“How do you make a small fortune in tabletop gaming?” runs an old joke.
The punchline, of course, is that you come to that market with a large one.
The tabletop truly is a brutally challenging place to try to earn money, one which you have to be either wildly deluded or unbelievably passionate to even contemplate entering. Nevertheless, people have been making a go of it there for quite some decades by now. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that love rather than mental illness is the motivating force. For, whatever else you can say about these folks, nobody is more passionate about their hobby than old-school tabletoppers.
If you do dare to dream of making real money on the tabletop, there are two ways you might envision doing so. One is to strike gold with a once-in-a-blue-moon mass-market perennial of the sort that eventually winds up in every other family’s closet: a Monopoly, a Scrabble, a Clue, a Trivial Pursuit. Under this model, you sell that one game to tens if not hundreds of millions of people, the majority of whom might not buy another board game for five or ten years after buying yours.
The other pathway to profit — or at least to long-term survival — is to score a hit in the hobbyist market. Here your sales ceiling is much lower. But, because you’re selling to people who see tabletop gaming as a lifestyle rather than a gambit to divert the kids on a rainy afternoon, you can potentially keep selling them additions to the same basic game for years and years, turning it into not so much a single product as a whole ecosystem of same. It’s a tougher row to hoe in that it requires an ongoing effort on your part to come up with a steady stream of new content that appeals to your customers, but it’s marginally more achievable than winning the lottery that is the mass market.
That said, any given game need not be exclusively of the one sort or the other. Crossover hits are possible and even increasingly common. In recent decades, several hobbyist games — among them titles such as Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride — have proved to possess the necessary blend of relatability, simplicity, and fun to be sold in supermarkets and greeting-card shops in addition to the scruffy hobbyist boutiques.
Way back in the early 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons was successful enough that its maker, the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin-based TSR, dared to wonder whether that game might be able to make the leap to the mainstream, however strange it may have seemed to imagine that an exercise in elaborate make-believe and tactical monster-fighting might have the same sort of legs as Monopoly. After all, despite its complexity and subject matter, Dungeons & Dragons was already far more culturally visible than Monopoly, a fixture of school cafeterias and anti-Satanic evangelical sermons alike.
Alas, it was not to be. The Dungeons & Dragons wave crested in 1982, after which the bandwagon jumpers began to jump off the wagon again. True mass-market success was probably never in the cards for a company whose acronym stood for “Tactical Studies Rules.” Luckily for TSR, they retained a core group of loyalists who were willing to splash out considerable sums of money on their hobby. Indeed, for a goodly while it seemed like they would snatch up as much new Dungeons & Dragons product as TSR cared to throw at them.
A new era of Dungeons & Dragons merchandising dawned in 1984, when TSR rolled out a trans-media property known as Dragonlance: twelve individual adventure modules, plus two source books and even a strategic board game, all meant to allow a group of players to interactively experience an epic tale of fantasy war that could also be read about in a trilogy of thick conventional novels, the first of their kind that TSR had ever published. It was a brilliant conception in its way, and it became hugely popular with the fan base, heralding a slow shift in TSR’s rhetoric around Dungeons & Dragons. In the past, it had been promoted as a game of free-flowing imagination, primarily a system for making up your own worlds and stories. In the future, the core rules would be marketed as a foundation that you built upon not so much with your own creativity as with other, more targeted TSR products: settings to inhabit, adventures to go through in those settings, new rule books to make a complicated game still more complicated.
The transaction was not so cynical as I might have made it sound. The products themselves were often excellent, thanks to TSR’s dedicated and imaginative staff, and many or most fans felt they got fair value for their ongoing investment. Yet the fact remained that this was also TSR’s only viable way of remaining solvent after the mainstream culture had dismissed Dungeons & Dragons as a weird, kitschy fad or a shorthand for abject nerdiness.
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