The board game market is strangely bifurcating where one biz model is $100 and up at seemingly ever higher prices via kickstarter, and the other model is something like the gmtgames p500 model where you preorder at a considerable discount to list price. So I got a copy of MBT last week for about 40% off because I preordered on the P500 a long time ago, at the same time as the kickstarter people were getting scythe for their $100 or whatever. DVG is in more or less the same market as gmtgames and has run some expensive kickstarters I've participated in, so its not merely a eurogames vs grognard thing or whatever.
The most interesting consumer side effect is one model has prices drop after launch, and the other has prices increase after launch.
One similarity is both models require extreme levels of customer participation, not a mere casual search at amazon for any game and expect it to arrive in two days, its a multi-month (year?) commitment of planning ahead and keeping up with the marketplace.
From having participated in some RPG kickstarters (admittedly slightly off topic) I sometimes think they aren't even beginning product development until some time after the kickstarter is funded, which will eventually lead to some spectacular inevitable fails.
Some Cliff's Notes on VLM's post for anyone who, like me, didn't fully get it at first:
GMT Games are a wargame company. They specialise in the classic style of wargames, with hexes and tokens with attack and defence strength and whatnot. That said, they have also published things like Reiner Knizia's 'Battle Line', and the famous Cold War geopolitics game 'Twilight Struggle'.
GMT Games release games using their 'Project 500' model. They develop games, and once one is nearly finished, they make it available for pre-order, at a discount. If they get 500 pre-orders, they produce it. If they don't get 500 pre-orders, they don't produce it, and the people who pre-ordered don't get charged [1].
MBT is a modern rewrite [2] of a classic hex-and-counter wargame from 1987 [3] which models tank warfare in Europe during the version of World War 3 which looked most likely at the time.
DVG is Dan Verssen Games, also primarily a wargame company. They have done a number of kickstarters. Some just sell the game at a modest discount, like Warfighter - World War II [4]. Some upsell pricey vanity options, like The Cards of Cthulhu [5].
Eurogames are a hard-to-define genre which, IMHO, emphasise mechanics giving rise to involving, complex play rather than realism. Settlers of Catan is the godfather. Further examples are Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Alhambra, Kingdom Builder, etc.
Grognards are players of classic hex-and-counter wargames [6], and, metonymically, such games themselves.
The most interesting consumer side effect is one model has prices drop after launch, and the other has prices increase after launch.
One similarity is both models require extreme levels of customer participation, not a mere casual search at amazon for any game and expect it to arrive in two days, its a multi-month (year?) commitment of planning ahead and keeping up with the marketplace.
From having participated in some RPG kickstarters (admittedly slightly off topic) I sometimes think they aren't even beginning product development until some time after the kickstarter is funded, which will eventually lead to some spectacular inevitable fails.