Reply To: Too many games with miniatures in it?

[maledrakhParticipant 11996xp 3]

One could also ask if there are too many boardgames altogether, and are the good ones dissappearing in the flood?

There is more than enough market space for many different kinds of boardgames. The bloat of minis-heavy game that come out of kickstarter recently  might be hogging the trough for the moment, but there are also hundreds of games that do not use minis at all. Maybe it is your own focus on which game to look at that is zeroed in on the minis heavy KS games and not all the rest that get released?

I see the glut of minis games more of a reaction by the KS games companies to an apparent diversification of the market to cater to different customer groups than anything else. They would not have made so many if people had not pledged for this kind of game.

That said, the reason I think most mini-heavy board games refrain from having minis-only options, is quite simple: economy of scale.

To get the best price for production, you need as large a quantity as possible. If you need to produce say 5000 complete games to achieve a certain production price point, you don’t want to split the customer base into, say, 2000 wanting the full boardgame and 3000 only wanting the minis (presumably at a significantly lower price than the total package), which would increase the production costs per game considerably and maybe even making producing the game not even viable any more.

I for one, as a customer, would in many cases have gone for the minis-only option if there was one. There are a lot of dead forest just sitting around cluttering up my basement and I also would like to save on shipping costs, as all the cardboard and paper that I really do not want not use is both bulky and heavy.