CMON's Hate, "Exclusivity," FOMO, and Josh's post about combat systems

I remember one day, when I was in marketing class our teached asked what does Zara sell. We said clothes, as it seems the obvious answer. But he said we were wrong. What they sell is not clothes, but fashion.

Kickstarter does not sell games to play. If you want to play a game, you don't buy one that doesn't exist yet sight-unseen knowing it will take one or two years to appear at your doorstep. Rather, the product being sold on Kickstarter is the experience of supporting and buying a game. It's the hype, the expectation, the sense of community. If you want to play games, you just go and buy a Knizia game for 10 bucks at the local store.

After all, if you were buying games, you would care more about the rules than all those huge-ass miniatures and bits and all other nonsense. You would care about balance, cards being easy to read and hold and so on. The focus would be on gameplay, not exclusivity or random expansions for games you know nothing about.

This is why companies lie about it. It improves the actual product: The hype, sense of doing something unique, the different purcharse experience. It drives sales early on and it's forgotten later. Sure, a few people might get upset, but you already got two hundred bucks out of them and most don't care.

This is not to say that you cannot buy games on Kickstarter because you want the game. While I've never bought into a campaign, I could see doing so if someone reprints 1825. But the huge drive of people buying games on Kickstarter is not done based on games as an art form, but games as a purchase experience. After all, did the people backing 18OE, a 16 hour monster 18xx, really in the market for such a game? Did all the people who bought Legend of Grimrock truly want a Dungeon Master experience? Turns out, they didn't. They went unplayed. Because it was not what people truly needed or wanted. They bought into the idea, not the actual act of play.

Erik, it feels like this discussion comes around every couple of weeks but yours is the most coherent post on the subject I believe I've yet read. I can only agree completely with you.

mezike wrote: Erik, it feels like this discussion comes around every couple of weeks but yours is the most coherent post on the subject I believe I've yet read. I can only agree completely with you.

Thank you Mezike. I've thought about writing an article about it, but it seems a one-way ticket to controversy and nasty comments. Ultimately, I don't want to berate people. I just think we should examine more what we are buying and what we truly achieve to get.

As in, buying a 10-player 250€ game on Kickstarter to see it gather dust on your shelf is fine if that's what you want. But, is it what you really want?

Erik Twice wrote: As in, buying a 10-player 250€ game on Kickstarter to see it gather dust on your shelf is fine if that's what you want. But, is it what you really want?

I remember that this came up a few years ago when KS had really started to gather steam as "the" outlet for game production and, even then, we were aware that there was simply too much being published for anyone to reasonably review, much less play on a regular basis. That was the point where everyone realized that some people were in to collect games, not play them. There's nothing wrong with that, if that's what your hobby is, but that's also being honest about what drives you.

Eric, I took the liberty of screenshotting that post and posting it on Twitter, citing you and TWBG. It was just so good, and I thought it would get some of boardgame twitter yakking.

Better to ask forgiveness than permission and all that.

Yes, absolutely, Jackwraith. I know a guy who is able to very clearly state that he is first and foremost a collector (previously of football programmes and now of board games). I don't comprehend it personally but I appreciate his self-awareness and honesty.

However, the grey area is with people who identify as 'gamers' and not as collectors but who are being sucked down into this hobby's equivalent of a fast-fashion mill. One nice, high quality pair of jeans will last longer, work out cheaper, and be more comfortable than endlessly buying cheap replacements every few months. Can people in this hobby realistically stop at one great game that they love to play a lot and be satisfied with that?

mezike wrote: Can people in this hobby realistically stop at one great game that they love to play a lot and be satisfied with that?

There are different kinds of gamers, and one of them is what I would call the Lifestyle Gamer. This guy doesn't want to own or play lots of games, he wants one big game to obsess over. A game with an ongoing supply of new expansions, supplements, and editions, and enough popularity to support organized play or at least a ready supply of local players. Games like Magic: the Gathering and Warhammer 40K. While recently reading through the Marvel Champions forum posts at BGG, I came across some poor dude who was quitting Marvel Champions because it just wasn't big enough to serve as a lifestyle game that could fill the hole in his existence.

I'll just add an anecdotal aside.

I've spent most of my career working for FMCG businesses leveraging global brands and am well aware of the many intricacies in the way products are marketed and the particular struggle of landing new products in the marketplace (almost all new products fail within the first six months so it's really not surprising that most board games also disappear fairly quickly from the common consciousness, harking back to Erik's point about some games becoming 'forgotten' before they even reach distribution).

People often mistakenly assume something sinister and conniving in corporate marketing but it really isn't the case. The formula for success is quite simple - find out what people want and then give it to them, then ask them what they liked and make your product moreso of that desirable quality. If it's a conceptual quality like "success" or "admiration" or "attractiveness" then advertise your product with those qualities. Follow the trends that your target audience follow and copy them in your packaging and advertising. The only people doing the manipulating is ourselves craving the things we crave and, trapped in our own dissatisfied shells of self-doubt that we are hardwired to reinforce with confirmational external stimuli, the egg most definitely comes before the chicken.

mezike wrote: The only people doing the manipulating is ourselves...

As someone who has had to implement the will of the Marketing team, the above statement is definitely NOT my experience.

I remember a Marketing* professor tell us that marketing could not create a need. At the time I thought it was the biggest line of bullshit that I had ever heard, but these days I'm willing to accept that perhaps we didn't hear the capital-N in Need. As in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, etc.

*When I was going to college, I thought most of my classes were interesting. Even Finance, Accounting, etc (BTW, avoid a Computer Science program ran through the College of Business unless you like that sort of thing). Marketing was not one of them. "Total waste of my time."

An underrated aspect of KS criticism is how the target audiences have morphed over time. I could make the case that KS was driven at first primarily by minis boardgame enthusiasts who saw CMON as the new FFG who were basically beating FFG at their own game. Then the drivers morphed into collectors who maybe never had a deep & abiding connection to boardgaming but loved the shiny exclusive toys. And anyone who has been on eBay in the past 2 years can see that KS has morphed again since a hoard of folks have been turned on to the idea that a $100 spent on KS in one year can be turned into $250 in an eBay sale a year or 18 months later. This has been especially true and accelerated during the stay-at-home pandemic.

My question is: How many other niche groups can "take the reigns" so to speak and keep this crazy KS minis game train rolling? At what point does fatigue set into everyone across the board and the whole market just collapses? It has yet to happen, and maybe there's another niche out there to exploit.

hotseatgames wrote:

mezike wrote: The only people doing the manipulating is ourselves...

As someone who has had to implement the will of the Marketing team, the above statement is definitely NOT my experience.

Whether willfully or playfully, I think you are missing my point which is that nobody is rubbing their hands together in a boardroom and cackling about how they are going to make everybody buy a particular product against their will, they are instead asking people (in roundabout ways, sometimes purely through observation and sometimes directly) "what would make this product interesting to you? What would make you want to buy it?" and then leveraging those responses to create new products, refresh packaging and conceptualise advertising campaigns to give people exactly what they asked for.

But yes, working with a marketing team is an experience because they are believing in a formula that "if we do this, then people will buy" and get ornery when others in the organisation go off-message.

I think a large part of my interest in the title was from the hobby perspective. CMON games may be hit-or-miss, but the plastic is consistently above average.
A prevailing thought from earlier this week was, "Huh. I can get a lot of cool looking minis, from an admired illustrator, for a decent price."

Under closer investigation, I can't do it. Thanks to all for helping me walk off the purchasing ledge. I have plenty of minis to paint already, for titles I find more appealing. Many of the Hate models are neat, but there's no way around it - there's too much overlap.

Erik Twice wrote: I remember one day, when I was in marketing class our teached asked what does Zara sell. We said clothes, as it seems the obvious answer. But he said we were wrong. What they sell is not clothes, but fashion.

Kickstarter does not sell games to play. If you want to play a game, you don't buy one that doesn't exist yet sight-unseen knowing it will take one or two years to appear at your doorstep. Rather, the product being sold on Kickstarter is the experience of supporting and buying a game. It's the hype, the expectation, the sense of community. If you want to play games, you just go and buy a Knizia game for 10 bucks at the local store.

After all, if you were buying games, you would care more about the rules than all those huge-ass miniatures and bits and all other nonsense. You would care about balance, cards being easy to read and hold and so on. The focus would be on gameplay, not exclusivity or random expansions for games you know nothing about.

This is why companies lie about it. It improves the actual product: The hype, sense of doing something unique, the different purcharse experience. It drives sales early on and it's forgotten later. Sure, a few people might get upset, but you already got two hundred bucks out of them and most don't care.

This is not to say that you cannot buy games on Kickstarter because you want the game. While I've never bought into a campaign, I could see doing so if someone reprints 1825. But the huge drive of people buying games on Kickstarter is not done based on games as an art form, but games as a purchase experience. After all, did the people backing 18OE, a 16 hour monster 18xx, really in the market for such a game? Did all the people who bought Legend of Grimrock truly want a Dungeon Master experience? Turns out, they didn't. They went unplayed. Because it was not what people truly needed or wanted. They bought into the idea, not the actual act of play.

Excellent points, but I don't think you've pissed off enough people with what you wrote. There's more to anger if you set your mind to it.

Because, this isn't just about the games purchase "experience". It's about validating your self-chosen identity as a serious gamer. This is equally manifest in the purchase of $3500 gaming tables with vaults and the ever-so-important cup-holders, comfort chairs, Kallax shelves and the like. The entire industry is about looking like a gamer as much as playing games. If someone sold boardgamer sneakers there would be a raft of buyers.

We play games about courting the king with our behavior, on a table that is about courting street cred with our behavior. The entire industry has become more about purchase than play.

I like a lot of the smart posts above here including Erik's, and absolutely believe that the marketing, fomo, participating in the preorder feelings and anticipation is a huge part of the Kickstarter allure. And yet... my actual lived experience on Kickstarter has been really good and delivered a lot of good games that I've played a lot! P500 has been the same way for GMT (which you don't pay upfront for, to be clear).

So I don't know what to make of it besides saying "it is and can be both things" which kind of sucks as a post but...