We sent out a survey to our email list, and had hundreds of responses! Thank you if you helped provide your insights to our (hopefully) annual gaming survey! The survey was primarily self-serving, to hear your opinions so we can stay focused on making cool things and avoiding making uncool things. In the spirit of sharing things we find interesting, we’re publishing data to questions that might be applicable to others. By the way, this is Martin!
Give me the data please!
Before we dive in, this is our first crack at collecting and publishing this information. The data was interesting to us, and we wished we’d asked even more questions. As it is, there are a couple of caveats to be aware of.
- First, we had 256 responses collected. As you guessed, this originated from our “monthly” email newsletter. If you’re not yet on the newsletter and you’re interested, then here is where you join.
- Second, the responses to the survey were incentivized with a drawing for a reward of one of our games + expansions.
Dissecting the Population
Who are the respondents and how do they classify themselves? The first part of the survey aimed to answer exactly this. Exactly 181 people from the list own 1-2 Adam’s Apple Games titles, while the next largest bucket is 57 people owning zero of our titles. Only 15 people responding own more than 2 games of ours. 218 people choosing Planet Unknown as their favorite AAG title, while 21 people said they had never played one of our games.
Of course, the survey is a great time to self-reflect as a publisher, so we also asked what we can improve upon. The most picked answers (above 10% of picks) are better marketing, better packaging, better distribution, and better production quality. There is always room for improvement!
What is your board gamer archetype? Archetypes in question of the survey are:
Collector – This is someone who takes pride in their collection. The biggest group of the survey, I definitely feel like a collector too. Speaking from experience, I value a game just by having it in my Kallax. I’m glad for the opportunity to own the game and play it anytime (I own every game by Red Raven Games myself). Personally I’m enthusiastic to be prepared for any kind of game night.
Competitor – An outright Spike (see MtGs player types). Someone who values winning in a game more than anything else. This is a natural archetype in the board game scene as you’re agreeing to more rules in your life, and it’s natural to want to master them. I’ve never been a huge competitor myself, but it is a valid archetype. I always start every Teach answering the question “What’s the goal of this game?” by saying “The goal is to win, you win by…”
Teacher – The unsung heroes of the board game community! Kudos to you, if you are reading this and are a fellow rulebook enthusiast. Making a great rulebook is hard work, but explaining it well is even harder and that’s what good teachers can do (and also warm you up to the game while teaching). I’ve always valued board game reviewers as they can explain a game concisely and thrillingly.
Organizer – If “Halloween Horror Game Night” sounds fun to you, then you are probably an organizer. Local board gaming events should be at the heart of every city. This is advice for everyone, if you do not have a local FLGS (friendly local game store) that hosts game nights, do it yourself! Especially, if you’re lacking players to play the games already on your shelf.
Other – The archetypes mentioned above are just scratching the surface of how granular we could be with this survey, and some people cannot easily define themselves with a single archetype.
To round this section out let’s quickly point to one of the most divisive topics in board games currently, AI art.
Even though the discussions online might seem fixed more on the negative side of things, the results show that a clear division is not visible from this group of respondents. We still subscribe to the traditional view of contracting amazing artists, and when we find pleasant and talented people to work we keep them around!
Now, let’s check some acquisition stats! As we can see when we compare Figure 4 and Figure 5, there are more individual purchases in retail than in crowdfunding. This would lead me to believe that there are no doomsday scenarios of retail going away and crowdfunding taking over, the two complement each other allowing for more choices.
The Big Unknown of Crowdfunding
Now let’s explore perceptions around crowdfunding. The crowdfunding scene is an everchanging ocean of features, possibilities, and opinions. There’s no wonder there have been many talks about the decline of crowdfunding recently due to the freight shipping debacle, increased shipping prices, VAT inclusion, or even unforeseen circumstances such as the Red Sea Crisis.
This also resonated a bit in our survey when we asked about the responders’ feelings about crowdfunding games in 2024. While nearly half of the respondents felt a downtrend in crowdfunding, the other half felt neutral or positive. From a consumer point-of-view, I believe the neutral feeling is a healthy one, because it leads you to exploring and assessing whether the campaign is right for you or not. The publisher has a job of marketing their campaign but it’s still up to the consumer whether they back or not.
Crowdfunding prices are something that’s been the center of attention as well. From Figure 7 we can see that the ideal consumer price is leaning a bit towards higher pricing campaigns (over $100), however, the graph still resembles what we could call a normal distribution with the middle value, $75, being the highest. The hot topic is the platforms, especially with CMON recently signing an exclusive pact with Gamefound. From the publisher’s point-of-view it’s good to have a choice of platform because we can research the better choice for a specific game. One outlier in our data is BackerKit, which most likely speaks to the population of our newsletter not being huge RPG enjoyers. BackerKit is a stellar crowdfunding site if you’re looking to back or launch your RPG setting or ruleset. Gamefound’s Stretch Pay option (instalment payments) is a fresh take on innovation in the crowdfunding scene. We can already see other sites, such as Pledgendary, exploring these options too.
The last part of the crowdfunding section was an open-ended one, specifically targeting add-ons and stretch goals as both features are unique for crowdfunding. Since both were open-ended questions, some coding and categorizing of all the answers was needed. Among both questions, we can see that the highest answers are for deluxified components (this includes acrylic tokens and miniatures, plastic miniatures, wooden boxes, wooden tokens, and more) and gameplay (this includes expansions, alternative sides, asymmetric options, variant, and more).
Plushies were specified many times, so that’s why they do not fall into the Thematic Tie-ins category, which on the other hand includes art prints, cookie cutters, oven mitts, and more (Critter Kitchen by Cardboard Alchemy was the most mentioned). Thanks to the extended possibilities of campaigns, we observe that features such as custom inserts, GameTrayz, and sleeves are also among the most desirable ones.
All About That Content
In the last section of our survey, we focused on the content. What drives people to purchase games, how do they hear about them, and what kind of content they want to see more? This is especially intriguing to us, as we’re exploring all options on what we can do with our games.
In Figure 9, word of mouth is the most chosen way for people to hear about games. Board game hobby is a social one and we can see that even through the pandemic people still lean on that, which is good to see. It makes sense for us as publishers to offer review copies and look for channels that do previews for our upcoming crowdfunding games.
Lastly, looking at Figure 11 we can see a demand for more content from the publisher and designers. People want to hear stories about how board games are made and the popularity of designer diaries on BoardgameGeek can only attest to that. And I would wholeheartedly recommend anyone to watch CGE’s docu-series on making their games. Overall the behind-the-scenes and information aspect of the content are more desirable than the lifestyle type of content.
If you made it to the end, kudos to you! Let us know in the comments section below what questions we should ask next year.
Cheers and Happy Gaming!
Martin ‘Klobouk’ Řehořík