|
|
|
|
|
|
by squaredot
1277 days ago
|
|
|
I know a lot of people who are passionate about board games, I hang out with a group of board game players from time to time, and I am quite an enthusiast myself. The complaint about prices is relatively recurring, but I don't think it's justified most of the time. People complain that some games are expensive, often referring to the quality of the material they offer, for the finishes, comparing it to other similar games, $100 seems to be a hard barrier to digest psychologically. When you buy a game, you buy an idea, a design. The cost is in the design, in the innovative mechanisms in it, and also a little bit in the illustrative art, but I think only secondarily. If a game costs me $120 but I play 20-30 games with three or four other friends, is it really expensive? If a game costs $30 but after 2 games I have already exhausted the game strategies and mechanics, was it really a good purchase? P.S.: The fact that many buyers use the appearance of a game to judge the appropriateness of its price leads to a very unpleasant consequence: manufacturers, in order to justify the price of a game, produce it in a box that is twice as big as it needs to be, because if the game is big it justifies a higher price, and so we end up with libraries infested with games that take 2X or 3X the space needed. |
|
|
- Games are getting a much higher production level than the past, and this costs more. Sometimes this is good, but often it isn't necessary, it's just to pad out margins. At least you can see where the money is going, but it makes everything less accessible to kids, people with a casual interest, and anyone with limited cash on hand.
- Prices have just plain gone up. Yes, I can understand why a small-publisher POD title or a box of custom plastic is $100 even if I wish there were other options. But why has Catan gone from $25 to $60 MSRP even as the components have dropped slightly in quality? Bohnanza from $10 to $20? RftG, $20 to $35? These increases are a) largely pre-pandemic, b) since ~2015, tracking overproduced editions and industry consolidation rather than general inflation, so the cause is not really a mystery.