Anyone here have experience with gauging the market for a board game or a video game?
I am nearing a launch for my current project, which is a collection of digital board games/party games that you and your friends play with your phones, but I am trying to figure out the size of the market I could potentially expect. I don't have much first hand experience with this kind of thing, so any help, guidance would be much appreciated!
My initial thoughts:
- My product is a bit of a hybrid game (part board game, part video game), so not quite straightforward as for a more traditional game
- Checking sales numbers of similar/comparable games (VGChartz for video games, kickstarter for board games)
- I've not gone the route of landing page/email sign-up, I guess because I haven't really seen that myself with games I've been interested in. But as I think about that as I am typing, that seems like something I probably should've done🤔.
I designed and kickstarted a board/card game once[1].
The kickstarter did okay ($60k) which we leveraged into a publishing deal after realizing that we really weren't equipped to deal with the manufacturing ourselves (super hard to evaluate manufacturers remotely).
I have a background in video game design, but never got involved in the industry since it has such harsh dynamics (big investment upfront for a feast-or-famine payout with very low ability to validate or predict your success).
Given the disclaimer that I haven't actually done it apart from the one boardgame, I think it's an industry which has (1) snowballing winner-take-all outcomes but (2) which you can semi-control via a fanbase. So if I was developing anything, I would treat my key metric as mailing list subscribers who are deeply engaged in my development process, following the art, design decisions, balance refinements, etc etc.
Without having your own audience before launch, you're basically at the mercy of people happening to find it and love it and then snowballing (e.g. goat simulator). So if I wanted to be more reliable, I'd try following something like 1000 true fans[2] approach. I'd also pay a lot of attention to some of the stuff Jeff Vogel has written[3], since he's been able to avoid most of the painful dynamics of the game industry by being fairly intentional about his value proposition, priorities, and audience.
Tough industry though. Wish you well with it.
PS. No idea how you size the market. But I'm not super sure it matters unless you're trying to raise pre-launch funding, but game investors seem to be fairly industry-specific, so I'm not sure market size is a variable they necessarily care about (since they've already chosen and restricted themselves to a given market when they selected the genres they want to invest in).
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/laurob/a-duel-betwixt-us
[2] http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php
[3] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JeffVogel/20190905/350098/I_Am_the_Cheapest_Bastard_In_Indie_Games.php
Thank you so much for your reply! Super helpful insights. I think I will get started now on building a email list of interested people. And I appreciate the well wishes, I have some friends in the gaming industry and it does seem quite daunting to try to launch something in such a crowded industry. But I have been trying to keep my costs very low (I have been working on this as a solo dev/artist/designer) to mitigate some of the risk. Would love to pitch my project to you and get your opinion, let me know if you are interested! Thanks again!