Aaron Lawn: Games for the mass(es)

Most of us are more than familiar with the long-standing tradition of the licensed game.  Many games from the mid 20th century are roll-and-move variants with a popular theme pasted on¹.  The same phenomenon exists today – not only from the giant companies like Hasbro and Mattel, but also the smaller publishers like Fantasy Flight, and even European publishers like Kosmos².  Today, I’m not interested in specific games, I’m interested in why we see so much of it…

Whenever I see a discussion of game sales breaking into the general public³, I find myself spinning off into history, and seeing what has come before.  Games have a long history of being sold by something other than the game itself⁴.  That is to say that the company that produces the game expects people to purchase the game not necessarily because of the game, but because of the marketing tie-in, be it a TV show, Computer game, Novel, or finance methodology⁵.

So the largest game companies in the United States have come to rely on marketing their games as something other than games.  New party games are often tied into the most popular game show of the day.  When Sudoku was at its peak, every company jumped in with a game.  We are beyond the days of having a roll-and-move game for every show on television, but we’re still faced with a general market that does not actually sell games based on what those games are⁶.

Which brings us around to the non-mass games.  The games put out by the small publishers⁷ don’t have a history of strong marketing on which to base their US releases.  These are games that are being primarily sold based on their gameplay, be that challenge, brinksmanship, or some other of the myriad of ways that a game can be designed.  As boardgames started to appear in greater numbers from Europe, the companies started taking what seems to be the primary method of marketing that European publishers took - using the designers of a game like the author of a book.  This is a great idea, but it collapses when presented to a general public that doesn’t have any name-recognition, and also provides no concrete method of marketing a new designer.  Over time, the hobby market has built up some name-recognition within the US that will sell games, but it doesn’t work outside the current niche.

So we’re sort of back where we started.  For new games to break into the view of the general public, they need to be marketed, but games don’t have a history of marketing in the same way that books and music⁸ do.  So we’re left with the marketing history that games do have, which is a rich history of getting licenses and selling games to established fans of another property.

⁹

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¹The partridge family game anyone?

²Though they seem to be focusing on the literary side of things – Pillars of the Earth, Golden Compass (which does tie into the movie…)

³i.e. the mass market.  Often symbolized by presence in big-box retailers like target/wal-mart, but not necessarily confined to them.

⁴There seems to be one minor (or not so minor) exception.  That would be the mid-1980’s boom of the party game.  Many of the party games were not directly tied to some other property.  Password came directly out of the TV show, but Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit, and Taboo were all launched and marketed on various varieties of fun^4a.

^4aDespite the fact that there were eventually TV game shows that replicated most of these, they were not sold by using those game shows.

⁵ Rich Dad, Poor Dad = Cash Flow, the Game.

⁶ Well, except for the old standards.  But even with games like Monopoly, Scrabble, etc, Hasbro has been mostly following the trend of marketing them as “family activities” - focusing on the name recognition to sell the individual titles and promoting the general activity of gaming.  This isn’t a bad thing at all, but also isn’t actually marketing the games themselves.

⁷ including such popular party games like Apples to Apples - but of course covering the games produced or given domestic release by Z-man/Rio Grande/Mayfair/Days of Wonder/Fantasy Flight etc. etc.

⁸ Two items that are sold based on their content.

⁹ It’s been a long footnote day.  But one more.  I actually have no clue how the great 3M marketed their games.  The original bookshelf series were games that sold into the general public without any marketing tie-ins.  I presume they simply spent money on print advertising similar to the back of their boxes, but that’s a complete guess.  And marketing from the time of 3M would be interesting, but ultimately without the evolution of presentation over the intervening years it wouldn’t give a great picture of how to present a game to the modern world.

© 2008 Aaron Lawn

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"We are beyond the days of having a roll-and-move game for every show on television,...” Now we are in the days of having a dvd game for every game show on television (often with Howie Mandel). Posted by Lee Fisher on Mar 13, 2008 at 09:27 AM | #

Here’s a few footnotes of my own: * I think the big game manufacturers want you to think of games as a commodity, more or less interchangeable with each other.  If all games are equivalent, then go with the one that has the fun/familiar theme.  If you can sell more lunch boxes by putting Welcome Back Kotter on them, then why not sell more copies of Monopoly by slapping on a NASCAR theme? * I suspect European companies go with literary themes because of the nature of their market.  Europeans seem much more interested in history (or at least historical literature) than Americans do, and less swayed by popular culture and, particularly, science fiction.  That’s obviously a generalization, but seems to match my own observations. * The European publishers didn’t originally use designer names as a marketing device, but were more or less forced to do so.  I think it was Alex Randolph back in the 80s that led the revolt to get desinger names on the cover.  Now, of course, it works to the advantage of publisher and designer alike. * My recollection from the 60s was that the 3M games weren’t marketed at all.  They were simply available in nicer game stores and people hungry for games of greater sophistication than what was currently available bought them.  Probably not in large numbers, but obviously enough to make the line profitable (since it lasted for about a decade).  There may have been some sedate magazine ads during this time, but I suspect this was dominated by shelf presence and word of mouth.  The 3M sports games probably got more print advertising, but I don’t think any of them ever had TV ads. Posted by Larry Levy on Mar 13, 2008 at 09:52 AM | #

Great article. It seems to me that, although true marketing could propel quality boardgames to success more quickly, eye-catching packaging and presence on the shelf of a big box store is as much as you really need to get games to the mass market. Can we ever hope to see RGG in Toys “R” Us, or Target? Would we want to? Regarding fn8, isn’t mass-market music sold more on image than content? The digitization of music will stifle the trend, certainly, as preview-then-buy has become the norm. But as of now, it seems the average person to walk into a music store in the mall and purchase a CD does so more because of the personality on the cover (the brand, if you will) then the songs therein. Consider the success of compilations like “NOW that’s what I call music,” et al. Posted by Erin Wolthausen on Mar 13, 2008 at 06:39 PM | #

3M was able to sell games because there was nothing else to do in the 60’s. You had three TV channels that came in over static-y airwaves, no videogames, no VCR’s. I bet probably that people were desperate enough for entertainment that they read books and sat in an open field in the rain for three days. Posted by Frank Branham on Mar 13, 2008 at 11:03 PM | #

While my memory is a bit fuzzy on it, I recall the 3M games being available in department stores (at least in Denver in the late 1960s and early 1970s), something which has long since ceased to happen. The idea of marketing games to adults apparently made sense to the department stores in that era. I don’t recall anything other than print ads for them, though. Posted by David Reed on Mar 14, 2008 at 08:45 AM | #

An interesting note that I forgot to include in my Nuremberg report--I happened upon a mass-market retheming of Koenig Solomos Schatzkammer--with an Indiana Jones theme!  Of course the new version was released by Clementoni, not Mattel, but Kosmos has also recently produced quite a few “gamer games” with popular book and film tie-ins, and the success so far has surely spured them to seek more licenses for the future. Perhaps this is a way to gain name recognition for designers through a product whose theme is familiar to non-gamer consumers--and also a method of introducing them to the wider spectrum of game mechanics that exist. Posted by Jeff Allers on Mar 14, 2008 at 04:34 PM | #

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