Can an overemphasis on attractive art, components, and hardcovers price gamers out of the market?
High Quality
As the gamer market has matured, we’ve begun to see board games that are priced at over 60 U.S. dollars or higher. These are luxury products, with more focus on the look and presentation of the game (usually thanks to its components, miniatures, board, etc.). The problem is that the presentation drives the price up far enough that some people cannot afford to buy these games. In other words, there’s a concern that people are being priced out of gaming.
Keep in mind, in boardgames there’s a tendency for a few people to buy huge numbers of games, while others, through friendship or game clubs, play those games with the buyer. It’s somewhat different for tabletop role-playing games, although game masters still tend to buy most of the material for the group. The issue still applies though: companies have to strike a balance between producing an attractive game and a functional one, all while balancing cost. Not everyone can afford to make or buy a beautiful game.
What’s Driving “Art Inflation”?
There are so many games (including RPGs) out there, and so many people are exploring games rather than learning to master them, that games seem increasingly designed to be played just one to three times (or one sequence of adventures), because that’s all the time gamers have to devote to them before moving on. Whether a game gets played at all depends partly on how it looks – game explorers will play a game that looks interesting before a game that doesn’t, and in today’s world “interesting” usually involves three dimensional pieces and artwork (artwork is expensive).
In other words it involves expense in the physical production of the game rather than in the design. This can be true in both video games and tabletop games: if you pay attention to video games much you certainly have heard complaints about how developers spent more time on the graphics of a video game than on making the game fun to play.
The question is, has an “ooh, shiny!” attitude leaked into RPGs?
Ooh, Shiny!
The recent Spelljammer product is an example. With around a $70 list price, you get three pasteboard hardcover “books” all of 64 pages each, and a GM screen, in a slipcase. See Beth’s review for more details on what was included. Why so few pages? I suspect it was because the artwork, high quality paper, hardcover, and slipcase cost a lot of money.
Of course, companies will produce products that the market will bear, and despite my misgivings about the product, it’s clear it has fans. I often wonder, with modern supplements to RPGs, how many people actually use them, though. Are they produced more to be read and admired than to be used? (Kind of like “coffee table books?”)
This happens with board games too. I designed a wargame (Hastings 1066) that I tried to make as inexpensive as possible, as the impetus was something that could be sold in British National Heritage stores at museums and battle sites. The cards and paper strips provided the “board.” Other components included a die and some cubes. A Kickstarter was run and the list price was $35, very low for this kind of game. It did not sell well (though keep in mind, it never got into the kind of distribution I’d envisioned).
I designed another game on the (modified) system, Stalingrad Besieged. The publisher decided to include a mounted board, and three different sets of pieces (mini-cards, blocks, and very large cardboard). This increased the list price to $70. The Kickstarter tells the story. The publishers felt that their clientele were happy enough with the expense, and they made twice as much money. Yet it was all about presentation. The presentation, in other words, helped sell the book, even if it meant fewer people could afford to buy it.
What to Do About It
We might ask ourselves what’s “natural” for different kinds of games. For board games, showing most of the rules to the players is expected, while for card and video games, hiding these rules is natural. Insofar as much of what happens in RPGs takes place primarily in the mind and imagination, we could say that given sufficient imagination, the game needs very few props and pieces.
If you want to self-publish an RPG product, how do you avoid spending a lot on presentation? Smaller publishers without the resources of large game companies may rely on AI-generated or public-domain art. But the reality is, there’s an increasing expectation of attractive presentations overall as layout software has become more accessible and print-on-demand has surged. And then there’s the Internet itself, which relies on thumbnails and quick scrolling, making it very challenging for any new game from an indie publisher to stand out.
Some publishers try to split the difference by creating “bare bones” versions and more advanced, elaborate games with all the bells and whistles. But this is a luxury too; few indie publishers have the resources to produce both options.
Do We Really Need All That Stuff?
My view is that genuine imagination is in short supply. I don’t mean “brain fever” – that’s easy to generate – I mean imagination that is useful in problem-solving. I wrote about this at some length in “The Chain of Imagination” and “The Lost Art of Making Things Up.”
There’s a balance to be struck between indie designers, who are often new to the hobby and don’t have the financial resources to pour into their games, and experienced game companies, who can afford to create luxury content that not everyone can afford. In theory, there is room for both audiences; in practice, the luxury games (merely by existing) can raise the bar for the indie games. Artists have a right to make a living; conversely, the market is bound by who will pay for the game, and whether or not they play the game is almost beside the point. There’s a danger here though, which is that if a market caters too much to the affluent spectrum, there will be an increasingly smaller customer base to support the creation of new products, and that’s bad for gamers everywhere.
In defining what we really need to play RPGs, there’s a spectrum of opinions ranging from the basics (paper, pencil, and imagination) to the elaborate (expensive miniatures and other components). Experienced gamers who grew up with tabletop games before the era of advanced manufacturing and the Internet may lean more on imagination. But today, with the massive amount of gaming choices and the accessibility of crowdfunding means the bar has been raised, and it’s not enough to simply have a good game … it has to be pretty too.
Your Turn: When it comes to buying games, how much does form (it’s presentation, including hardcover vs. softcover, more vs. less art) matter over function (how often you’ll actually play the game)?
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