The Business: Soft Confirmation From The Boardgame Sector

Jon's video here reveals more than it says it does.

Let's talk about the reveals:

• Total Crowdfunding Dependence outside of the Dominant Network.
• The pozzed gatekeepers are in a decline of their own making; more and more folks are just routing around them.
• Revenue for Tabletop across the board are down year-on-year.
• The larger geopolitical affairs totally wrecked this market niche.
• Gamers are retreating to the safety of the Dominant Network and its Brands.

That's confirmation.

If you are not Big Corpo, you are already defacto out of business; you beg on Kickstarter and pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, Big Corpo has no problems cranking out stuff that gamers will buy and play because everyone will agree to play it and they have no problems finding it because it's on Amazon and Walmart and Target and other such Big Box stores worldwide.

What's going to follow is increasing news reports of retail stores either closing or diversifying away from just selling Tabletop or Tabletop/Comics- either by adding (a new dominant product category, sideling the others) or by pivoting out of that entirely. We already know this is happening to bookstores and comic shops; hobby stores are not at all different. Instead, more people will (a) rely on Amazon because that's where everyone shops, (b) hedge with dominant alternatives, and the smarter ones will set up their own sites and stores to sell direct.

The problem? This kills casual discoverability. You have to compensate with aggressive self-promotion on social media, all of which funnels prospects to your email list that you use to keep people informed on releases, restocks, and events.

That's how the game is played now. Deal with it.