Interesting article. I think it’s fascinating to compare the economic situation in the music industry to the one in the board game industry. The board game industry has enjoyed a huge renaissance at about the same time as the music industry has been pummeled. Astoundingly, the board game renaissance appears to be entirely due to a clever packaging trick.
Basically the quality of a board game is determined by the interactions created by a small set of rules (it is a huge turnoff if it takes more than ten minutes or so to learn the rules of a new game). So the actual core value of the game is essentially just a small quantity of information. However, people don’t buy just the rules; no one would pay anything for a sheet of paper with some game mechanics written on it. Instead, the rules come packaged with a set of physical game pieces like playing cards, a game board, or colored tokens. These game pieces are trivially easy to manufacture; they are just little pieces of paper, wood, or cardboard, and they are worthless in and of themselves. So somehow when you package together these two components—a piece of paper with some high-quality information written on it, along with a set of dumb cardboard pieces—you can get something that people are willing to pay $50 or $70 for.
Interesting article. I think it’s fascinating to compare the economic situation in the music industry to the one in the board game industry. The board game industry has enjoyed a huge renaissance at about the same time as the music industry has been pummeled. Astoundingly, the board game renaissance appears to be entirely due to a clever packaging trick.
Basically the quality of a board game is determined by the interactions created by a small set of rules (it is a huge turnoff if it takes more than ten minutes or so to learn the rules of a new game). So the actual core value of the game is essentially just a small quantity of information. However, people don’t buy just the rules; no one would pay anything for a sheet of paper with some game mechanics written on it. Instead, the rules come packaged with a set of physical game pieces like playing cards, a game board, or colored tokens. These game pieces are trivially easy to manufacture; they are just little pieces of paper, wood, or cardboard, and they are worthless in and of themselves. So somehow when you package together these two components—a piece of paper with some high-quality information written on it, along with a set of dumb cardboard pieces—you can get something that people are willing to pay $50 or $70 for.