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May 26, 2003

WISH 48: Money, Money, Money

48? Wow... a lot of these to catch up on as time alows!

The price and availability of miniatures goes up as more companies leave the market. Wood costs lead to extended paper costs, and supplements and gaming systems are becoming a serious financial investment. Is this affecting your gaming any?

Of course, the reason "more companies leave the market" is not only because many of them are run as hobbies by people with little or no business sense.

It's also because there isn't that much margin to be made at today's prices (unless you avoid printing and distribution costs by going the PDF route, which the market really hasn't accepted yet). And really never has been. The most successful games have made a handful of people rich (the small 'r' version... no Gateses or Buffets in the gaming world), but most games just provide enough to pay a small number of people, often most of them freelancers paid well under the word rate for broader market writing. Most people writing games work another job to put food on the table.

I will admit, I don't automatically buy everything new and interesting any more, but that's more because there's too much product these days, and much of it support product for games I already know I'm not going to follow (like most everything White Wolf puts out... if only because they don't support Adventure!) or are the effluvium of the countless fly-by-night d20 lines (so many that the good products are easy to overlook!).

If you let price dictate your decisions, you don't buy wonderful things like Nobilis in favor of, say, The World of Synnibarr (which offered a LOT of pages for its price... pages of utter crap, of course, but a lot of them). That's clearly a mistake.

And I still follow a simple rule... If a movie costs $6 (matinees here in New Hampshire still do), then any game that will be enjoyable to just read has to be worth at least $18 (because it will take 3 times longer than the movie), and if it is even slight more enjoyable than a similar-length book or movie, then it adds even more value to the equation. Now, I'll admit that I think the new Talisman is overpriced at around $70... but that's because I already have the earlier editions. If I had access to no Talisman at all, I might just decide it's worth it, because it is a great light game and I know I've spent enough hours playing it to catch it up to the "movie price equivalent" easily.

Of course, I buy $45 German board games just because the bits look useful to recycle for other uses, so maybe I'm a poor judge.

Posted by ghoul at May 26, 2003 09:14 AM

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