Brandon the Game Dev

The year is 2029. Everybody has jetpacks and Amazon is the only company in existence. What does board gaming look like in this brave new world 10 years into the future? And for that matter, what happened to Kickstarter?

I’m going to do something I don’t do on this blog. I’m going to try my hand at futuring, that fabled profession of the mystics. While unscientific, unfalsifiable, and usually wrong, I nevertheless think this is an important exercise sometimes. When you’re trying to come up with a business strategy that works, you need to think five or ten years down the road. By extrapolating from current trends, you can try to envision the world you will soon inhabit. As Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

These are just my thoughts. They’re not hard facts and this isn’t a how-to guide. I want to start a conversation about the future of board gaming, even if you think some of this stuff is totally off-base.

Kickstarter will become a store.

In my recent article, Could Kickstarter Become a Board Game Store by 2020, I talked about why I believe Kickstarter could become a store in the near future. The year 2020 is a nice, clickable title that just happens to be feasible. In reality, I could Kickstarter becoming a store anywhere between 2020 and 2023.

The short version of my argument is that Kickstarter has already started taking pre-orders. This marks a dramatic change in the way they have historically done things. Not to mention, around 10% of campaigns don’t fulfill rewards at all, and those that ship are basically always late. In some countries, Kickstarter is not allowed because of consumer protection laws.

If all that weren’t enough, Kickstarter has financial incentives to become a store, because they take funding based on success. Furthermore, they have the brand recognition and loyal community they need to pull it off. They could very easily pivot into “a store for small businesses / creative professionals.”

The traditional publishing business process will be much more viable than self-publishing.

You’d still be able to get your board gaming fix, don’t you worry. There are all kinds of small companies that publish board games and for ones that have already had a measure of success, you’re not frontloading the entire cost of board gaming, just the manufacturing cost that Kickstarter would cover. This is likely to happen even if Kickstarter doesn’t become a store because there is some evidence that suggests your first time on Kickstarter is harder than ever.

Though you’ll still be able to buy great board games, that extra expense would knock a lot of self-publishers out of the game entirely. Board gaming as an industry isn’t declining, but rather maturing. The explosive growth is slowing down, which makes it a little harder for first-timers in business, too.

Some board gamers will become intensely interested in RPGs.

While board games still grew from 2016 to 2017 by 13%, RPGs did 22% at the same time. The year before that, the growth rates were 22% and 29% respectively. This is in stark contrast to the 2014 to 2015 growth rate where board games grew by 56% and RPGs by 40%.

Now, look, any economist worth your time will say “past returns do not guarantee future performance.” This is true. However, what made me look into all this data was the overwhelming amount of people on my Facebook group, social media channels, and chat room saying one of two things:

1. Board gaming is getting stale and all the games look the same.
2. I really want a story.

Number one is really telling. A lot of the people I see complaining are the exact same who were head-over-heels in love with board games in late 2015 and early 2016. They are early adopters. Many of them are superbackers on Kickstarter. With the love fading, some keep buying games and hoping they’ll find something great. Others leave board games entirely.

The second point is different. Board gaming does allow us to tell stories, but RPGs are a far better medium for that. In fact, the core component of any given RPG is essentially the sourcebook. The sourcebook contains lore as well as the rules the RPG universe abides by. RPGs rely on players to tell stories with the prompting and structure provided by a carefully crafted system. RPGs won’t scratch the board gamer itch for puzzles or crunchy heavy board games. They will definitely satiate desire for storytelling far better than board games typically would.

It will still be worth it to make board games if you love board gaming.

This post might make you feel awfully uncomfortable about making board games. Allow me to try to ease your unease. Creating hobby board games alone without integrating them into a larger business model such as transmedia storytelling doesn’t typically yield phenomenal amounts of money. The biggest board game campaign I remember was Exploding Kittens, which was in the neighborhood of $8 million. Matthew Inman might have walked away with $3 million in net profit from that. That’s a heck of a windfall, but he lives in Seattle, and frankly, you can’t retire wealthy on that sum. Oh, and by the way, he sells, in the words of Wikipedia “wall posters, greeting cards, calendars, clothing, coffee cups, signed prints, stickers, magnets, and badges.”

What board gaming has always done, however, is get people around the table to have a good social time without staring at a screen. In our increasingly digitized, alienating world, board games give us a chance to communicate with one another, escape our problems, and challenge our minds. While the amount of mechanics that can be applied to board games is finite, the number of possible expressions when combined with themes in nearly infinite. A well-made board game is an elegant system. It’s an art form.

If you love making board games, you should still make them! If you want to make a little money doing so, you can still pitch to a publisher or make a small business. The rules of engagement will change between now and 2029, but this shouldn’t dash your dreams. It will simply change the methods needed to achieve them.

Final Thoughts

I know this is a lot to take in. Ten years into the future of board gaming is tough to imagine. Yet by practicing this exercise, we stretch our imaginations, reset our expectations, and become better planners.

What do you think board gaming will look like in 10 years? Let me know in the comments below!

Building an online community can be daunting at first. The internet is already so noisy. You can feel like your voice isn’t heard and that community building is futile. Fortunately, this is not the case!

Many of you know me through the Pangea Games Discord server I run (1,400 members at the time I write this) or the Pangea Games Facebook group (1,700 members). Both of these are active, engaged, friendly communities where board game developers and board game lovers get together to share ideas, commiserate in success, and improve upon failure.

Many have asked me how I’ve done this and how you can do the same. If you’re among them, it’s your lucky day! As it turns out, it’s not actually all that hard to build a community. It just takes a lot of work 🙂

First, let’s define an online community. As I see it, an online community is any place that people are actively engaged in conversation on the Internet. Actively engaged meaning that people check in regularly and talk to one another. It’s a simple definition, but you’ll notice that it specifically excludes online platforms where nobody ever engages. Engagement is key here.

With that in mind, let’s cover eight simple steps that I use to build online communities.

1. Choose the right gathering place for your online community.

Before you have a wedding, you need a venue. The venue will determine the decor, the number of guests you can have, and the general mood. Online communities are similar. There are many venues you can choose – your own website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, forums, subreddits, chat servers like Discord… You know what, grab a chair because this list can go on for a while.

Think deeply about what you are trying to accomplish by community building. Then choose one to designate as your gathering place. I chose to create a Discord server because Discord is a popular, free chat app for real-time discussion that’s targeted at gamers. Likewise, I chose to create a Facebook group because Facebook is the world’s water cooler and because groups are favored by Facebook’s algorithms (which prioritize active discussions).

I cannot give you a hard and fast rule to tell you which gathering place is right for you and your online community. You will need to use your best judgment.

2. Establish a theme and ground rules to ensure positive discussion.

Early on, you want to make sure your community has a clear theme. For my Discord server, the theme is simple: this is a place for board game developers to talk shop. The Facebook group is similar, however, the contests I use to promote it – more on that in a moment – make it friendly for both developers and hardcore gamers.

Once you have a theme, come up with some basic ground rules. Don’t overengineer it. Nobody will read super-legalistic community rules. For example, here is what I use on Facebook:

3. Invite about 20 of your friends so the room’s not empty.

Before you can build a meaningfully engaged community, you need to establish a normal pace of conversation. Invite about 20 people who you already know. Start conversational topics on a daily basis and encourage them to comment. You don’t have to push extremely hard for engagement yet, you just need to make sure your community isn’t a ghost town when you really put your foot on the gas promoting it.

4. Establish norms.

Nobody cares about your rules. Perhaps 10% of people will read them and far fewer will remember them. Because of this, norms matter far more than rules. Setting good rules is part of setting good norms, but it’s not the most important part.

If you’re going for engagement, you need to make a point to ask an interesting question every day. Come up with hundreds of questions you can ask to start a conversation and schedule them in advance. When people start to respond to your questions, like their comments and reply as often as possible. If someone behaves in a negative or undesirable manner, gently nudge them in the right direction (or delete the comment).

Constantly encourage positive and meaningful engagement. Constantly discourage negative behavior. Again, this is before you start really promoting your community. Once you set good norms, people will start following that old monkey-see, monkey-do rule. Surrounded by smart and kind people, people will become themselves smart and kind.

5. Give people a reason to join your online community.

Once you have a month or two of engagement, you can create reasons for people to join your online community. They can be simple, such as individually crafted messages over social media. They can be flashy, like the board game giveaways I do twice monthly on the Facebook group. Either way, you need to give people a reason to join.

6. Push to 1000 members.

Early on with the Pangea Games Discord server, I hand messaged nearly 10,000 people on Twitter and Instagram. It took about 100 hours over weeks of effort. When I was done, I had just shy of 1,000 members in the community and it was actively engaged. It has remained active without sustained effort.

I don’t know what it is about 1,000 members specifically, but this seems to be the point at which communities are self-sustaining. There have been entire weeks where I’ve dropped out of Discord and barely been on Facebook, and the communities are still running. This should be your goal.

“Brandon, I don’t have thousands of followers or the time to message all of them.” Hey, that’s fair – there are many other options. For example, I use the blog – which pulls traffic primarily from search engines – to pull in new members to the Discord server. I use regularly scheduled giveaways of popular board games to encourage engagement on the Facebook group, as well as other related channels.

Of these, you may find giveaways to be the most accessible option. In that case, I recommend you check out Gleam.io for running contests. I’d also like to point out that these contests don’t have to be super-expensive. Often, a $50 prize is more than enough to get people’s attention and $25 in ads can go a long way toward further spreading the word of your contest. I’m a notorious tightwad and even still, the prospect of pulling in hundreds of people for around $100 per month is very attractive.

7. Listen to feedback to keep your online community healthy.

Once your community is self-sustaining, people will start conversations on their own, without your input. This is really good! Every once in a while, you’ll see criticism of your administration or even simply an expressed desire for new features. Listen carefully to what people are saying. You don’t have to cave to every demand, but the occasional incorporation of feedback into your methods goes a long way toward a healthy community.

8. Don’t overspecialize on one platform.

This is less of a community-building step, but more a necessary caution. If you’re hoping to build an online community, you are likely doing so because you’re building a business. That means your community is not merely a cool thing you do, but a lead generator for product sales, consulting, etc. It may also be a valuable part of your branding, too.

If you depend entirely upon a single platform like Facebook or Twitter to build a community, you become dependent on a company whose success has nothing to do with yours. Facebook changes their rules all the time. Twitter might get bought out. Discord could disappear tomorrow.

Sound conspiratorial? It’s not. Facebook tightened their rules for contests lately, which led to people – including me – changing the way they run their groups. In a naughtier example, Tumblr changed their service to prevent certain sorts of 18+ content from being posted. The change happened suddenly and was effective two weeks after the announcement, leaving many individuals whose content was not family-friendly high and dry. YouTube has a terrifying copyright strike system that can easily shut down movie reviewers for using copyrighted content.

My point here is simple: build a community on more than one platform. Our online channels are handled by very large corporations who can change the rules whenever they like. Don’t forget that.

Final Thoughts

Building an online community is a straightforward, repeatable process. It takes a lot of work, but it’s well worth it in the end. You’ll be able to generate leads, communicate directly with a larger audience, establish your brand presence, and figure out what people want. Not to mention, it’s a lot of fun.

Have any questions about building an online community? Let me know in the comments below 🙂

Last week, I talked about Kickstarter, and how I could see that website changing in the near future. It occurred to me shortly after I wrote that article that many people approach board games with the intention of making money, but not necessarily making games as an end to itself. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, and you can certainly make good money producing board games. The only trouble is that many of the people who see board games as a vehicle to get rich quick don’t realize that you have to build a business along the way.

For those of you who get into board games because you’re seeking money or looking for something to do in your spare time, this is an article for you. If you’ve released a game and you’re staring down the yawning chasm of “what next,” this is an article for you, too. Those among us who want to test the waters for different industries like video games, RPGs, or toys – this is for you, too.

Think long-term.

It takes a long time to build a business. The simple fact is that if you’re not a fortunate son starting out with tons of spare cash or hands-on mentorship from early in your life, you’re going to have to learn the hard way. It will most likely take three to five years to turn a profit, and if you’re working full-time or have a family, it could take longer.

There’s no shame in taking your time! It does mean, however, that you have to plan for five or ten years down the line. You can’t merely be a trend-chaser because trends change very fast. If your intent is merely to make beautiful board games as a creative endeavor, then you should do that and have fun doing so! However, if you want to make money and you have to build a business, you have to see gamers as customers.

When you build a business, you can’t simply give customers a new variation on something very old. That may be your end result, but you have to either go through a specific process where you figure out what they need and then make that or, you know, get really lucky. You have to find your target market, figure out what they need, and then figure out how to address them. In the end, you may do this through games, or you might do it through something else entirely!

Build a business by building a platform.

Let’s say you’re convinced by now that you need to think long-term. Your intention is to make money with board games being just one possible way to do that. With board games being difficult to make and the likelihood of success being several years away, how do you build a platform that can weather the storms? A lot of things can tear you down when you try to build a business – failed product launches, dried-up funding, personal crises. Even if you have some early successes, you may not be bringing in the kind of money you hope for. You need the ability to pivot and diversify into related businesses.

In short, you need to build a brand. This is one of those pieces of advice that gets passed around on the internet so often that it becomes meaningless. Here’s what this actually means: you need to encapsulate your intentions, your abilities, and your interests into a set of associations. Those associations include a name, logo, website, social media, mailing lists, etc. If you do this right, you can explore different areas in business without losing everything. If you do this really well, then over time, you can bring in income from lots of different sources, which would leave you free to be more creative in the long run.

Build a business by building a community.

Having a platform is one thing. Having a lot of people to talk to is something entirely different. Obviously, the marketing benefits of having a large community are numerous. You can generate more leads, market test ideas, and generally spread your ideas to a larger audience. Yet that’s not the only reason to build a community or network.

When you build a business, having a community can help you meet valuable contacts. Knowing the right people can help you know which opportunities to pursue. They can help steer you away from unprofitable or unenjoyable directions. What’s more, the people you meet may very well make fantastic teammates for future projects.

Create situations where you can fail and still try again.

Last but not least, some degree of failure is inevitable when you’re talking about time frames spanning multiple years. You need to be able to recover quickly when you fail. Yes, that is a when since the experimentation necessary to succeed will invariably lead you down some misguided path at some point. This is especially true early on.

For the first year or two, your goal is simple. Don’t get knocked out of business. Stay solvent on your debts and hope that by continuing to work, build a platform, and build a community, that better days will come. After that, your job is to use the resources you’ve gained – whether that’s some hard-earned cash or brand equity – and put it to good use by making something truly profitable.

Final Thoughts

When you realize that trends change as people find different ways to meet needs – which are themselves in flux – the whole context in which you build a business changes. The scope widens. You stop seeing things in terms of “the next board game I’m going to make.” You begin to see the next way to allow people to escape their problems. Games become one of many ways to provide an intellectual challenge. Your design becomes a way to bring communities together.

Focus on people’s needs and how you can meet them. If you can do this with your own platform and your own community in your own authentic voice, then you have a much better chance of long-term success. Kickstarter could go offline tomorrow, board games could become unpopular, and customers could flee to entirely different products. Then there you would be – still be standing there with another chance to succeed.