Cult Of Games XLBS: The IP Dilemma – Should The Tabletop Industry Be Taking More Risks?
October 17, 2021 by avernos
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In general if a game has an external IP attached to it, I am out unless I get a chance to play and enjoy the game. The exception is a reskin of a game I already like, D&D Betrayal & Scooby Doo Betrayal are both in my collection. One of my worries, especially in a RPG, is that the players are not central to the story. I demoed the Doctor Who RPG and the players were the Doctor’s companions, this immediately turned me off from the game and therefore I do not own it.
I was talking to my wife after GenCon this year and basically declared I was done with IP based games. It was Renegade Games booth that mainly did it for me, all their GenCon releases were IP based and none of them caught my interest. Now, I am much more likely to give a game a chance if it is its own property. Especially for a RPG, if I like the universe enough, unless you are going to do major expansions to the universe I can find a system to run it in.
I lump IP’s with theme. Frex, I have SJG’s Car Wars, and it’s obviously a close relation to Mad Max. I think theme attracts customers, which starts off the selling process. In the hobby market, theme’s more important to Ameritrash players, who often want a simulation of the theme, than Eurogamers, who are more interested in the game mechanics.
As said earlier, I *would* agree that it’s when IP overshadows the actual product, that may be too far. Atari’s ET video games is the poster child, although Saturday morning cartoons, and even Garfield, were sometimes designed to sell merchandise. Steamforged Games dropped Guildball in favor of IP-based games.
Anyway, wanted to post an interesting factoid about IP’s. In the CCG market, as it became a glut and before its crash, more and more IP CCG’s came out, no doubt a symptom of a CCG’s need to attract initial attention against its competition. Are IP’s a concern for hobby boardgaming or miniatures games? Certainly miniature games — like CCG’s — tend to be “lifestyle” games, meaning that it’s more likely to crash when we’re seeing a glut of games come out. While I’m seeing more KS games that are IP-dependent (hello, Batman), I still see more concern over a business that can deliver product than IP (which is a mistake, since I’d rather have funding go to the creator than the license, and licensors can interfere with the game design and even success of a KS project — see AvP).
The problem with IPs is the cost. If you can show them a finished game and get approval for it in one go then that’s great so just copying what already exists is the easiest way. If you want to expand the IP with new characters, stories then they need to all be individually approved and that’s going to be a lot of back-and-forth discussions with the IP owners. All done through copyright lawyers, which will be expensive. A lot of the time the cost of the lawyers will be more than any potential profits that can be made so it just can’t happen.