Fantasy Flight Games is one of the most important companies in the hobby games industry. With footprints in board, card, miniature, and roleplaying games, and successful games in each, the company has an unusual span of products and a high rate of success. We recently had a chance for an extended chat with Fantasy Flight Game CEO Christian Petersen on the games market and his company’s place in it. Here is the full version, a small portion of which was recently printed in Internal Correspondence #84.

In Part 1, we talk about the history of the company, the state of the market, and Fantasy Flight’s board games. In Part 2, we talked about keeping games in stock, FFG’s LCGs, Star Wars, and 2014.

For our readers who may not be familiar with the history of the company, could you start out by telling us a little about how Fantasy Flight Games came about?
I started the company back in 1995, and my first instinct was to get into the business of importing and translating European comic books and graphic novels. That didn’t fare so well. If you recall, those heady days of 1995 were not exactly the best time to launch a little graphic novel company, not only because of the market, but because graphic novels were not all that big of a deal back then.

So that didn’t go very well for us. But the nice thing about starting in that area is that we learned how to make print manufacturing, and started to learn the tools of the trade as far as the various desktop platforms needed to do publishing. So with the comics taking a serious southward turn, I turned more to my own personal hobby, which was hobby games, and developed the first board game that we ever made, called Twilight Imperium.

Since then we have built and are trying to make the best hobby games for hobby game stores that we can.

You mentioned “we.” Were you the sole founder or did you have partners?
I was the sole founder. There was another partner very early on from Indonesia, and he decided to return to Indonesia after the first six or seven months. I was alone then when we started the games. Then I had a few people helping me, and I had a part time helper for a while; but I didn’t have my first full-time employee, Todd, until 1997.

Let’s bring it up to the present day. We’d like to get your impression of the overall condition of the hobby game market.
I’d say the overall condition of the hobby game market is excellent. Over the last 19 years that I’ve done this, I’ve seen various ebbs and flows in the marketplace, and various interests congregate in specific areas, but I think now we have a greater influx of interested customers from all over in addition to a very broad sphere of interest across many different genres, whether that be collectible card games, miniatures games, board games, or games that fall in between those overlapping categories. So I find that the marketplace is about as robust and as healthy as it’s ever been, and I’m encouraged by the diversity in the marketplace that makes me hope that there could be some duration to that health.

We’ve never seen anything quite like the recent run in the hobby market.
I know, it’s really amazing. What I’m really encouraged by is that when we’ve seen booms in the past they’ve been very specific to a certain game or certain category, whether it was d20 or Pokemon, or Magic in the middle of the mid-to-late 90s. Now we’re seeing this boom, but I think except for Magic, which is resurgent and powerful, you’ll struggle to see one particular line whose fading would necessarily break the momentum in the hobby.

Why do you think that is, that the market is so healthy right now?
If I thought there was one particular reason, I’d have some news for you! The reality is that there have been a number of different factors that have occurred over the years. First of all, the actual quality and the visual appearance and the sheer enjoyment of games that have come out has just improved year over year over year. And I’m really proud of our contribution to this, and we certainly have not been alone in making really great quality content.

There have also been two other important factors. About 10, 11 years ago, we had a very large influx of gamers, very young gamers, in the Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! category, and I think a certain percentage of them, in their contact with gaming stores, or their parents’ contact with gaming stores, became aware of this other marketplace and that has created some of the groundswell we’re seeing.

Third, I think that the technology sector and the computer game generation has started to become aware that some of the roots of the computer games that are out there today really harken back to this hobby gaming and specialty gaming field. So what we’ve seen with the greater interest is that people who have emerged into the software hobby have really taken it upon themselves to also be interested in these alternative ways of playing games. One thing I noticed through the past decade was how big of an interest group for our games there was among software game developers. So I think the interest in software games has helped the notion of hobby games, as people bring gaming into their lives more.

So there’s been a wide variety of different motions that would have made people more interested in these games, and I’d like to think that we have some great product for them as they enter that field, and that in itself has caused more energy in the coverage and more energy in the ability for the mass market to be receptive to these niche hobby, specialty science fiction, fantasy, horror themes.

As you cover on your site, you know that some of the biggest television shows that we have now are really fantasy geek shows, whether it be Game of Thrones (see “’Game of Thrones’ Sets Viewer, Pirate Records”) or The Walking Dead (see “’The Walking Dead’ Round-Up”) and so on. And that has helped us, inured this greater coverage.

We see Wil Wheaton’s TableTop show making some significant inroads, and attracting new audiences, by being able to profile games in a way that I certainly, in my experience, had never seen before in terms of an effect on sales based on press coverage (see “The ‘TableTop’ Bump”).

It’s definitely a unique thing in our history also. You mentioned the connection with interest in video games feeding back into their origins in tabletop games. Some companies are very explicitly mining that connection by developing apps that tie to their tabletop games. Where is Fantasy Flight in that world?
Well, there are a couple of types of apps you can do that tie to tabletop games. We’ve done some outright game conversions into the digital field. That’s an area we’re very cautious about, but that we’re still actively exploring to see how we can do this in the best, most effective way.

The other type of apps are the types that digitally support your tabletop games, and we’ve been fairly active in those and are still trying to discover the best ways to achieve a nice balance there. For example, we’ve done die rolling apps with custom dice and functionalities for our Star Wars games. We’ve done some support apps for our Arkham Horror line.

So there are two different fields here: there are tool set apps, which can help you better enjoy your physical games, and then there are the actual digital conversions.

Our most successful digital conversion (and we’ve only done two), is our Elder Sign: Omens app, which harkens back to our Elder Sign physical game. We’ve been very pleased with the reception of that and continue to use this approach, and we feel it has really helped the visibility and the actual sales of the physical game. So there’s a real awakening to that for us that these things are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I know you can have a successful software title and actually drive sales and interest back into the physical game.

We also think that’s something that a company like Days of Wonder, who has done some great apps, has seen as their digital side, for example with Ticket to Ride, has really grown their audience and has driven more activity back into the hobby market (see “15 Million Online ‘TTR’ Games”).

Can we drill down a little bit into the different categories that Fantasy Flight is active in? In your board game space, you have a wide range of families of games, with core games and expansions and support products, and the families move on and off our bestseller chart depending on the season and what releases are happening. So overall it’s hard to tell; what’s your best-selling board game family?
Well, we have a number of families that we’re very, very pleased with. I think the most famous would be the Arkham Horror series of board games, and we just launched a major new title for that, a sister game to Arkham Horror, called Eldritch Horror. That’s done very well for us.

Another important board game for us is the Game of Thrones board game, which is a game we did a second edition of. Our first edition sold very, very well back in the last decade; but of course now, borne on the increased popularity of that brand, and on what we think, not self-servingly I hope, is a pretty good game, it really turned out be a huge success for us.

Some other series of games that are workhorses for us, that we’re really proud of, include the Battlestar Galactica game, which despite that brand being off the air for a couple years, continues to be completely amazing for us.

Some of the classics we have brought back; Cosmic Encounter is a very strong performing line for us.

There’s a great number of other ones, there are probably obvious ones that aren’t coming to mind, but those are some titles that your retail readers will know well.

Fantasy Flight Games is one of the most important companies in the hobby games industry. With footprints in board, card, miniature, and roleplaying games, and successful games in each, the company has an unusual span of products and a high rate of success. We recently had a chance for an extended chat with Fantasy Flight Game CEO Christian Petersen on the games market and his company’s place in it. Here is the full version, a small portion of which was recently printed in Internal Correspondence #84.

In Part 2, we talk about keeping games in stock, FFG’s LCGs, Star Wars, and 2014. In Part 1, we talked about the history of the company, the state of the market, and Fantasy Flight’s board games.

As we interview retailers and distributors about your games, there seems to be a pattern where a game will go out of stock, demand will build up, and then you’ll bring it back a couple of months later and ship additional product. Is that a strategy of yours to let them go out of stock to build demand and then bring them back, so you can get faster sales on the reprints?
Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily a strategy of ours. Obviously one of the biggest challenges that any kind of publisher has is to manage the right balance between inventory and sales. The thing that is difficult for us is that we manufacture most of our games overseas and we have fairly long lead times. I would say our restock lead time is typically four to five months. So we tend to bring in our games in fairly large quantities and we tend to gauge how these games do relatively carefully, but we have been fortunate enough that some games just take off much faster than certainly we, or any of the initial stocking on the retail side, would have expected.

So we do have games that from time to time will go out of stock. When we have a game go out of stock, we of course believe the actual marketplace itself should have a two to three month supply. Of course, some retailers will have run out of stock, particularly if they stock very narrowly, but we believe in a three tier system of having a buffer of three or four months of stock, and then we try to restock as soon as we can.

But we have a large library of products. We bring in our stuff in very decent amounts, and we will occasionally go out of stock on products for a couple of months. I think it has more to do with the natural flow of things rather than a predetermined actual strategy. Does that make sense?

Then the question that follows is, if it’s not intentional, why does it happen so often?
The way we gauge our inventories (because, of course, we have to be careful of what kind of investments we put in inventories) is that we gauge demand, and then we gauge what we need to do to properly supply the marketplace. With our line of products and with the number of products that go in and out, I think it’s just natural that there will be, at any one time, a number of products that will be out and then come back. I don’t think it’s something that is particularly problematic.

So you don’t think that it hurts sales and that the demand goes away, that the demand is still there when it comes back in stock?
There is that. I think it’s very important that we have a very good, serious partnership when it comes to our distribution and in our retail chain. Just because we go out of stock doesn’t necessarily mean that the marketplace is out of stock, right?

We do rely on our distributors and retailers to have some months worth of supply so we can gauge when we should bring something back in stock. But certainly, these things have to be made in large bulk, they take a long time to make, so we have to make our investments quite a bit ahead of time, and reprints take four or five months. So if there are spikes in demand, or there is less in the marketplace than maybe there should be then there will be periods where stuff is out of stock.

We often hear this, but keep in mind the number of active titles we have, so it is something that may be seen as more of a problem than it actually is on a mathematical basis. Certainly I understand some of the emotions that can run when you get that one game that they have particular demand for, and we, of course, are out.

There are other examples where we simply cannot make enough and I think specifically when it comes to a game like X-Wing, which goes out of stock regularly, the factories we have working on that game simply are working on them as fast as they can.

We had to make a very specific choice: do we want to limit the amount of supply we put out there or do we want to reduce the quality of the product over the short term? And we decided to keep the product quality as high as we could, and unfortunately that leaves some demand in the marketplace. We have worked really hard the last year and a half to expand our factory capacity to output more, but there may be times where we’re literally making things as fast as we can , whether that’s tool capacity or simply factory capacity to do more, particularly with painted product, to do accurate and nice paint jobs on these things.

How many games do you have in your catalog?
I believe the number of active SKUs that we carry right now across all of the different lines is somewhere in the range of 800 to 900.

What was your annual output in terms of new products in 2013, and what do you expect in 2014?
In terms of new product, we released somewhere around 220 new SKUs last year, we expect that to be around 260 new SKUs this year. In terms of actual productions that we hit every year, we just had a conservative estimate that we’ll start about 1,200 different productions in 2015. We actually start our factory up on a new production run five times a day so our factories are quite, quite active.

So once again, the notion that we print sparsely is maybe overstated, but that is certainly the challenge of keeping everything in stock at all time. It can be something of a challenge for us. But I hope you can also understand it is something that we have to treat very carefully.

We wanted to ask about your card games, the LCG format. You have a number of licensed and house brand titles that you do in that format. You started working in that format at a time when the collectible card game market was very unfriendly to new launches. It seems to have loosened up a little now. Are you still happy with that LCG format as a way of getting card games out there, or are you thinking about any collectible card games in the future?
We are super thrilled with the LCG format. It is probably the biggest shining star in our overall family of products. We really believe very strongly in the various strengths that format has to offer. I think you have had some articles about that in the past, and [SVP--Communications] Steve [Horvath] is a good evangelist for it.

It is a rapidly growing format; LCGs is our second largest category right now and it may be our biggest in a year or two; we’re very happy with it. We believe it’s a way for people to enjoy this kind of constructed card games and be able to enjoy multiple games; and we believe from a pure business model perspective it’s a fair and awesome model to put out there.

Whether we’ll ever do a collectible game again, we have no plans right now to do one. I can’t say we’ll never do one, but we’ve certainly made the non-collectible, fixed format a staple of ours. I don’t have much insight into where collectibles are right now; we’re certainly happy that Magic is as strong as it is, to keep our industry healthy. I have not seen a lot of new entrants into the game market, except for My Little Pony. I don’t have much visibility into how that’s doing other than the online marketing talk.

Fantasy Flight has had a number of licensed games, and a couple of years ago, you got maybe the granddaddy of them all in Star Wars, which you’re now doing in three different formats (minis, RPGs and LCGs). Can you talk about what it’s like to work on that property? Specifically what’s it like in terms of continuity, and is that changing with all the new plans now that they have for future movies and TV shows and so forth?
What’s it like to work on what you called the ‘granddaddy?’ I’m of the generation that grew up as a kid with Star Wars and the original trilogy, the various Kenner action figures, and so on; it’s really a gratifying thing for me personally to be able to put a lot of creativity and hard work and get some great output out of that category, to make our mark in the Star Wars universe a little bit.

We’re all excited, gratified and honored to be doing it.

In terms of continuity, we’ve been very happy to work with Lucasfilm; frankly they are a great licensor (and I don’t say that because I have to). In terms of the most recent changes that they’ve been talking about, they have yet to really hit any of the stuff that we’re doing, so I can’t speak to what kind of changes that it’s going to make. It’s my understanding that it’s not going to be anything that is as dramatic and as retcon-heavy as many may think. But it is something that we’re still studying. In particular, we’ve created a lot of content and written material for the role playing games, so that’s the department that’s most interested in seeing what’s going to go on there.

One of the things we were interested in was that the RPG is set in the Outer Rim, and now this new animated show, Star Wars Rebels, is going to be set there. That seemed interesting that they were exploring that part of the universe.
Yes. We have not been made aware that there’s anything that has been a problem with our Edge of the Empire roleplaying game. That is something we actually worked with them on very, very recently. We think that is still very much valid. But like I said, we don’t really know where they’re going with the forward-looking continuity until they start landing on some of their plans, and they’re ready to start talking about some of those storylines and decisions that they’re making vis-a-vis the movies.

We’re all waiting anxiously to find out what they’re going to be doing there.

What are you most excited about for 2014 at Fantasy Flight?
The problem that I have for 2014 is that we aren’t ready to announce them yet. All I can say is 2014 is going to be my favorite year of all our Star Wars content that we’ve put out; and there’s some new and exciting stuff in that category coming. I hope that will be enough for you.

Do you expect an up year in 2014? What do you see in terms of the overall market for 2014?
In some ways, 2013 was a very careful year for us. With a few exceptions, our teams did not work on a large range of new major releases. We have some major ones we’ve been working on for a while, but we have spent a great deal of our energy, and a large percentage of our teams working all through 2013 and into 2014, on a series of brand new games. So what you’ll see coming out in 2014 from FFG is a much more significant impact on new games and new lines than those that we had in 2013. Specifically, you’ll see some very exciting momentum behind what we’re doing with X-Wing.

We expect 2014 to be an up year for us, and I say with crossed fingers that we have been so fortunate in the market and with our fans pretty much nonstop for the last 10 years, so I hope that will continue.

weeble1000 wrote:
It means FFG doesn't need GW, doesn't care about GW, and will happily let other products eclipse GW.

"In terms of continuity, we’ve been very happy to work with Lucasfilm; frankly they are a great licensor (and I don’t say that because I have to)."

In other words, GW is a terrible licensor and I'm much happier working with Star Wars, and making a lot more money. In fact, Star Wars is a much better license than LoTR, so, Hey GW, go feth yourselves! Oh, and a little salt in the wound for you, our LoTR LCG is doing GREAT!

 notprop wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:
It means FFG doesn't need GW, doesn't care about GW, and will happily let other products eclipse GW.

"In terms of continuity, we’ve been very happy to work with Lucasfilm; frankly they are a great licensor (and I don’t say that because I have to)."

In other words, GW is a terrible licensor and I'm much happier working with Star Wars, and making a lot more money. In fact, Star Wars is a much better license than LoTR, so, Hey GW, go feth yourselves! Oh, and a little salt in the wound for you, our LoTR LCG is doing GREAT!

I think you read far to much into it.

Also GW don't licence LotRs, it's not theirs to licence out.

 agnosto wrote:
I'm sure a GW white knight will be along presently to tell us how the surge in hobby sales over the past couple of years has nothing to do with GW and their loss of market share...

Edit:

To be fair the interviewer just asked about Star Wars specifically but if FFG was making money hand over fist with the GW IP, I'm sure he would have thrown in a comment about them....

....either that or he didn't mention them because he's afraid of receiving a C&D..

weeble1000 wrote:
The point is that FFG has acquired a license that GW is terrified of: Star Wars. Star Wars not only dwarfs the profit-fueling power of GW's LoTR license and buries the needle compared to Warhammer 40K, but FFG also has a license to LoTR and is producing more successful products with that license than GW is.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Why would GW be terrified of SW of all things? SW isn't exactly something new, and the games FFG produce don't compete directly (as in the same genre) as GW's own miniature games.

PhantomViper wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Why would GW be terrified of SW of all things? SW isn't exactly something new, and the games FFG produce don't compete directly (as in the same genre) as GW's own miniature games.

X-Wing would like to have a word about that assertion of yours. Or do you think that X-Wing is anything other than a miniature wargame?

 cincydooley wrote:

PhantomViper wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

Why would GW be terrified of SW of all things? SW isn't exactly something new, and the games FFG produce don't compete directly (as in the same genre) as GW's own miniature games.

X-Wing would like to have a word about that assertion of yours. Or do you think that X-Wing is anything other than a miniature wargame?

Sure? But I'd agree that it doesn't directly compete with anything GW is offering presently. I mean, there's pretty large difference between Arial dogfighting and mass battle boots on the ground Wargaming.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:
The point is that FFG has acquired a license that GW is terrified of: Star Wars. Star Wars not only dwarfs the profit-fueling power of GW's LoTR license and buries the needle compared to Warhammer 40K, but FFG also has a license to LoTR and is producing more successful products with that license than GW is.

Why would GW be terrified of SW of all things? SW isn't exactly something new, and the games FFG produce don't compete directly (as in the same genre) as GW's own miniature games.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
GW in the 80s to mid 90s was itself a hobby game company fairly like FFG, publishing a range of board games and RPGs as well as tabletop rules.

 judgedoug wrote:
Prediction
FFG will release a 28mm Star Wars miniatures game which will dominate sales

 judgedoug wrote:
Prediction
FFG will release a 28mm Star Wars miniatures game which will dominate sales

Prediction 2
...and within 5 years FFG will own a controlling share of Games Workshop.

 Manchu wrote:
28mm SW would have a huge impact on miniatures gaming, I suspect much more so than X-Wing (which is more of a board game). Although I have heard explanations as to why FFG has not done this just yet, it's harder to understand why they still haven't done it with each passing year of greater success with X-Wing. Perhaps it will be the successor to X-Wing?

PhantomViper wrote:


With that line of thinking then the only game that is a competition to 40k is Warpath since they are the only ones that also do futuristic mass battle boots on the ground in 28mm... That is kind of a simplistic way to see the miniature wargaming hobby.

 cincydooley wrote:

PhantomViper wrote:


With that line of thinking then the only game that is a competition to 40k is Warpath since they are the only ones that also do futuristic mass battle boots on the ground in 28mm... That is kind of a simplistic way to see the miniature wargaming hobby.

Well, no.

Any other skirmish game with 28mm models is going to compete with GW products. Warpath, infinity, etc are more direct competitors to 40k while Warmahordes sits somewhere in between 40k and Fantasy, but is still a pretty direct competition. I'd probably argue that Flames of War is not a direct competition to any GW product, either, despite having more similarities than X-wing.

X-Wing is not a direct competition. The only similarities is that they involve miniatures in dice. Does it pull some market share as people are buying 2 x wings Instead of a 5 man 40k box? Sure. But the products aren't direct competition. Coke and Pepsi are. Coke and Pabst blue ribbon, while both beverages, are not.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
But you can take that to the extreme. If I spent $30 on take-out, then that's $30 I didn't spend on GW, so technically GW has lost market share to Pizza Hut (wat?).

That's absurd, I know, but going back to my original point and the whole reason we got started down this tangent: The interviewer or the CEO not mentioning GW products isn't as meaningful as some people are claiming. The interview was about the successes of FFG as a company, so they talk about their own brands plus their biggest license deals (of which Star Wars is obviously the biggest).

"He didn't mention GW, therefore XYZ..." just seems like people are looking for a free kick at GW where there is none.

The interview was about the successes of FFG as a company

 cincydooley wrote:
In that regard, it really doesn't infringe upon my hobby budget for 40k at all.

 judgedoug wrote:
Prediction
FFG will release a 28mm Star Wars miniatures game which will dominate sales

 BrookM wrote:
I don't see FFG having another go at that after getting rid of Dust. They should stick to pre-painted stuff, board games and RPG's.