Global Toy News

Changing the Rules

Rob Bartel is a veteran designer and producer of video games with Electronic Arts’ BioWare studio. He joins us as a board game correspondent, however, having recently expanded into board game design with Two by Two, 2012 runner up for Best Family Game in Games Magazine's annual "Games 100" Awards. A passionate advocate for the board game industry, Rob helped found two national initiatives - the Game Artisans of Canada and the Canadian Heritage Collection. His newest endeavor is the Famous Games Company, an innovative provider of promotional card games for the sports marketing industry.

Today, Apple announced their new iBooks Author software, a pet project of the late Steve Jobs who intended it to disrupt the educational e-book market. It's interesting and powerful software, to be sure, but it also underscores some dramatic changes underway in the educational system as well as in how we absorb information and learn in broader society.

Why should we in the game industry care? Well, teaching and education lie at the core of one of the biggest hurdles our industry faces on its way to the tipping point - the need for audiences to learn the rules as a pre-requisite to play.

Re-Imagining Retail - Where Games Can Take Us

Rob Bartel is a veteran designer and producer of video games with Electronic Arts’ BioWare studio. He joins us as a board game correspondent, however, having recently expanded into board game design with Two by Two, 2012 runner up for Best Family Game in Games Magazine's annual "Games 100" Awards. A passionate advocate for the board game industry, Rob helped found two national initiatives - the Game Artisans of Canada and the Canadian Heritage Collection. His newest endeavor is the Famous Games Company, an innovative provider of promotional card games for the sports marketing industry.

Over the past five years, bookstore chains like Chapters here in Canada or Barnes & Noble in the United States have faced growing competition from online retailers such as Amazon.com. When Borders filed for bankruptcy this past February, many assumed the brick-and-mortar bookstore might be following in the same footsteps as movie rentals (i.e. Blockbuster's fall to Netflix) and music CDs (i.e. HMV in the wake of iTunes). But Chapters and Barnes & Noble have both fought back. On the one hand, both have successfully embraced technology and the eBook movement with their Nook and Kobo eReaders. Less discussed, however, is their decision to carry an ever-broader range of carefully curated tangible products that invite shoppers to pick them up, touch and feel them in a way that's impossible online.

For book stores, toys and games have proven to be a big part of that second strategy. In an economic environment that finds Toys R Us delaying its IPO, debates over whether or not Walmart is slashing its toy department, and Hasbro's games category in a downward spiral of double-digit losses, Barnes & Noble recently declared its toys and games category to be up 53% year-over-year (on top of last year's 48% increase). In fact, they're rolling out thousand-square-foot Toys & Games sections in over 500 of its stores for the holiday season, paralleling a strategy Chapters started pursuing here in Canada earlier this spring.

So how are bookstores achieving such a remarkable success in the board game market? What implications does it have for the board game tipping point? What does the future of retail look like and what roles can board games play? Read on to find out...

Prediction Results - Games in the Harris 2011 Purchase Intent Poll

Rob Bartel is a veteran designer and producer of video games with Electronic Arts’ BioWare studio. He joins us as a board game correspondent, however, having recently expanded into board game design with Two by Two, 2012 runner up for Best Family Game in Games Magazine's annual "Games 100" Awards. A passionate advocate for the board game industry, Rob helped found two national initiatives - the Game Artisans of Canada and the Canadian Heritage Collection. His newest endeavor is the Famous Games Company, an innovative provider of promotional card games for the sports marketing industry.

As part of my When Games Explode series back in September, I made a series of predictions about the current explosion of growth and innovation we're currently seeing in the board game industry and what to expect in coming years. The first prediction I made was that the 2011 Harris Purchase Intent Poll, which tracks the intent to purchase toys as gifts, "will confirm that tangible games have overtaken video games for the average adult North American consumer." The latest poll, which includes the results from 2,463 adults surveyed online between October 10 and 17, 2011, was released this past week. Let's see how my prediction fared...

The Disruptive Force of Crowdfunding

Rob Bartel is a veteran designer and producer of video games with Electronic Arts’ BioWare studio. He joins us as a board game correspondent, however, having recently expanded into board game design with Two by Two, 2012 runner up for Best Family Game in Games Magazine's annual "Games 100" Awards. A passionate advocate for the board game industry, Rob helped found two national initiatives - the Game Artisans of Canada and the Canadian Heritage Collection. His newest endeavor is the Famous Games Company, an innovative provider of promotional card games for the sports marketing industry.

Are you familiar with the term crowdfunding? It's a growing movement where people with creative ideas seek advance funding for a project from the general public, usually through a third-party website that mediates the exchange. By connecting innovators and content creators directly to their audiences (and usually cutting out the traditional retail and distribution channels), it's already proving to be a disruptive force in the independent board game scene. As with Apple's app store, I wonder if this indie-driven disruption is part of the impending Tipping Point for tabletop games. Will it continue growing beyond the indie scene and begin to disrupt the established industry?

 

Essen is to Games what New York is to Toys

Rob Bartel is a veteran designer and producer of video games with Electronic Arts’ BioWare studio. He joins us as a board game correspondent, however, having recently expanded into board game design with Two by Two, 2012 runner up for Best Family Game in Games Magazine's annual "Games 100" Awards. A passionate advocate for the board game industry, Rob helped found two national initiatives - the Game Artisans of Canada and the Canadian Heritage Collection. His newest endeavor is the Famous Games Company, an innovative provider of promotional card games for the sports marketing industry.

Followers of this blog will already know that, every February, the world descends on New York City to take part in New York Toy Fair. While similar toy fairs exist throughout the calendar and around the globe, New York remains the largest and most important trade show for the global toy industry (although Richard Gottlieb can tell us if the recent China Toy Expo is beginning to challenge for this role).

As I write this, the equivalent fair for the global board game industry is taking place in Essen, Germany. Internationale Spieltage, or Essen Spiel as it's commonly called, began in 1983 and is now home to over 800 exhibitors from 34 countries. As with America's own ChiTAG, founded and run by fellow Global Toy News blogger Mary Couzin, Essen Spiel throws open its doors to the public, its 44,100 square feet of exhibition space teeming with 154,000 visitors over 4 days.

If you're interested in wrapping your head around the vibrancy and potential of the modern board game industry, Essen Spiel is the trade show to watch. Unlike most North American board game trade shows (ChiTAG being a notable exception), the audience is very demographically diverse - multi-generational, family oriented, with a fairly even gender balance. In short, Essen offers an early glimpse of what I referred to as "the land beyond the tipping point" in my previous When Games Explode articles.

National Treasures

Over the past year, I've been using my Canadian Gamer blog to raise awareness among retailers here in Canada about the local stories behind so many of the wonderful games on their store shelves. I'm constantly surprised by how few retailers are aware of the Canadian connections behind popular mass market games such as Trivial Pursuit, Yahtzee, Bakugan, Crokinole, Quarriors, Villa Paletti, and Things, let alone the flurry of Canadian-designed and -published games active in the hobby market.

When Games Explode; Part III of III: The Tipping Point

 
 
This is the last of a terrific 3 part series of articles by Rob Bartel.  Rob Bartel is a veteran designer and producer of video games with Electronic Arts’ BioWare studio.   Rob is uniquely qualified to write this series as he recently expanded into board game design with Two by Two, a light family game published by Valley Games. A passionate advocate for the board game industry, Rob helped found two national initiatives - the Game Artisans of Canada and the Canadian Heritage Collection. His newest endeavor is the Famous Games Company, an innovative provider of promotional card games for the sports marketing industry.

Parts I and II of our When Games Explode series examined how digital games have followed a remarkably similar historical trajectory as tangible board and card games. We also explored how video games took the lead in that relationship, reaching a cultural tipping point in 2007 that saw them embraced by the mainstream in the form of casual games on iPhones, Facebook, and the Wii. Part III concludes the series with a look at how we’re currently building toward that tipping point in the tangible games industry, evidence that suggests we’ll enter that tipping point in the fall of 2011, and what we can expect the landscape to look like on the other side. It’s a good theory but where are the facts? Consider the following:

Growth In Hard Times

The tipping point caught the traditional video game companies unaware. Coupled with the 2007 credit crunch and subsequent recession, traditional video games saw multiple years of steep double-digit sales declines in their traditional channels while industry researchers struggled to quantify the value of the new iPhone and Facebook platforms. Today, the share prices of most American business sectors have recovered but not those of the video game industry. Electronic Arts shares, which had hovered around the $50-$60 mark since late 2003, suddenly dove to under $20 in 2008 where they’ve remained until very recently. The other major publishers fared similarly. The picture is decidedly different in the physical games industry, however. In 2007, Inc.com included independent board game publishers Rio Grande (86.4% growth) and Fantasy Flight (125.3% growth) among America’s fastest growing companies. Online retailer Boardgames.com (124.5% growth) made the list in 2008 and Fantasy Flight returned in 2009 with 174.1% growth. These are exceptional cases but the trend holds true at the broader level as well. CNNMoney reported that, as an entire category, board and card games saw a 23.5% growth in sales in 2008, comparable to the remarkable 23.4% return offered by gold bullion in 2009. In 2008, the US dollar return on gold bullion had only been 5.6%.

Evidence of the market shift can also be found in purchase intent surveys. A 2009 Harris purchase

When Games Explode; Part II of III: A Brief History of Tangible Games

 
 
This is part 2 in a series of article by Rob Bartel.  Rob Bartel is a veteran designer and producer of video games with Electronic Arts’ BioWare studio.   Rob is uniquely qualified to write this series as he recently expanded into board game design with Two by Two, a light family game published by Valley Games. A passionate advocate for the board game industry, Rob helped found two national initiatives - the Game Artisans of Canada and the Canadian Heritage Collection. His newest endeavor is the Famous Games Company, an innovative provider of promotional card games for the sports marketing industry.

Part I of our When Games Explode series looked at the history of the video game industry. Public perception of video games shifted from being a novelty for adult tinkerers in 1972, to child’s play in 1985, to the genre-driven domain of teenagers in 1991, before finally reaching a tipping point in 2007 where it became a mainstream activity for people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds. After 13 years in the industry, most of the video games I developed are now unplayable on modern hardware. Board and card games are timeless, however, falling in and out of fashion on their own merits rather than as a byproduct of technological progress. Although the timelines differ, tangible games have followed a remarkably similar trajectory to that of video games.

1883-1963: Adult Leisure

While tangible games never benefited from the scientific novelty that drove the early phases of the video game industry, they did benefit from the steady rise in American leisure time in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. In the 1830s, the average workweek was 70 hours. It had dropped to 60 by 1880, 50 by 1920, and our current level of 40 hours by 1935. Working class adults filled their newfound free time with inexpensive amusements such as board and card games. Founded in 1883, a game company called Parker Brothers sought to take advantage of this emerging trend. Whereas most parlor games of the day focused on teaching moral lessons to children, George Parker believed that games should be played for enjoyment and his designs focused on finding the fun in adult themes such as banking, the Klondike gold rush, the Spanish-American war in Cuba, and sports. During the Great Depression, a time when many similar companies went out of business, Parker Brothers was saved by a new game called Monopoly which became an immediate success. To date, the game has sold over 250 million copies and been played by more than one billion people. While today it’s primarily considered a child’s game, the original appeal lay with more adult audiences who harbored fears and fantasies about speculating on real estate, watching families members go to prison, seeing a wife take all of her husband’s assets and watching friends acquire wealth or slip into bankruptcy. Later Parker Brothers hits such as Clue in 1949 and Risk in 1957 continued to target the adult leisure market with universal themes involving murder mysteries and Napoleonic warfare.

1963-1974: Child’s Play

Although the market for adult board games never suffered the same crash that was seen in the video game market, it nevertheless underwent a slow transition as publishers began to align themselves with the children’s toy industry. 1963 saw Parker Brothers and Monopoly sold to General Mills, a cereal manufacturer then in the process of diversifying into other play-based products such as Playdough and the Easy-Bake Oven. This shift towards a more child-oriented and toy-like approach to games is best seen in the remarkably successful work of Chicago inventor and impresario, Marvin Glass, who saw great promise in new technologies such as injection-molded plastic and the alkaline battery. His innovative design company, Marvin Glass & Associates, began in the toy industry with products like the clockwork “robot,” Mr. Machine. In 1963, they turned their attention to plastics-heavy boardgames and released the classic title Mouse Trap, where players construct a fully functioning Rube Goldberg contraption as they move their mice around an outer, Monopoly-style track. Their 1965 game, Operation, cast players in the role of surgeons earning money by extracting whimsical maladies from a clown-nosed patient – if their metal tweezers touched the electrified gameboard, the patient’s nose would light up and an alarm would sound. Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, a dexterity-based game where players push buttons to control the fists of plastic robots in a boxing ring, was released in 1967. Wildly

When Games Explode; Part I of III: A Brief History of Digital Games

 
Rob Bartel -- In an effort to better understand the evolving relationship between traditional and technology based game play, I asked Rob Bartel, a veteran designer and producer of video games with Electronic Arts’ BioWare studio, to write a series of postings on the history and current status of game play.  I think you will enjoy this outstanding series and learn a great deal about where gaming has been, where it is now and where it is going. 

Rob is uniquely qualified to write this series as he recently expanded into board game design with Two by Two, a light family game published by Valley Games. A passionate advocate for the board game industry, Rob helped found two national initiatives - the Game Artisans of Canada and the Canadian Heritage Collection. His newest endeavor is the Famous Games Company, an innovative provider of promotional card games for the sports marketing industry.

Armed with a history degree and a talent for poetry and theatre, I made what many considered an odd choice at the time and joined a little-known company called BioWare as a professional video game designer back in 1998. Today digital games are enjoyed by people of all genders, ages, and walks of life but, in 1998, they were anything but mainstream. Video games were considered the sole domain of teenage boys with a severe lack of social skills. But I saw potential and, over the next thirteen years, I worked hard to convince the studio that our audience was a lot more sophisticated, intelligent, and diverse than they were imagining. Looking back on the industry with a historian’s eye, it’s clear to me now that video games have gone through four distinct phases:

1972-1983: An Adult Novelty

During this era, which was dominated by brands such as Magnavox, Coleco, and Atari, video games were considered more as a “wonder of science” than as truly compelling activities in their own right. The market was predominantly university educated and technically savvy adult males with a passion for tinkering with circuit boards and soldering irons. The novelty wore off in spectacular fashion with the great video game crash of 1983 when that market turned its attention to personal computers, which were more versatile, customizable, and responsible than a dedicated game console. The crash decimated the North American video game industry, ultimately driving almost every major player out of business.

1985-1991: Child’s Play

Following the devastating 1983 crash, Japanese companies like Sega and Nintendo (originally a playing card company) rose to prominence, slowly reinvigorating the industry with smartly designed games, simpler controls, and a narrower focus on the children's and pre-teen market. Games of the era, which still hold a lot of nostalgia for adults in their 20s and 30s today, entertained their audiences with solitary experiences in brightly colored cartoon worlds populated with talking animals, mustachioed plumbers, and magic beanstalks that grew into the clouds. Within North America, video games quickly came to be seen as child's play rather than as a socially acceptable activity for adults.

1991-2007: Enter the Teenagers

While Sega and Nintendo captured the children’s market, something very different was beginning to