Tag Archives: board game inventors

SO YOU INVENTED A BOARD GAME, NOW WHAT?

SO YOU INVENTED A BOARD GAME, NOW WHAT?

One of the best features of the Board Game business is that the barriers to entry are fairly low. You can come up with a new gameplay mechanic, get some graphic design done, or potentially do it yourself. You then find a factory, send them the specifications and the artwork files, and then you are ready to place an order and get your Game manufactured.

Sounds easy right…? Well we may have summarised a lot of different steps and difficult decisions and creative developments here for the sake of brevity, but the point is this – from a commercial perspective, developing the Game is the easy part!

The easiest thing to do in the business of Board Games is to press the button & write a purchase order for inventory of your Game – that’s what so many Board Game startups do. The hard part is to actually sell it.

Number one point here – please think very carefully about manufacturing your Game. You can easily create a mock up, or prototype of your Game, you can even today produce a more or less final looking and working version of your Game at a comparatively affordable cost. You may want to go and try to sell that sample to potential customers first before you even think about starting a manufacturing run.

Imagine if the feedback you get is a). that might work, but here’s some things you need to change or b). That product has no chance of working, we would never buy it. If you get this feedback, you will feel silly to have run manufacturing and to be sat on thousands of copies of a Game that nobody wants to buy, or which could have been saleable if you had presented it to the market first and then taken on board the market feedback to tweak your product to make it a much more compelling proposition.

We have advised plenty of companies who have run production and then failed to secure any Sales for the Game. Over the decade and a half we have been in this business of Consulting on the Board Games business, we have had plenty of people pay us to run, in effect, a post mortem for their Game. And routinely within seconds of looking at the Game we spot various critical flaws or misconceptions which make the product commercially unviable.

But that’s not just us, we aren’t saying that we know everything – far from it! But ANY industry person can tell you if your packaging size/format is a problem, if your theme is off, if your gameplay has fundamental flaws, if your product is likely to have any commercial appeal or not. You don’t have to come to us for (paid for) advice and feedback on your product, although you can if you want, but there are many industry source you can validate your Game with first before you start incurring major costs and ordering inventory.

The bottom line then is this: the answer to the question of ‘So you invented a Board Game, Now What?’ is that you need to validate the potential for the Game and seek feedback from the market – both consumers and where relevant to your proposed business model, from Retailers as well. The ‘Now What’ should not lightly be the fact that YOU like your Game so much that you’re going to order 5,000 units of it, at least not until you find out if other people share your enthusiasm for your Game! Please don’t make the same avoidable mistake that so many Board Game startups make…

 

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The Importance Of Board Game Inventors To The Board Games Business

The Importance Of Board Game Inventors To The Board Games Business

The unsung heroes of the board games business are board game inventors! In so many cases, classic games which are now cultural icons came from the minds of independent or start up inventors before being taken onto a bigger commercial stage by more established board games publishers.

The challenge for board games publishers with highly experienced staff is that there is often a feeling of seen it all before and of doing things a certain way. Creatively speaking, outside inspiration often stretches what a board games company will do and makes the company look at things in a different way.

In some ways board games publishers have the easiest R&D model of nearly any business out there – there is a vast array of tested and honed board game play concepts out there. The average small to medium sized games company will review many hundreds of new concepts each year, bigger companies may review more than a thousand. And from this mighty array of options they can whittle the options down to as few as they can viably launch. That is not to say that there is no work required from that point on – far from it, things need to be tweaked, artwork needs to be developed and any plastic components designed, engineered and manufactured, but nevertheless the pool of creativity available to board game companies is close to unparalleled.

Many games companies hit a rough patch and have a bad year or two, but there can be no excuse that they didn’t have enough ideas to develop! The trick for board game companies is to develop strong filtration systems and processes which can sort the wheat from the chaff. This can take some effort, and every established games company has somewhere along the line turned down a game that became a top seller elsewhere, this is because games publishers can bring in way more concepts than they have time to properly review and it is difficult to predict which games will take off and which will fail spectacularly.

This of course is the main challenge for even professional board game inventors – the high level of competing games concepts and the high quality of many of those concepts makes it hard to place even strong games from originators who really know what they are doing. Therefore, the business model for games inventors is massively stacked with upfront opportunity cost and emotional investment based on faith and love of the game. All this effort and energy needs to be expended well ahead of actually selling anything and making a living. Nobody knows exactly how many board games get published globally each year, but it is in the thousands at least, maybe even ten thousand or more. So, despite heavy competition there is ongoing demand for the output of board game inventors.

For those still unconvinced of the need for or importance of board game inventors in the games business, consider this – all of the following popular and iconic games were created by independent inventors: Monopoly, Clue/do, Trivial Pursuit, Settlers of Catan, Operation, Cranium, Scrabble, Dobble…and many more. So, here’s to those plucky game creators and their glorious output!

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.boardgamebiz.com/index.php/board-game-business-consultancy-services/

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