I follow Dr. Lew Pulisfer’s YouTube channel. He’s been designing games for a long time. He was published multiple times in Dragon magazine in the 80’s. He has designed several board games that have been published and seen several re-printings and editions. He’s taught game design at a college level and wrote a book about game design. He’s been around and knows what he’s talking about.

He posted this video the other day and I disagree with it, in part.

 

He’s correct in that there are a bunch of bad board games being published. There is a market that wants a game that doesn’t require 10 or more plays to really understand the games depth. I don’t really understand who these games or for or what they want. I don’t buy many board games. Typically its because I haven’t really exhausted my interest in the games I already have so I keep playing them.

If you are running a “big” game company then in order to cover your overhead, you have to sell tens of thousands of copies of a game. You have payroll, rent, phone and all the rest to cover. If you don’t have a pool of cash or a solid performing back catalog of games to make through the lean times then you have to keep dumping mediocre games on the market to satisfy the demand. That’s a race to the bottom. The problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win. Or worse, come in second.

If you are running a small, lean game company, then you only need to focus on the minimum viable audience. You need Keven Kelly’s 1000 True Fans. Look at Free League, Goodman Games and Lamentations of the Flame Princess. They aren’t “big” in the way Mayfair was or Asmodee or Fantasy Flight are. Certainly, they aren’t WoTC. They aren’t trying to make games for WoTC’s market either. I doubt you are going to see a Dungeon Crawl Classics collectible card game though a card game illustrated by Doug Kovacs would be cool. They’ve identified the people they want to serve and they deliver what those people want. They aren’t going to be flying to GenCon in private jets but they are doing well enough to keep doing it and that’s not bad.

There is always a market for quality. You have to find the people who are willing to pay for it. Realize that the mass of the market may not be interested in your work but you don’t have to get the mass to make a living.