Where is the Gaming Community Going?

GW’s recent results and the latest Mantic kickstarter got me thinking about the health of the miniature wargaming community.  Now it could be said that we are in a golden age of miniatures wargaming with great new models coming out every week from different companies and a new game being launched through kickstarter seems like on a monthly basis but all these minis and games have me worried.  Players only have so much time and money and no one is really working hard to expand the market anymore.

Kickstarter seems to me to be encouraging a lot of essentially dead games as opposed to growing communities.  People who buy in can get a lot of stuff at a reasonable price by being willing to pay now for unknown delivery in the future, but where do these games go after the kickstarter.  Retailers are not going to be really happy about supporting them as a large chunk of the initial sales have already bypassed them.  New players might be reluctant to start buying in since they are getting less for their money than the backers.  If someone wants to start playing Dreadball now I was just reading that you have to pay way more to get the same starter set type stuff.  It essentially falls on the backers to invest the time in building the community.  Maybe that is how they earn their "discount".

This is going to work better for some types of games than others.  Board or Skirmish games are probably the best as the initial backer is likely to have everything he needs for him and his existing gaming partners to play a real version of the game.  For a skirmish game you often end up after the kickstarter having several different factions all kitted out.  So the single backer can bring the fun to his group without to much concern for lack of external support but it is to his existing group who could be playing any other game also as opposed to a bridge to a larger community.  It is even worse for a battle type game where a kickstarter would probably only leave most people with at most 2 factions.

This type of issue carries over into gaming outside of kickstarter.  For skirmish or boardgames, one player might be able to furnish all the stuff for a larger group.  I for example could provide minis to an entire Blood Bowl League or event of like 25 people but only have Space Marines and Nids for a battle game like 40K.  If you look at GW, you will see they are not in the boardgame or skirmish game market, they do battle games with relatively little direct competition in that segment.  This worked well for them for a time as battle games are such significant cost and time commitments that you want to get into one where other people are already involved.

Now consider the Mantic Deadzone kickstarter, it was pretty successful with over a million dollars raised but it only sold to like 5000 people.  Given the population of the area served by kickstarter is like 1 billion people that makes the buyers probably pretty sparse on the ground.  I calculate that in my county there would be like 2 backers based on these numbers.  This compares to GW having like 50-60 active buyers even with their reduced sales levels.  While I love different miniatures and tons of choices for games, I am not sure if having 20 games with 3 active players in my area is better than having 4 with 15 active players.

Truth be told, I honestly have enough miniatures (not even counting  that Reaper Kickstarter being delivered this fall) that I will never get them all painted and such.  For 28 mm fantasy, I have my Reaper Bones, D&D Chainmail, and D&D Coop Games minis.  While I cannot do any type of battle game with such a group, I can cover any skirmish or dungeon crawl just fine.  Looking at the mantic Dungeon Saga kickstarter, I am like I already have a modular card tile dungeon set from the D&D Coop games and I have minis that are close enough to represent anything they produce so why get it.  In Sci Fi I have epic Space Marines, Squats, Eldar, and 28 mm Space Marines and Nids all of which to battle level.  Ignoring the Blood Bowl collection as it is pretty specialized.

Now I would love to have a game for my 40K stuff that was not 40K since other than Hull Points it does not seem to be that the designers have made any good changes in a while, but the issue is that rules are hard and people do not want to pay for them so most games are all about the minis.  Good model independent rules are hard to do when you are trying to bridge the gaps between all the different vendors.  Someone could just target an alternative game at 40K players but then you are going to run into problems with your art and diagrams since GW claims to hold the image rights for even your personal collection of painted and based minis.   A gaming rule set that is just text is really not very catchy and will probably not be read by very many people.  I have tried to read through some of the Mordheim rules and am always looking for images to help the text keep my attention or show me clearly what this group or that group should look like.

Looking at GW and the 28 mm 40K models, one could easily see three tiers of games.  A skirmish type game (Kill team, Killzone) with high terrain density and low model counts, a normal company battle game with tight and balanced rules for competitive play with more tactical less strategic focus, and a loose Apocalypse style game for bring what you want for narrative style games with your friends.  As your taste change you can move from one type to the other while still using your miniatures (and as we all do keep buying more) and style within the 40K fluff if you like it.  Unfortanutey they decided that one ruleset for all, pushed to the high end of model count and size now.  Leaving other companies filling the skirmish level with tons of different games and scattering the player base.