Game design crisis

Hello,

Without knowing much about the inner mechanism of the boardgame industry, I would say that, what makes a videogame sucessful is not the same thing as what makes a boardgame successful.

With high development costs, videogame producers are less likely to take risks. Thus instead of investing money in a game that is innovative, but not garanteed to succeed, they will invest in a sequel that already proven to be a good investment (such as maiden football or another walt disney title). They will then increase the success of their project with advertising.

The boardgame industry, on the otherhand, has lower development cost (The guy in his basement) and is not mainstream enough (at least in Canada) to be advertised. Thus, for a title to be successful, a boardgame has two possibilities: First, it can rely on a popular brand name (monopoly, lord of the ring, warcraft). Although it is not a garantee of success, it has more chances of making it through the main stream. The other way to succeed is to innovate. Making an original and fun boardgame will probably be more successful than any advertising, since people will talk about it, and show it to their friends (this is how Settlers was introduced in our group, and probably to any other newborn gaming group).

Anyways. My thoughts. Feel free to amend or comment if I said anything wrong! Very interesting topic by the way!

Have a nice day,

Jeb

EDIT: I noticed that, although I sticked to the theme of the topic, I completely missed the question! DOH! Alright, I will followup on this later on :)

It's instructive to go back in time a little here. Long-ish, boring and yet controversial post follows. You have been warned.

The late 1970s was the first break-through period for video games. The first real "video game"*, Space Invaders, appeared at just about the same time as the first home computers were becoming affordable. The technology wasn't so hot, but the novelty was immense. It's hard to imagine what sort of an impact Space Invaders had these days - almost as hard as remembering the impact that Jaws and Star Wars had on the movie-going public (although I'm of that generation, being 10 years old in 1978, and between them, those two events have overshadowed everything else from that period in my memory.!)

(*and I don't count Pong or things like Space War as they were too small scale compared to the global impact that Invaders had.)

But the important point was that the technology was very first-generation, and this meant that it almost didn't matter how crudely the ideas were implemented - the novelty factor outdrew everything. And this meant that "one-guy-in-his-bedroom" could produce games that would be accepted by the market simply because presentation wasn't the overriding factor.

And this state of affairs held for nigh-on a decade; video games and consoles advanced in quality unmatched by home computers until the advent of what was the real second-generation: the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. And suddenly, the hopes of the lone-coder were shattered. No longer could OGIHB do everything as the users of these machines demanded hi-res graphics, multi-channel sound and so on. Programming teams were certainly not unheard of prior to this (the last gasp Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 games were built in this way) but this was where it took hold.

And the third-generation wasn't far behind, as Microsoft took over the world in the mid-90s with a version of Windows that actually worked.
At the same time, the console market had undergone a similar revolution.

The result is that buillding a video game today requires a team - it's not an optional component. You need specialists in a lot of fields to produce something that will compete with the best. (That's not to say that innovation doesn't exist, but it can struggle to break free without some heavyweight support. Or it can be enjoyed on the first-generation level by those people willing to look for it. For which we can at least thank the 'net!)

Boardgames have been in the second-generation world for a while now, although this has occurred at different rates in different areas of the world (and kudos to people like Rio Grande and Days of Wonder for dragging the US market into line.) But in the second-generation model there is less room for innovation as the focus shifts to the presentation (and less kudos to Days of Wonder here, as they may have made things much harder for smaller companies!)

IOW I think that the semi-stagnation process is almost inevitable. Sure there will be lots of small companies who will continue to break the rules and, once in a while, one will surprise everyone by selling well too. But grabbing on to "franchises" strikes me as a classic second-generation syndrome and I think we will see more of it.