Sign of the times !?

[Zarniwoop]

I can't help but notice that this little hobby of ours whilst going through a so called "Golden Age" seems to be a victim of its own success.

There has been an explosion of new games, conventions, gaming groups and people joining the hobby. My concern is that is all this happening to fast is there a danger of the bubble busting causing it all to fall down around us?
You see this ever increasing amount of new games both through conventional retail as well as the crowd funding route but you also see a large increase in the second hand market. Now this could just be seen as a logical extension of the increase in size of the hobby or equally it could be seen as a consequence of the "cult of the new". There has always been those, in every hobby, that have to have the latest and greatest but it seems to me that boardgames are suffering the worst kind. When you see games for sale at bring and buys that are still shrink wrapped you have to wonder what is the point?

I've never really seen this as a collectors style hobby I buy games to play them, admittedly I do not always succeed straight away but I at least try to play a game at least once before selling it on.
The trouble is the bring and buys are starting to get so huge you begin to wonder how sustainable the market really is, as I for one use selling older games to fund buying new ones. Increasingly I find that unless you are selling newer games at bargain prices no one is really interested. I have several games I have tried repeatedly to sell, at bargain prices, but with no joy despite the fact they are perfectly good games just not hot of the press.

Maybe it will all settle down a bit and level off somewhere sensible.

Just some random thoughts to mull over....

[Snakes in the Tiki Lounge]

There's a noticeable bit of wider cultural exposure going on around board-gaming and so on these days. Things like that one vaguely successful youtube show Will Wheaton does about such things really help push the concept out into the wild in a way that you just wouldn't have gotten once upon a time.

That does increase the risk of both normies and hipsters, so a bubble is very possible. A crash might not be inevitable though, long as no-one's building overly ambitious projects on flimsy foundations. If the various businesses that make up the industry keep their heads, then the worst case scenario is that the wider audience eventually contracts and weaker and less successful companies have to close up as competition becomes fiercer again.