Drain Bump

Things—I presume them to be thoughts—swirl in my brain like two halves of a solution that won’t quite blend. Think of Nestlé Quik and milk: No matter how vigorously you stir, there will always be lumps of chocolate goo. Whether that is a negative or a positive thing is largely subjective. I still submit that it isn’t meant to be so.

I forgot what I was talking about.

Games a-Plenty

My spare thinking time has been devoted quite a lot to gaming lately. The recent convention has some to do with this; the upcoming KublaCon is another factor. Regardless, I’ve been concocting adventures, scenarios and envisioning minutely detailed painting on tiny figures… not to mention the scouring of gaming websites and magazines which tell tales of victorious and varied board games, video games and their ilk.

One thing which struck me as significant in all this is that there is a lot of overlap among gamer geeks (previously I’ve referred to these people as “hardcore gamers,” though the distinction is purely academic) but the focus levels are so diverse and numerous that even with overlap, there is still a lot of splintering among the community. What I mean is that there are loads of people who play games which reach beyond the comfort level of your “average” individual whether in terms of committment, depth of involvement, complexity or social stigmas. Yet among the teeming throngs of people it can be difficult to find consensus about where the line is drawn.

In some cases it can be a money thing. Investing in a tabletop miniatures game like Warhammer takes a lot of time and effort but above even that it can be really pricey; I estimate that my 40K army is worth (note that I did not pay this amount because I got a lot of good deals and recieved significant portions of it as gifts) around $1,000. Video games, too, can be really expensive: At $50 minimum per game and noting that a single game can hold one’s attention for maybe a month if you’re lucky, we’re talking about $600/year and that’s not counting the cost for a console system itself which would bring video gaming up to around that $1,000 mark (more if you’re a PC gamer). Board games cost upwards of $70 each and if you schedule a game night per week you might get away with a single game per month but I’d say it’s more likely to play one game three times unless it’s really great. Point being, most people don’t have the financial resources to focus too heavily on more than one or two aspects of geek gaming as a whole.

I notice this as a problem because what ends up happening is that you have all these potential customers who would be involved in this aspect or that if they weren’t already being consumed by another aspect. Games Workshop, for example, I’m almost positive has had meetings where top brass discuss how to get video gamers to start spending some of that cash they’re burning at EB Games over at the GW store instead. I’m reasonably sure that the existence of Dawn of War is evidence of these meetings since the game (while quite enjoyable—don’t misunderstand me) seems in many ways like a big advertising campaign for the tabletop game. “Did you like this video game? Try the home version!”

The response, aside from some of these sorts of cross-genre experiments, to continual splintering of the marketplace has seemed to be the industries constantly raising the prices citing rising production costs. Head over to any forum dealing with Games Workshop games to see an example of how this sits with most customers (I presume in recommending this course of action that you’re comfortable with 14-year old guys drawing insights such as “that sucks!” and I feel safe in presuming that because, well, you’re here and that’s the sort of insight I typically draw). The problem with hobbies like this is that when it comes down to it you can either accept what the content providers are doing in whole in order to stay with the activity you enjoy or you can discard it entirely: Middle grounds are hard to come by short of dropping into “casual” status.

With all these elements in place what really suffers is the secondary markets: Add-ons and supporting products which should be providing competition but instead suffer from legal issues and limitations that make them rarely necessary and often difficult to implement properly, especially if the original intellectual property owner finds value in offering something put out by a thrid party. Consider the external hard drive for the PS2: It shouldn’t have been a big deal for someone other than Sony to put out a cheap, reliable hard disk with a decent capacity that plugged into the PS2 and offered nearly unlimited storage space for games. And what a return on investment over the $30-40 memory card from Sony which offers a paltry eight MB space. But until Sony released their official hard drive, none that I know of were put forth to consumers. Why not?

Probably the reason why not is that third party accessory developers know that customers have a limited appetite for non-official add-ons because they pay so much just to stay in the hobby to begin with (remember how easy it is to drop $1,000/year on this stuff) that any extra—no matter how useful—are regarded as a vehicle for gouging the customer.

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