Recently, 3-Minute Boardgames did a video on the impact of the global pandemic on game prices and all of the increases in costs and shipping delays associated with it. He begged people to be patient and understanding and while I agree, that’s good advice, I think it’s also a wake-up call to the entire board game industry.

Maybe you’re doing just about everything wrong.Now this is something that the board game community doesn’t want to hear and that’s mostly why I want little to do with the board game community. They are, largely, fanatics and crazy people without the slightest grasp on reality and that’s why I stopped paying attention long ago. The only thing I still do is catch up on a could of channels, just in case a game I feel like playing comes out and that’s pretty rare these days.

However, that said, I think one of the biggest problems that the hobby board game industry has had in recent years is the over-reliance on Kickstarter. Kickstarter encourages, actively, the over-proliferation of games based on the idea that you can get a lot of money without having to put in much work first. That results, at least in my opinion, a ton of very derivative games by creators who think if someone else can do it, why can’t they?

It’s also led to the absurd “cult of the new” mentality that has ruined the hobby board game industry. It’s not about playing good games, it’s about getting an endless supply of new games, to the point that you may never play a game more than once or twice because you’ve got a constant stack of new ones you have to get to.

That’s just stupid. Manufacturers have come to rely on it though. It’s why there are tons of expansions and new versions all the time, because they want to keep that money rolling in. Instead of making games that appeal to a wider audience, they’d rather just produce a handful of games in dozens of versions to appeal to a tiny number of people and that’s just stupid. The entire hobbyist board gaming community has developed an addiction for buying new shit all the time. This isn’t about playing games, it’s about buying them. It’s about c0llecting them.

Again, that’s just dumb. Of course, you can’t dare suggest such a thing or you’ll get bulldozed in negative comments. It’s like telling drug addicts that there’s something wrong with what they’re doing. They don’t like that very much. It doesn’t matter if it’s true, they just can’t see it because they don’t want to.

That’s one major reason why I’m not a fan of the community because the community is addicted. You can’t talk to people about actually playing games because all they want to do is buy more. I’m sorry, I just don’t see the attraction.

So maybe there’s a different way to look at this. Instead of people whining that they aren’t getting their constant fix, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate the way the industry runs. Instead of a constant drip of derivative games that all feel the same, just mixed and matched for mechanics, maybe they ought to put out some really good games that have some longevity involved. You don’t have to keep getting new all the time. You can just play the games that you have. What a novel concept, right? Break the addiction. It can’t be that hard.

That means that, for the near future at least, there won’t be a lot of games in the pipeline. People will have to make due with what they already have. Is that going to hurt the industry? Probably, but they’re the ones who made this untenable situation in the first place. Instead of shipping small production lines constantly because they don’t expect to sell more than a handful before the next update, maybe they need to take a look at the quality of the games they’re making, produce them in larger numbers, be concerned with the amount of unnecessary crap they’re sticking in the box and not make so much. Sell more to a wider audience, not a never-ending slew of small crap to a handful of people. Is that going to harm Kickstarter? Hopefully. Fuck Kickstarter. If small designers want to get really good games out there, there are companies that they can go through. Is that gatekeeping? Absolutely. We need gatekeepers to ensure that only the best of the best get through. There’s too much garbage out there already. Let’s learn from this and be more picky. You should be playing games more than once or twice. Your entire hobby shouldn’t be whipping out your credit card. That’s just dumb but there are lots of dumb people out there. Maybe we ought to stop.

Sooner or later, things will return to normal but hopefully, by then, people will have learned a lesson. Probably not though. People tend to be stupid. It’ll just be whining and complaining that they aren’t getting that dopamine hit in the brain because there isn’t a package on the doorstep every single day. Luckily, I don’t have to watch it because I refuse to hang around in those circles.

That’s really a good thing from where I’m sitting right now.