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NOT a discussion on which game is the most popular, please.
How do you know how well a game is doing?
Is there some kind of useful data that we could actually collect?

Dakka polls? Is the community on Dakka representative, games with their own fora could be underrepresented. Polls somewhere else maybe?

Financial data? One of you will have to tell me about what and where to get it. Quite definitely not my field.

How active podcasts are? Useful ways to find numbers on that?

What do you think and how would you measure it?

Many ways, many of which also vary depending if your'e talking in general or local.

NOTE Remember that online is always a very tiny subset of players of any hobby. Even on Steam there's only ever a tiny faction engaging in chat on the forums or even reviewing the games.

NOTE 2 When looking at stores (online or real) always factor in the general health of the store itself. A store that is doing badly will often reflect this in bad support of the various games they supply.

Local:
Well this one is easy, at the local level you can see how many people game at your local club for a specific game. Not just who collects armies for it, but who is actually playing and getting involved on a semi regular basis.
In addition you might look at what the local store is stocking, in general if a local 3rd party store is stocking lots of models for a game and they are not heavily discounting them (ergo trying to shift stock that isn't selling) then its a sign that there is a healthy buying population for that game locally. This might mean your club isn't playing it much, but another club/store/group is supporting the game locally.


At the national and international level then its about data pooling.

a) Prices and stock on online stores - yep just like the local shop you can look at stores online. Stores holding wide ranges of the models, stocking them and selling and not heavily discoutning can show popularity. Running out of stock often is also a good sign to strong sales.
In contrast stores running massive discounts and not restocking can be signs of a game doing less well.

b) If the company trades publicaly then looking at their public record and finances helps. GW publishes this every year and its an ideal resource for seeing the sales, volumes, profits, income, expenditure etc... Basically its probably the most detailed and impartial source of info on if a company is doing well or not.

c) Local and national event support. Are there many events; how well are they attended; how good are the prizes etc.... A game which has few major events at the national scale is likely one that might not be doing well. Of course one has to factor in the games nature and design - not all games make for tournament products.
However you can also measure it over time - a game picking up more and more events is doing better than one losing events - baring in mind there's always going to be a rough cap on the number of events that can be held so a game showing little change, but a high number every year is likely doing well.

d) Chatter online/facebook/forums. Yep even though its always a niche its also a health sign too. If there's few chats on forums and facebook then the game might not be doing so well. Because now its doing poorly enough that even the niche market is not all that enthusiastic about it. This is often also a good measure of a companies marketing and hype. Companies putting out few details and few new releases are often those that dwindle on chatter online.

e) mentioned above, but release rate. A company that is having trouble delivering new products to the market; which isn't releasing things on time; which isn't communicating with its fans etc.... These are all signs of a company struggling in the background which can be a good measure of dwindling sales leading to increased pressure as money gets tight.

Of course other factors can mess this up too; but in general if a company isn't presenting itself well then things are going wrong.


In general its all going to be a case of adding together various sources of information and looking both current and historical at them. In addition its about getting a general feel as, outside from company financial information, you're unlikely to get a firm picture.

In general you can see that products like Warhammer are doing super well - lots of stock running out but being restocked in stores online; lots of stores selling it; lotsof new releases; lots of marketing; loads and loads of events and tournaments. Ergo everything is mostly on the up - even in niche communities there's more chatter.
Tihs latter you can see with things like Age of Sigmar - prior to its launch there was far far less chatter about Old World fantasy - it was dwindling fast. Now AoS is generating a lot more chatter and a lot more life.


Meanwhile looking at something like the old days of Spartan games you could see their forum activity dwindling; their release rate getting more and more spotty; their communication getting weaker and more confusing and issues with stores trying to get deliveries of new stock. Indeed they showed a lot of signs of suffering before their fall.


Warmachine is also showing some signs, however they've still got an established core that is still functional. A dwindling setup that shows they are not as strong as they once were; but still have strong potential to turn it all around.

How do you define “how well a game is doing?”

Is the company making money? Do people play the game? Is there continued support? Can I find someone to play a game with? Is it fun?

Monopoly has 1000 different variations and more get released every day, so someone is making money, someone is buying them. Nobody plays the game, there’s no ongoing support. No one will ever play more than one game with you because the game is built to *not* be fun.

Yet every household in North America has a copy gathering dust in a closet. *shrug*

Profit.

Long term planning and investing.

I would highlight Steve Jackson Games as an excellent example of providing info on the state of the company,even though they have no obligation to do so,as they are privately held. Unlike GW,which is publicly traded, and has to make some info disclosures for legality,and to attract investors. SJG doesn't have to do any of that, yet they are pretty candid anyway about things, including bad decisions they've made. Here is a link to last year's report -
http://www.sjgames.com/general/stakeholders/
You won't find much other info like this out there, as pretty much no else shares it.

Try Google Trends. https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US

You can plug in a bunch of games or manufacturers and it'll put it into handy graphs, maps and charts of what people are searching for where and when.

Try adding "Tide Pods", "Fidget Spinners" or "Avengers End Game" for a bit of fun and to put things in to perspective.

New releases and availability would be my benchmarks.

If a game is doing well the publisher (or 3rd parties) will continue to make it and make new stuff for it.

Otherwise...

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
New releases and availability would be my benchmarks.

If a game is doing well the publisher (or 3rd parties) will continue to make it and make new stuff for it.

Otherwise...

Agreed. Healthy companies continue to produce new product.

greatbigtree wrote:How do you define “how well a game is doing?”

Is the company making money? Do people play the game? Is there continued support? Can I find someone to play a game with? Is it fun?

For a wargame I would expect those things to be correlated, so don't think it matters which one you measure.

The second one ("Do people play the game?") if I had to pick.

This is an interesting topic. Wargames themselves are a niche market, hence the comment above about Tide Pods, etc.

Some games can be healthy in an IP sense, despite overall sales figures. An example would be Battletech. It just does not die.

For publically traded companies, sales numbers and profit are important figures. However, many games are made by privately held companies. Google searches, etc, can help a bit in terms of identifying interest in a game. Sold items on ebay / number of items listed is also some kind of measure.

I think at some point you need to consider who produces/makes the game.

A number of extremely successful games are produced or designed by hobbyists in their spare time and then published either by themselves or from an association with a larger publisher such as Osprey games. Even when successful (i.e. plenty o' sales, lots of people playing the game, general buzz is good) these designers still maintain a normal job/employment.

Very few....VEEEERRYY few people in wargaming design/production do it as a full-time job. Only the big companies really. For a lot of the smaller game designers, stuff is produced smartly with less risk, so any profit is just hobby funding and helping support the continuation of the product development, etc.

Only a handful of companies outside of GW have any actual retail locations and often it's a hobby center or gaming hub near their HQ etc. (I think Fantasy Flight has a kind of hobby-bunker building somewhere in the US with some retail on site?)

Very few companies are like GW, a large corporation with investors, making actual progress in profit and increasing their holdings. A lot of small time publishers are just happy to have occasional sales, enough to let them enjoy their hobby and they'd justify that they're doing "good" as well. So, for some, year-on-year profits are a measure, others are measured differently.

I guess looking at market expansion and company size and market hold is another key area.

There's a lot of 9-15mm companies out there which are very small scale; mostly hobby level casting and backyard work running alongside regular income. Often only supporting perhaps one or two people. They are more labours of love than of money. They have smaller markets and generally attract a much smaller customer base and also lack the income and investment potential to invest in heavy marketing material; in pushing their brand forward and in increasing their overall market share or even growing the market itself.

So on the one hand you can say they are healthy in that they are running, ideally profiting and still have a sustained market. But on the other hand you can consider their scale is so small that any minor upset in market could kill them and if the owner even falls ill for a time that can even be enough to shut them down for good.
So they are in very weak positions.



Then you get some like Battletech who have long term fans and, are, again trading on a much smaller scale; but have abit more power for investment; a bit more clout in the market; but are still not really pushing forward with expansion of their market.

In both cases its not just lack of marketing but also likely lack of production expansion investment. Even if they could grow their market it might not work well for them as they'd lack resources to invest into more machinery and staff for production and shipping.



So on one measure they are healthy, but on the other they are very unhealthy in terms of their future prospects.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
New releases and availability would be my benchmarks.

If a game is doing well the publisher (or 3rd parties) will continue to make it and make new stuff for it.

Otherwise...

Actually giving it more thought this might not be true...

The game might have players but night not need or benefit from expansions (never seen a Monopoly expansion per se, to say nothing of chess...) or the game might be doing well but the company might be mismanaged and not able to get out new product...