With the rise of tablet culture there have been more and more tabletop games incorporating digital tech into their gameplay ( XCOM, Golem Arcana, and Mansions of Madness, to name but three). And the list of boardgames with videogame themes is a long one: Monopoly: Legend of Zelda, anyone? How about Jenga: Donkey Kong Collector’s Edition? Hands up if you ever played Clue: DVD Game. There’s nothing new about either of these ideas back in the 70s games like Stop Thief and Dark Tower incorporated electronics pretty well as soon as it became cheap and feasible enough to do so. Plus, apps and devices can keep track of fiddly minutiae and inject “wow” factor.
Publishers know that people drift towards the familiar and comfortable, both in terms of IP and gameplay mechanics. There are two ways to do this: (1) tabletop versions of popular video games (2) incorporate technology. You can thus forgive board game publishers for trying to ride the coattails of their digital rivals.
Profit margins for digital games are also larger, not only because of digital delivery, but also because consumers have been trained to expect to pay $60-70 for a AAA new release on Steam.
But compare this to video games, which accrued $30.2 billion in revenue in the same year in the US alone ( source). As I’ve argued before, we live in the Age of Peak Tabletop, with an unprecedented number of excellent boardgames being released virtually every week and $1.19 billion in sales in Canada and the US according to ICv2.
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