just felt very differently watching this video perspective wise.
I think part of this is also a correction after years of the market overhearing. Nearly every boardgamer I know had a large stack of unplayed games even at the start of the pandemic and for those that preorder or kickstart games more and more games kept coming and this really highlighted just how many unplayed games they already had so a lot of people started looking at their collections and saying 'do I really need more games?' And looking at your games and seeing how many unplayed game you have really hits boardgamers harder than someone looking at all their unplayed steam games because board games take up so much space, so even when we see everything get back to normal you might see boardgames think a little bit longer about if they really need a 9th game with their 3rd favorite game mechanic or if they should just play the games they have.
One point on domestic (US) paper production. The increasing consolidation of US paper manufacturing from regional, independent mills to a few national-scale companies has resulted in monopolies where the supply has been deliberately constrained to keep prices high to ensure not just a profit, but a large profit. In my own community a profitable paper mill was purchased not for its capacity but merely so the new owners could lay off the workforce, shutter the mill and drive up prices by buying out the competition. This mill sat idle for a couple years before being eventually put up for sale, but new owners insisted that any entity that purchased the site would have to agree to not produce paper as a term of the sales contract. Several perspective buyers attempted to purchase it but were shut out by this no-compete requirement. After about 4 years of simply sitting on a fully functional, yet shuttered mill, the new owners sold much of the machinery to buyers outside the US and cut up the rest for scrap before selling the property for less than they paid for it. In the end, they were able to claim a massive tax write-off for the "loss" of selling the property for less than their purchase price and accomplish the goal of preventing competition.
In terms of shipping I’m surprised you didn’t mention both the Suez incident, which has caused all sorts of issues. Also just general ports not being able to keep up with up with demand. I’ve had a board game wait over a month in a port ~50 miles from me in the US.
the Suez Incident totally piled on what was already a bad issue! It was hard to watch!
I backed the Battletech Clan Invasion Kickstarter. I'm really tired of people complaining about the delays that happened. The timing was just really horrible and things got really delayed. People do need to be understanding of the supply chain issues.
I do suggest that game companies start looking for manufacturing partners closer to their markets.
My local game store owner said that after he sells out of his current Battletech products he's refusing to order any more because Catalyst games took so long to get him product and some product was missing. As someone who really enjoys the Battletech IP I feel like it's cursed sometimes.
The problem with getting manufacturing partners closer to their markets is that means massively increasing the prices of the games. One of the projects I backed last year had a lot of people asking them in they would move their production out of Asia and they said they looked into it and it was going to cost them twice as much to make components that would be of significantly lower quality and that is a really hard ask for most people. They said that was also still using a developing country to produce in, as producing the type of large games with lots of nice components that people want in a country like the US would cost so much they it would put the game out of reach of all but their richest and most dedicated fans.
Seyla!
Most of the people working on kickstarters are doing the best they can to get everything back on track. We just have to be patient. :/
I worked in toys at Target for the first two years of the pandemic. For months, a lot of our board games and puzzles were impossible to find, Monopoly and Jenga were especially popular. While this focused on more complex board games, it's interesting to see the other side of what I saw.
Thanks so much for commenting on this side of things!! I remember walking into a Target and seeing the bare board game shelves! It was a crazy thing to see and I'm happy they're expanding their board game content!
Watched all of these problems happening with the Catalyst Game Labs Battletech kickstarter which had the worst timing. Being hit completely by surprise. They were and still are extremely transparent about EVERYTHING going on, which I and many others appreciated. There was a significant portion of backers that were not as accepting of the situation.
But now they seem to be on the upswing, both in the last of the KS deliveries having gone out a while ago, and lots of thier product are reaching shelves in Game Stores nowadays.
Regarding shipping containers, there's also an issue with supply of containers themselves. This is because a lot of covid related supplies were shipped to parts of the world with little exporting trade, meaning there are yards of empty container that aren't sendt anywhere, cuz very little is exported. This is a symptom of lopsided trade. So when more containers are needed you actually have to send a ship with little on board - which is expensive - then load empty container on the ship to take them where they're needed. Adding two extra trips with little compensation is very slow and expensive.
Yep. I had to read up on this a bit during my Global Supply Chain class last semester. Sadly, there's just no easy fix for the situation because for it to become profitable both ways there has to be something to send back other than just empty containers and the supply chain is crippled in so many areas.
Supporting Kickstarter and buying directly from publishers is in principle a good idea. But some of them become very inflexible if you live out of their comfort zone to ship to. Then they sometimes basically ask you to use one of the retailers since those will then take care of the whole international stuff like tarifs and so forth.
In reply to your suggestion that we contribute to crowdfunding: I and my friends are unlikely to ever back another Kickstarter again as long as KS remains committed to its pivot to crypto. We're avid players of TTRPGs and love backing projects but we want nothing to do with NFT, crypto or the blockchain whatsoever
The way companies are heading blockchain isn't going anywhere. Now I think how most people are using is a scam, but the usefulness is too much to ignore, and the environmental impact is exaggerated. But hey if dumping blockchain means you're going to dump Facebook and Twitter I think you and your friends will be better for it.
Ew, good to know. Fcking crypto...
They what? Gross. 😣
Well, there is this place called Gamefound in the board game space.
I should add it was set up by Awaken Realms in response to Kickstarter never really improving anything.
the expansion of games to our tablets and phones and whatnot is brilliant, things like gartic and such is a great leap forward in the possibilities we have, but it misses out on the real draw of boardgames.. drawing together and playing with the people we care about and having a shared experience, a memory.
They can exist side by side.. but as we've seen before in so many other mediums, eventually it'll just flop to one or the other, and it's not going to be the electronic games.
I think the big problem is that smaller publishers don't have the ability to hire staff or know how to create digital games. This will certainly hold a lot of companies back from creating a game in a digital space.
Yeah, can't say I'm shocked the pandemic is hurting this business.
its not really the pandemic that is the problem, its the restrictions governments put in place and people's fear of disease
I actually think its great because we are seeing more digital versions of tabletop games, as someone that don't have a lot of friends living close by to meet to play games, being able to play tabletop style games online is awesome.
One of the problem though is that a lot of the digital versions of the games that people are playing make the creators little or no money.
I have seen this directly. My husband and I kickstarted a game almost two years ago with a reliable kickstarter, but they have had all of these issues and finally decided to downsize their staff and shell out the increased cost of shipping themselves, just so everyone can get the game they paid for, and so their company can start on their next game.
"What can we, the game playing public, do to help?" @5:23
Be willing to pay local manufacturing cost for things, rather than relying on cheap labor and a delicate global supply chain. Raw materials, if not already in the country, are easier and cheaper to ship than finished goods. I'd be really curious to see how different manufactures, who produce in their primary market, have fared compared to those who rely on China.
You can be willing to pay local manufacturing costs... but are you willing to be the one working in the manufacturing plant? ... Yeah, neither is anyone else. People SAY they want to support changing the system, but aren't willing to actually bite the bullet and be the change itself.
And, they aren't willing to allow people to move to America who WOULD be willing to do so. Because of the ongoing idiot idea of "Them illegal aliens are stealing Murica's jobs"... you know, the jobs Americans don't WANT to do in the first place?
The irony: America does not represent what it was in the olden days, some ways for good, others for so very bad. It USED to be "The land of the free; bring us your sick, your needy, etc.", but that hasn't been true... for at least the last 22 years. (9/11 combining fearmongering and real fears certainly didn't help matters).
Like, why NOT make it absolutely easy to let people move to America and do the work they are willing to do which you DON'T want to do? (Answer: because so many people would rather have someone to hate than to help.)
Its not going to happen, one of the things the fueled the board gaming boom was premium games at a far cheaper price then we had seen before.
I go out of my way to pay for anything not made in China, it costs more, but it is better quality and more likely to be responsibly made
Jarie 水栓(Suisen) The US takes up some 1 million immigrants every year.
@@JarieSuicune Americans are willing to work in those manufacturing plant but are going to want to be paid actual wages and not the bare minimum. Also include full benefits as well including lots of time off and maternal leave. The only jobs American are not willing to do are farming jobs as they are very seasonal, very very back breaking. Set the pay at $25 hr and you'll get people to sign up very quickly.
I admit that the big aspect I have been looking at with the tabletop industry needing to reevaluate its production and development priorities has come from the notion of sustainability rather than solvency, but I suppose they might be one and the same soon at this rate.
Is there any merit to the notion of tabletop publishers to explore things like downscaling component quality? Maybe utilizing lower grade paper (that could still be sleeved), more generic tokens that don't utilize such meticulous production, assembly, or storage, or in the case of plastics utilizing recycled and reclaimed material for production?
i know as buyer i not going less quality good if i can. the main uptick in cost base on video also not be help by downscaling component quality much.
Well said, and offering digital versions of parts of their games, or other workarounds, are a great way to demonstrate to backers that they are working on the product and aren't just taking the money and walking away.
I am hoping all of the supply chain mess will lead to more local supply chains.
I'm reminded of the story how TomSka and friends tried to get their Muffin Time board game out the door in later 2019 and everything just started popping off. They did a video of it documenting their struggles and how they made that really fun game.
I'm a TTRPG designer going into this year starting to get my book off the ground and thinking about going through a printer, so this is a really important video to me, thank you. I knew there were production and shipping issues, but I wasn't aware that it was quite this bad.
How about publishing online versions of tabletop games? That would completely cut off the issues mentioned in this video, and would even bypass an issue of people not being able to physically meet together to play tabletop games. There is Tabletop Simulator as an example of a base engine that people can make online tabletop games at. Publishers could take something like that and add the adequate level of polish needed for a unique experience!
As someone who loves TTS for design prototypes, demoing, and playing out-of-print products, it's great but it's genuinely a poor substitute in my opinion.
I play tabletop specifically for the feeling of playing in person with others, and even if something like VR would be an adequate substitute (it isn't) it would be prohibitively expensive.
Exactly!
Would that still preserve the feeling of meeting up with people to play though? Over the pandemic, I found TTS to be more of a stopgap than a reasonable replacement, personally, though of course it's still quite a young idea
Exactly! Off the top of my head, Root, Catan, Risk, Wingspan...all have PC versions with online multiplayer, and I'm sure there's plenty more.
In the last year there has been an uptick in board games moving online! Which is amazing but TTS and Tabletopia are still in their infancy. the UI and HUD are a tough pill to swallow for most players.
I love it when you go off script! It really puts the personal effect in to get that proper empathy across that this is a serious issue affecting real people.
I worked in a completely different industry and I know the exact same problems. No supplies, no money, no workers, and very few people are actually understanding about the situation. It got to the point that several people just gave up. We ended up in a pit of quicksand with any hope of rescue constantly passing us by. In the end we had to shut everything down.
2:20 - So, I think it was around 4-5 months ago, an Extra History episode had another jab at Amazon...but that one was a non sequitur and felt forced.
This jab, however, flowed well with the narrative, was subtle, and earned a chuckle as well.
Well done.
That meme guy making the peace sign and disappearing got me lauging so hard i had to rewind because I missed the rest of the video, well done!
Hectic. I remember seeing a friend create a tabletop game before my eyes in College. I really hope that this doesn't stop people like her from creating amazing things
I manage an RPG and board game club and the Pandemic is killing us. When we can open, only the most hardcore show up.
mad respect to zoey, i never had the magic touch to work the cotton candy machine.
at that job, we had two kinds of employees: the Chosen Few who could consistently make perfect cotton candy, and the unwashed rest of us. The Chosen could not explain how they were chosen, they only knew that they were.
I literally just backed a board game Kickstarter a few days ago, thanks for bringing this all to light as I didn't even think of any of this
Thanks for supporting the Tabletop Industry!
I have a friend that had a Kickstarter last year. Over the course of the Kickstarter, he saw the shipping price for a container almost double. This is while he's watching orders come in for a game. Backers saw his new shipping cost estimates and got ANGRY, accusing him of trying to scam them with a bait and switch, when if he didn't change his initial estimates for shipping the game would basically make him nothing due to the container costs eating up the entire profit margin of his initial estimate.
This seems more like an acceleration of factors that were already putting the industry at risk. That said, I feel that those companies that do survive these problems will be in a place to absorb smaller devs and hopefully lead to a new age in gaming as things pan out over the next decade; so, best of luck to them all.
props to you guys for shedding light on this issue while also promoting kindness and understanding during these difficult times
Fucking golden age for indie designers selling miniatures digitally for 3d printing.
I don't think board games and ttrpgs are dying. I think they're just changing. For example, solo board games are seeing a renaissance of a sort.
@Bleh A lot of solo game are very specialized selling people a game appeals directly to them rather than a large market and they frequently use far simpler components, as part of the reason to get all the big expensive figures and metal pieces is to show off to your friends, so they can sell it for more while delivering a less blinged out product meaning that small locally sourced production runs are far more feasible and the costumers are more likely to pay a little extra even if the game is mostly just paper and cardboard.
@Bleh that's less of my issue than the doom and gloom clickbait presentation I suppose? It's just not as dire as it's being made out to be.
Thanks so much for making this episode ☺️ us indy folks are trying our hardest!
Wargaming such as Warhammer 40K, Age of Sigmar, Kings of War etc. Are still booming and growing.
Their was clearly market saturation prior to Covid, the growth over the last 10 years had been hyperbolic and the excessive production value inflation and exhasustion of creative spaces for genuine inovation are drying up interest in new products. BoardGames after even higher replayablity then videogames so constantly purchasing new chardboard is an extravagance even for people who really love games.
I am aware that a lot of tabletop games have exploded in popularity on table top simulator, so I had a inkling that this was happening.
But due to my gaming group being five people I've been playing more board games during covid than ever before in my life. We never stopped as we never exceeded the limit of people advised at social gatherings.
To me covid ended up being the "board games revelation" chapter of my life where I realized how amazing they are.
This, and also throw all those politicians that insisted on business killing practices these last two years out of office.
Please tell eddy that I've been running Pugmire for my friends for about 2years and we are absolutely in love with it.
Eddy certainly is a good dog
Ron Perlman voice: "... not enough paper to go around. As the powers scrambled for the last precious cellulose resources, came the paperocalypse. The sheet of humanity was nearly wiped clean."
I've bought more board games in the last 2 years than ever before, they should be thriving! Man, externalizing all of the US's production really screwed us over, eh?
Depends, how many times the prices you paid for all your games would you have been willing to pay for those games to have been produced in the US?
@@falconJB I just paid 200 dollars for a board game that's out of print that normally costs 40 (and I am not a wealthy person by any stretch). I am the wrong person to ask that, because I would totally spend my money on American printed board games. But you're not wrong for the average user. :P
@@alwaysfallingshort I just remember back in the day we use to pay $100(adjusted for inflation) for games that were all cardboard and that is what we would likely be looking at if we brought production back to the US and since that would put them out of reach of a lot of people and greatly reduce the number of games even a lot of hardcore boardgamers would buy. Likely meaning that boardgames(outside of the mass produced games made by Hasbro) would retreat back into a niche hobby and we would see far fewer new boardgames coming out.
@@falconJB I think the point is that if there were competitively priced options, and if our nation actually invested in infrastructure and reducing the cost of production domestically, the overall price would be reduced. It's not just a matter of making them here, but our nation incentivizing actual job creators instead of industries that mostly outsource while calling themselves job creators, and that has nothing to do with the games industry specifically.
Ok, I'm going back to school to set myself up with a way to get my own ttrpg store focusing on custom maps, mini figs, character art, etc., so this is really of interest to me...
This seems more like physical copies are suffering but anyone who didnt rely on physical copies and who had online support are doing pretty damn great. WotC is doing great but they're a big company so they had ads on their side.
Just participated in the ATLA Kickstarter. Even with additional hurdles, because I don't pocess a credit card. It's not common where I live. Then the shipping got delayed for at least a couple of months. Pretty much helps being general more on the chill side and living the positive hype without getting sour.
In the spirit of helping a game I believe in, on kickstarter. Deep Rock Galactic is publishing a board game, dwarves fighting bugs with kick arse miniatures in caves.
I am in a family of tabletop gaming enthusiasts, and while I am not one of said enthusiasts myself, I understand that they mostly play online with simulators.
You're not describing an industry dying. You're badly describing an industry changing.
0/10 QR Code didn’t lead to Rick Roll
(Good, and insightful video, thanks!)
LOL next time!
I knew SOMEONE must have scanned it but I had to scroll a looong way down to find out
I didn't realise that the paper shortage was so acute. I knew it was bad but the closure of the paper mills and the shift in production to packaging explains why several retailers I know have increased non-paper items by 5% but paper items by 10%.
Oh no the pandemic has shown the instabillity in how all our corporate entities are functionally designed as inverted economic pyramids and now its our responsabillity to prop them up at our own expense, where have I heard this one before?
This kind of topic is why I fell in love with extra credit because without Lil being educated on this topic I wouldn't have known it was actually a problem
my neighbour doesn't let me pay his cat anymore, there is a restraining order
My cat was right at my feet when you said that so I immediately picked him up. He's a cuddly kitten
I appreciated your off-the-script bit :) In a weird way, it gave me nostalgia for when Extra Credits was just three people.
I would not have played DnD if there was no pandemic. It always struck me as a bridge too far into the nerd kingdom, a perspective I really regret since I found out how fun it is. We play digitally, which helped me ease into it, and now I look forward to trying it irl.
Every time my friends have gotten together we pick a game out of my collection to play. We have a lot of fun playing them but we have been having a hard time getting together consistently…
One option would be to create digital versions of your board game to help weather this time. My wife has a genetic condition that is extremely isolating, but she uses services like board game arena in order to play with friends that she doesn't have that many options to interact with.
You have forgotten that the policy to reduce emissions in China has resulted in factories being run at a lower rate to comply with emissions.
The South Sea Bubble!
I was Walpole!
At the start of the pandemic, a friend gift us "tabletop simulator" on steam, and that stuff was a blessing
One of my favorite table top games, Mystic Vale, actually has a version of their game up on steam. That being said it was apparently there since Jan 2019 and I had no idea. I know it's a very different experience playing your favorite tabletop games online but check and see if they're around and you might be surprised.
It's also available on the switch.
I don't have anything coherent to say about the board game problem that hasn't already been mentioned, but it's cool to see Eddie doing other stuff (as an Onyx Path RPG fan, Eddie does a lot of stuff over there too).
I didn't realize how many people have an irrational hate for this channel until after I linked this episode on a tabletop gaming subreddit to be like "Oh hey, this video kind of explains why the prices went up" and the only comments were people saying "I'm not going to watch the video"
From my personal perspective I really can't agree less.
I've spent a solid 150 hours playing Twilight imperium IV since the pandemic broke out.
Staying home from school with really dorky neighbors will do that.
So, you've been playing a game that was already out and available in stores. This is more about games in production and facing delays before they get to the stores.
@@mattmcelroy3929 Well I bought the game in May of 2020 if that makes any difference.
Due to the rising costs of electricity in Europe, board games sales skyrocketed here. Also the pandemic made families stay together for long periods of time, so a lot of us turned to analog games
how is that related to electricity?
@@syferpolski4344 Well ppl dont play as much games on console or PC when electricity prices are bonkers
All the best games are being released via Kickstarter, etc, anyway. One thing that still hurts them, though, is unexpected increases in shipping costs. As far as discoverability goes, some game designers are releasing demo versions of their games on Tabletop Simulator.
I went to a board game night every Friday before the pandemic.
No idea if it will restart when this is all over.
Here in the Netherlands I am also feel the paper shortage in the price of English books and books in general this also includes the English translation of manga and light novels which have been hard to get or even impossible to reorder
The last mass extinction led to the Cambrian explosion. Many of these issues are temporary, with luck the demand will still be there when industry catches up.
Demand almost certainly won't be an issue. As a general media, tabletop games are a social positive which has only gained strength and acceptance.
The problem is more in the companies themselves surviving. Much as I wouldn't be one to particularly complain if the only game like D&D were the one published by Wizards of the Coast (I'm a D&D fan and don't have much chance to play that, let alone trying other games), I know a great many people would be salty to death if their fave publishers lost to Wizards just because Hasbro (which owns Wizards) has enough money to survive the great publisher extinction.
Well, if everyone’s going to go around all rando petting cats today ….my cat will never come in! He loves his love 💕 ❤️
That Strahd cameo though. ;D Beautiful.
What's crazy is looking over at Wizards Of The Coast anticipating Magic having a downturn due to the pandemic, but then seeing a huge surge in sales and support, and then taking this nice opportunity to not have your game face severe repercussions and following that all up with trying to destroy your game through sheer shittiness on their part.
Watched this just after getting back from a DnD session.
Speaking of backing Kickstarters for board games, one I backed was the one for the Power Rangers Deck Building Game made by Renegade Game Studios. It was the first time I backed a board game Kickstarter.
I kind of miss regular self-publisher mini get-togethers. Where a local self-publisher would slap down a plastic table with a banner at a brick and mortar book store and playtest/sell their stuff.
Great video! Thanks!
No mention of tabletop sim or roll20?
as a UK resident, let me once again apologise for Brexit being utterly rubbish.
don't apologise, it's not actually your fault (I hope)
now apply this to every other industry that also require these aspects of production to understand the full situation the world is in
Sending a Hell Yes on the off script part especially
Thank you for this video and info.
So long as Kickstarter campaigns don’t do what stronghold games did with their recent Kickstarter, I have no problem waiting years. It’s a nice surprise when one arrives at our doorstep
I've gotten into the Arkham Horror living card game during the pandemic. I tried to complete a campaign set of cards, but its pretty much impossible finding just the last expansion pack I need. Everywhere is sold out.
As an indie board game designer this gives me hope. Thank you :3
Major supply chain problems seem to be the only part of this that have gone wrong. Previous years saw drastic growth in tabletop gaming, and board games have only returned to previous levels - actually distinctly above previous levels but no longer at peak - and the changes have largely been in which type of games are in-demand, with smaller player-count games more popular and ongoing games less obscure. The will to create board games is higher than ever, thanks to the residual effects of the explosive boom in indie board games from crowdfunding, and the demand for board games is high. There are major logistical hurdles that existed before Current Events and have been made drastically moreso recently, and there will have to be a major change in the logistics of the industry - but it's not going to fail, even if it gets very strange for a while and the industry no doubt finds a way to dump as much of the consequences as possible onto designers.
It's pretty telling for late capitalism that it can't even coherently organise basic logistics, when the one thing capitalism is meant to be good at is the self-organising efficient allocation of resources.
I'd be happy to support companies who don't call their costumers human garbage, a supply crunch like this is not a time to make potential buyers angry.
I’m Surprised since KS is having record numbers for table top games.
It's more about the supply chain after its been funded.
The pandemic made us use tabletop simulator much more, which got us to find new boardgames to try out, and discovered a few new favorites, like Disney's villainous, and Azul! Now we just all do a self-test before meeting, and it works quite well! Love a good whole day of 14 point Twilight Imperium on a huge map!
Board games are selling really well based on the numbers we're seeing. The biggest problem has been supply chain issues, but that doesn't equate to "extinction". If anything, scarcity seems to just drive more demand. When supply chains recover I think we'll see a lot of growth in this market.
I actually just played my first DnD session this last weekend
Board games are coming back
Yasss!!!!
@@extrahistory love the channel. Thanks for the heart!
@@10cody7 pc. I’m a half orc Barbarian with a pet emu
Just ringing in on Gencon, while the 2021 event wasn't very impressive, the 2022 convention is looking like it's going to be a much harder rebound. The hotel block (which didn't sell out in 2021 and had rooms available downtown until almost just before the event [which itself is kind of a stunner[ ) has done a hard 180, and COMPLETELY sold out within the first three hours. There's rumors and discussion about how the room block was smaller this year because 2021 was a smaller event, and it's likely that hotels were being a little cagey on committing rooms this far forward on an unknown, but this frankly insane demand is suggesting that 2022 is going to be a LOT more like 2019.
Varying your means of production is beneficial.
Man, board games are so fun.
Yes
#TRUTH
Everytime i see the map of our world i only see a big battleground with some countries trying to be the number 1 while enslaving or destroying other countries.
Great explanation and video 👍
Plus side finally got some actual miniatures painted man!!