Are trivia games dead? & If Trivia Pursuit was made today (for the 1st time) how much would it cost to make?

Trivial pursuit had very few plastic components, no details on those plastic components, and while it had a lot of cards, they were very simply made. I have no idea what industry prices are like, but those aren't expensive components.

As for whether trivia games have had their time, I don't know. I don't really play them. Party games are doing great (Apples to Apples, Cranium) but people are getting stupider. Trivial Pursuit has been replaced by whatever the pop-culture trivia equivalent is.

Assuming that there are 250 - 500 cards, a board, square box, regular pawns and dice, a rules sheet and a platform, you'd probably spend $10,000 - $15,000 for production of 1000 games in the US. Producing 500 games would cost you about 75-85% of that total. For 100 games, you'd have to go digital, and I don't have any info on that.

The main cost is the cards. A game like Apples to Apples has a zillion cards. Even though they printed 1 million games or so last year, the price from China was about $4.00/game - very high for that number of games and from China. On 1000 games, the cost of 250 cards alone is about $4.90 in the U.S.

Sorry to bear bad news, but I hope the info is useful!

Something not mentioned yet, that seems obvious to me, is that trivia games have a shelf life....today's trivia is tomorrow's "Who knows, who cares".

The games also rapidly get stale for the owners....they learn what the correct answers are from playing, and it is just a memory game based on previous play, rather than actual knowledge from things like being well-read or having a life.

Soon, no one is going to have a life, or care about trivia. We're going to be shivering in the cold, starving, sick with bird flu and fighting over the meager scraps of what is left of civilization.
Remember when they said, "There's no future"? Well, this is it.
Create a game that teaches people how to kill, that will sell.

Grim, cynical, angry, and at some point played Age of Mythology. I like you...

I tend to agree with you about there being no future, but bird flu is not your threat. So far, there have been very few human cases. I'm more worried about nuclear war, with the direction America has been going over the past years...

I'm not sure if you can actually sell a game about killing. People buy games for entertainment, not education. There's also the logistical problem of capturing violence in a boardgame. No video game has really done it, and they have a much greater toolset than we have.

I'd like to agree with the person who mentioned trivia games turning into memory games, and point out that the only way around this is to include a ton of questions, and even that won't last forever.

Trivia games aren't dead, they are just cultured now. Game design has come along way from "making a game" to "making a game for this audience". Trivia games are leaning away from trivial fact to social fact and is evident in almost every social networking site out there.

Where you might have had "who was the commander in chief during the war of 1812?", a newer game will ask "who won american idol in 2005?". Trivia questions are still there, they are just more socially relevant to today's events.
People don't need to know encyclopedic facts anymore -- that's the internet's job now.

What people do know are their hobbies & obsessions. Current trivia games let them exercise that knowledge base. Ask yourself why a circa 80s era Trivial Pursuit game SHOULD sell as well as a Hanna Montana Scene-It game.

simpson

I have no idea. I'm sure Mattel has a relationship with someone or even owns their own plant in China. I only know (read: think I know) the pricing because I was quoting on the game for U.S. manufacture.

Traditionally, companies never disclose who prints for them. This may change with the CPSIA (new safety laws in the US), but the labeling requirements are confusing. The law seems to state that the "final assembler" is the manufacturer of record, but most big companies do not want someone else's name on their box. I don't blame them, either. If the law is applied such that a contract manufacturer's name has to be listed on the box, you'll get a whole lot of manufacturing leads by this time next year!