Comment on October Monthly Bragging Thread

DanB
Sun, 06 Oct 2013 19:00:24 GMT

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.

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