> The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.
The same seems to be true with Games Workshop and I've never understood this. The products from both companies have huge markups (painted cards and pieces of plastic) and I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale rather than treating their products as luxury items. There's a clear reason that a lot of people are printing miniatures (pirating) from both franchises. I wouldn't be surprised if open sourced alternatives to these games soon spike in popularity as more people get fed up.
I think a lot of people have had the following conversation (in either direction)
Alice: Do you play Warhammer 40k?
Bob: No, I play MTG. I'd love to play 40k but I can only afford one addiction.
This just doesn't seem like it makes for a sustainable business practice. Even if we might consider that the total cost of entertainment isn't that extreme (there is low diversity for these games compared to a videogame or sports habit), people have a hard time justifying those prices for playing cards and plastic models because they intuitively understand that there is a huge markup.
> I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale rather than treating their products as luxury items
I'm not sure that's true. The actual bottleneck with these games is not money but time and interest: you have to have a group of people who all like the same game, and you have to be able to get the group together regularly to play it. There are plenty of people who are interested, but I suspect that the vast majority of them are already players of whatever game they favor (if they haven't switched to something like World of Warcraft--see below), so I don't know that there's a lot of untapped market share.
As for getting the group together to play, when all of the players are teenagers in school or college, that's relatively easy. It gets a lot harder when people are adults and have to work, pay mortgages, deal with various curve balls that adult life always throws at you, etc. And if you know you're not going to be able to devote the time to it that you used to as a kid when you learned the games (I started playing D&D in eighth grade, and spent far more hours playing it between then and graduating from high school than I have in all the years since--and my 40 year high school reunion is this year), it gets a lot harder to justify spending money on game materials.
Another factor is the availability of online games like World of Warcraft, which I mentioned above. These games solve the time and interest problem in a way that can't help scaling much better than in person tabletop play: you can play from your computer at home and there are always other people online playing. There are also limitations, of course: for example, you can't make up your own adventures and you can't have house rules, which were both features of every D&D campaign I have ever encountered. But it's another factor that I think tends to limit the size of the available market for games like D&D.
All of the above factors seem to me to indicate that there is a natural limit to the size of the market for games like the ones WoTC is producing, and the actual active market is close to that limiting size. If that's true, then the option of trying to make more money by scaling instead of markup simply isn't available to them.
I left the game as I got older. At the end of the day it just didn’t make sense to spend what magic cost if I could only play a few hours a week. It’s easy to spend over $3600/year on M:TG if you want to play competitively and that just doesn’t make sense to me if I’m getting roughly 100 hours of play in. I could do far better things with over $30/hour for hobbies.
I've always enjoyed the limited formats. I've periodically checked back in and played in prereleases or leagues or whatnot, without ever committing to building something preconstructed.
I think I may be done, though. The power and complexity creep has gotten to me in the past few years. I can understand that cards need to be rebalanced, or that new rules get introduced over time, but the complexity of the current version of the game has gotten out of hand. The cynic in me says that the power creep is there so that people playing formats like modern will pay for new sets, and since the new cards are more powerful and have more abilities, it drags down the game.
(will try be a bit verbose here so that people who are not MTG fans will still be able to follow sorry if it's a slog to get through!)
I was in a similar boat, though for a long time during university I shared a collection with a friend and we did a pretty good job at selling off stuff to keep the effective costs down.
Since 2016, I stopped playing heavily rotational formats like Standard [for those unfamiliar, there's many different formats of MTG which are played and 'Standard' is one of the most popular ones in which you can play "all the mainline cards released from the last X sets", normally ~2 years worth], and moved to Modern [all cards printed since mid-2003 are playable]. My hope was that because of the longer (and growing) availability of cards, Modern would be more affordable in the long term - since decks would remain viable for long periods of time (perhaps with small adjustments with new cards coming out) and would retain value as a result.
Then over ~20 months, that view changed a lot. First Wizards banned Oko & Mox Opal in January 2020. Firstly, these cards lost value directly - but they also caused quite a big shift in the metagame to the point where entire decks got awful, and hence less valuable. Then in mid-2021 they released the Modern Horizons 2 set, which had a massive impact on very many Modern decks (per MTGGoldfish, 8 of the 10 most commonly played creatures in the Modern metagame at the moment are from Modern Horizons 2). Once again, this totally decimated the value of many existing cards.
I hate the sort of "MTG Finance" approach to the MTG scene, but like you say - it's hard to justify $30/hr for a hobby, and its clear that Hasbro will print whatever it takes to maximize their profits (even if it has a significant negative impact on existing customers).
There are, such as pauper. I’ve also heard of playing with a total $ limit per deck, at time of construction.
The main limiting factor is what you can convince folks to play. Game stores have the main formats, and unknown amounts of money spent, but you can do whatever with your friends!
> I'm not sure that's true. The actual bottleneck with these games is not money but time and interest: you have to have a group of people who all like the same game, and you have to be able to get the group together regularly to play it.
For campaign based games like DND and other RPGs I'd agree, but with the specific examples of MTG and 40k I highly disagree. You do not need to meet regularly for MTG (card) or 40k (miniature) style games as they can easily be played as one-offs. While RPGs have one-shots they are far less common and the overhead is quite high compared to MTG/40k (just show up with your deck/army). In addition to this, games like MTG and 40k are often played 1v1 (though can expand) and this makes the scheduling problem easier since you only need to find compatible times for 2 people rather than 3-5 (or more).
Typical MTG and 40K players sing vast amounts of time into the hobby aside from the time actually playing. It's most obvious with 40K where you can spend weeks painting an army, but for both people also read the books, rules and supplements, spend time on forums, going to meetups and conventions. They're both massive time sinks. Says he that's been obsessed with 'tabletop' RPGs since the early 80s.
You absolutely will. I just got back into it after a 25 year hiatus, and playing with young people that weren't even born back then, and having a blast in the process.
There's a thriving comunity out there, and so far I've been welcome with open arms every time I've reached out.
You don’t need to wait. I run a group with a schedule specifically designed for parents of young children. (virtual, short sessions, immediately after bedtime). There are others!
look for “D&D Encounters” in your area. This is very common in game stores and they’re designed for drop-in players or first timers to try out D&D. This is how I got back into D&D 10 years back after not having played since the early ‘90s.
Most products start off fueled by passion and love, but once the original masterminds move on the people left are the beancounters who are more interested in the fruits of the product rather than the product itself.
We see this happen basically everywhere with almost no exceptions.
I play chess and also follow it as a professional sport. I suck at it but it's fun anyway, it costs nothing unless you play in money tournaments, costs very little unless you play in BIG money tournaments, and as far as I can tell it seems to offer everything that video games do in terms of skill challenge, social connection, and all of that. I'm sure these expensive video games have a reason to exist but I haven't figured out what it is.
I played D&D in high school when it consisted of a few (often xeroxed) rulebooks, some funny looking dice, some graph paper, and the players' own imaginations. The current version sounds awful by comparison.
Videogames are expensive when you are young. It might be more expensive than chess, but it quickly becomes one of the cheapest hobbies of most adults. It's sure cheaper than going out drinking an extra night each week.
Fair enough about the cost, but the thing is, chess isn't under any company's control and it has history and traditions going back for centuries. There is a sense of grandeur when you move a pawn even as the lowliest patzer, that no amount of GPU-enhanced videogame graphics can replicate. You almost feel the blood of Lasker and Capablanca running through your veins.
One of my favorite movies is a biodoc about a Soviet-era player from Kazakhstan, on youtube (1st of 3 parts, around 15 minutes each: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Io7jbHsYs ). I can't imagine someone making a movie like that about a Warhammer player. But, that's just me.
There's plenty of reasons not to like abstract games.
Abstract games are highly, highly dependent on memorization and repetition. In lower tiers a Go or Chess player that's played more games or memorized more positions will handily beat a player who hasn't. The sheer hours needed to get to high level chess play, where memorization doesn't matter as much anymore, is insane. There's a reason most great chess players start out young.
Abstracts are also perfect information games. I like games that simulate aspects of real life, and anything with perfect information immediately breaks my immersion.
Exactly this. As an avid board game player this is one of the things that has always frustrated me about chess. Those that like to play have been playing for a long time and there is a steep learning curve. Even the parent was throwing off vernacular. This is not just intimidating to many newcomers but will likely put them off because it is difficult to see yourself make progress. On the other hand, most board games have luck elements in them and have a wide range of luck-skill balances. You'll find that how people are introduced to board games (and videogames) depends on what game they try first. If that game requires a high skill level (or worse, high skill and high dependence on opening actions, like Catan (unfortunately is a common "intro game")) then people tend to not like "board games" in a general sense. But once people are comfortable with the space and patterns (there's only so many concepts in gaming) then they are far more open to more complex rule sets and more skill based games. Chess and Go's killer problem is that it is difficult to get started. Ironically we're on a form of mostly programmers and this is analogous to the "Python before C++" argument, but with less benefits to the C++ side.
If you are new to chess you will probably be a bad player, but it is still fun. I've been at it for decades and I'm still a bad player. I don't mind. I don't memorize much of anything. It's more like math puzzles. I suppose if I studied the right way and had more chess ambition, I'd be stronger than I am, but I don't try to be competitive, so it's fine. It's easy for me to find opponents at about the same level and have enjoyable games. That made a good way to relax after a busy week of work or school, meet other nerds, etc. That was all I wanted from it. I had no dream of becoming a grandmaster or anything like that, so I was happy. YMMV.
Added: Look at some of the PogChamps tournaments on youtube. The players are youtube streamers who are chess beginners and they play horribly, but they are still a blast.
I prefer playing games with my friends in real life than with strangers over the internet. That’s the biggest reason I don’t play abstract strategy games much.
Chess is not a great shared game for a group of friends. You all need to be somewhat close in skill to each other (or else the outliers will get bored of playing chess with the group). That also means that you all need to progress at relatively similar rates.
The board games I like to play are thematic, introduce a bit of luck, and are engaging for players of all skill levels. They don’t allow for nearly the same level of mastery that chess does, but that’s exactly what makes them so fun to play as a group.
I've never played chess on the internet. I went to chess clubs, played in cafes, and that sort of thing. There were players of every level from beginner to master. I got to know several people there and became housemates with one for a while. I stay away from such things these days because of the pandemic, but maybe I'll get to take it up again someday.
Besides playing, watching chess videos is interesting too. I like the youtube PowerplayChess channel for updates on top level events and historical games. There are lots of other channels too.
For all their faults, Games Workshop is really a miniatures company that has a ruleset, rather than games company that sells plastic models. I recall seeing a statistic that the majority of their customers don’t regularly play, and a shocking number have never played a game. Those customers are buying models because they think the models are neat, and are deriving fun from the act of assembling and painting.
From that perspective, the business is as sustainable as Star Wars or Marvel: as long as this Thor offers a better fantasy than generic Thors, the brand will last (and accumulate the advantages of a deep, lasting history), and therefore will outlast competitors.
It's interesting to see that particular segment of the "build and paint models" universe survive and thrive when you see contraction in a lot of other areas.
I'm fond of model railways, and it's discarded lots of that heritage. You look in a '70s or 80s magazine, and the projects are "here's a new (inflation-adjusted) $50 kit" or "assemble bits and bobs from three different $20 kits following a detailed article". Today, the equivalent model is only sold fully assembled and painted at $200.
Mantic Games Deadzone... it's not open source but they don't require you to use official models, the box comes with all the army lists, they don't change the rules every 10 minutes and the factions are all suspiciously... familiar (without breaking copyright) and you can just drop in most of your existing 40k miniatures
The same seems to be true with Games Workshop and I've never understood this. The products from both companies have huge markups (painted cards and pieces of plastic) and I'd assume that they could actually have a far larger market and profit by concentrating on scale rather than treating their products as luxury items. There's a clear reason that a lot of people are printing miniatures (pirating) from both franchises. I wouldn't be surprised if open sourced alternatives to these games soon spike in popularity as more people get fed up.
I think a lot of people have had the following conversation (in either direction)
Alice: Do you play Warhammer 40k?
Bob: No, I play MTG. I'd love to play 40k but I can only afford one addiction.
This just doesn't seem like it makes for a sustainable business practice. Even if we might consider that the total cost of entertainment isn't that extreme (there is low diversity for these games compared to a videogame or sports habit), people have a hard time justifying those prices for playing cards and plastic models because they intuitively understand that there is a huge markup.