If Mark Twain had played Panzerblitz instead of poker, he might have concluded that the reports of the death of wargaming have been greatly exaggerated.
For 20 years, the hobby has been beset by apocalyptic predictions of its impending demise. Wargames should have disappeared by now, swallowed up by video games, the Internet, and 14-hour workdays. They should have been another bit of ’70s nostalgia, fated to fade into dusty attic boxes and eBay auctions.
Disco and lava lamps have long since departed to the tackiest ring of hell. But wargaming endured and did more than endure. It seems to be thriving. The bad old days of the ’80s and ’90s are a memory. No more poorly playtested cardboard catastrophes with errata longer than the original rules. No more spreadsheet computer wargames with eye-numbing graphics and carpal-tunnel interfaces. Computer game publishers such as Matrix, Battlefront, and HPS are churning out titles, with at least 20 games expected in the next year or so. Meanwhile, the printing presses are humming with a proliferation of board games from established publishers like GMT, as well as designers selling desktop publishing designs over the Internet. More than 150 paper titles were published in 2005.
Subscribe Today
World Boardgaming Championships 2006, Lancaster, PA.
Peruse the game sites and forums, and there seems to be a sense of contentment. Who cares if the glory days of the 1970s are gone, when so many teenagers and college students couldn’t wait for the mailman to deliver that manila envelope with Strategy & Tactics magazine inside? The students went on to become educated and affluent adults. Perhaps the hobby has reached that comfort zone where publishers can deliver quality games and gamers can afford to buy them.
So is wargaming in a new Golden Age? That was the question on my mind when I was asked to speak at a Department of Defense conference on how the U.S. military can use entertainment games. As a journalist and wargamer who writes about simulations used by the military – from converted hobby games to $400 million computer sims by major defense contractors – I was asked to discuss the state of hobby wargaming.
Many wargame designers practice their craft out of love rather than money. But wargaming is not a charity. It’s as much a business as a hobby. So I began with a simple question: How many wargames are sold?
It should have been a simple question. But I discovered that no one really tracks sales, nor is there any way to verify the sales figures given. Obtaining sales figures from wargame publishers is like pulling teeth, especially for paper games. The secrecy borders between the ludicrous and the paranoid. Wargaming is not a competitive field. Three companies will publish three Pacific War games at the same time, gamers will moan about having to choose, and the collectors will end up buying all three. If the hobby has problems, it’s in the size of the pie, rather than how it’s sliced.
I had heard anecdotally that paper game sales were up, and indeed some publishers say they’re doing well. GMT, the most prolific of publishers, reports sales have risen 40 percent over the past two years. Avalanche, another major producer, says sales of backstock games quadrupled in the first quarter of 2006 versus the same period last year.
But other publishers reported no significant change. Kevin Zucker of OSG, a designer since the 1970s, put it best: “Sales always go up and down. The market is miniscule.”
How miniscule? Grenier Games, a small publisher, estimates that it might sell 250 copies of its latest game. Clash of Arms says its typical print run is about 1,500 copies per title. Compare this to Rio Grande Games, publisher of popular Eurogames such as Puerto Rico and Carcassonne, which reports that sales can be as high as 100,000 copies per title. Eagle Games – now defunct – said that its reprint of Conquest of the Empire sold more than 20,000 copies in its first year.
According to one list, there were about 150 paper wargames published in 2005 (of which about 20 percent were either magazine games or Advanced Squad Leader supplements). Even assuming that every game sold 1,000 copies – a generous estimate – that’s only 150,000 copies. In 1980, 2.2 million copies were sold, according to Jim Dunnigan’s history of wargaming.
Hard numbers are hard to find, but the most revealing figure I found was in the pre-publication thresholds. GMT and Columbia want 500 pre-orders before they will publish a game. OSG wants 350. Yet board games aren’t hand-made race cars or high-tech Stealth bombers. They’re printed matter like books. At $20 or $50 or $100 a copy, a wargame isn’t much more expensive than consumer electronics or even a hardcover book. Imagine a DVD player or mystery novel struggling to sell 500 copies. It’s not the sign of a vibrant market.
Are computer games such as Conquest of the Aegean replacing boardgames?
But was I even looking at the right market? Perhaps the Digital Age has rendered paper games obsolete. Perhaps the heart of wargaming now beats inside a computer. With all the millions and millions of people around the world playing every kind of computer game from America’s Army to World of Warcraft Online, surely the computer wargame market must be thriving?
I was shocked when Panther Games, whose superb Conquest of the Aegean features the most sophisticated AI on the market, says it expects to sell just 3,000 copies (a mass market game like The Sims sells in the millions). At $50 a pop, 3,000 copies would only produce $150,000 in revenue. Panther president Dave O’Connor notes that such paltry sales can’t pay for one full-time designer, let alone the $750,000 needed even for a small six-man design team to design a cutting-edge computer wargame. He’s going to do contract work for the Australian military to make ends meet.
[continued on next page]
