OnTableTop – Home of Beasts of War

Reply To: First impressions vs sustainability. Are looks more important than rules?

December 20, 2024 at 5:24 pm #1908157

limburger

22342xp

But what do we consider ‘surviving’ ?
Not every game has the potential to be played by everyone.

A consistent audience of a thousand players is still an active game.

Not every game needs to hit an audience as big as 40k manages.

Chess is still an active game despite having the same old rules and minis for decades.
The core concepts are simply that good for a lot of players.

Xwing had a great launch, but it struggled getting good fresh content.
And IMHO it hit the wall early for a lot of folk as they didn’t have the need to play anything other than Xwings vs Tie-fighters with perhaps a sprinkling of iconic craft from the movies. I’d say it could have survived if the publisher had set a more realistic goal for the player counts that could keep the money flowing. The core game is still more than serviceable.

If ‘new minis’ are the only thing that keep the players happy then that game is doomed as sooner or later you will not have anything new to add. This kind of happened to Guildball as well. They simply ran out of design space for the various characters.
You can’t level up the old crews forever, because that would make any new crews too weak to compete.

Games need more than a constant flood of ‘new’ things to stay alive. They need to inspire players to invent their own things.
If all a game does is make them reach for their credit card … then what is there when the money runs out ?