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...or how I got distracted in 30 seconds or less.

Over in the GW Annual report thread - a question was asked about what existed before GW was so great and developed the hobby... What indeed...but that isn't the point of this thread. I crawled back into my library of old dusty books and magazines to see what existed before Warhammer and Warhammer 40K and while flipping through the pages of Strategy & Tactics magazine I noticed something again...for the first time (great thing about getting older is learning lots of new things over and over again).

This was the 1981 Adventure Game Industry Survey. The year covered would have been 1980 (survey for the year prior to the year it is published). It is a survey of the various companies who were doing business in the US regarding their sales for the year. It covered war game, RPG and miniature companies. The dollar amounts given for the year were $34 million on wargames, $36 million on RPGs and $10 million on miniatures (back in the good old days when miniatures were had by the fist full for less than a dollar each - and not talking about the historicals that were going for about 25 cents each at the time but fantasy and sci-fi miniatures).

If we were to slide that forward with inflation that would be $127 million today. If you adjust for population growth (assuming the same percentage of people inclined to game now as then) you get roughly $190 million.

GW's take of the US market is $55 million.

Illustrative of anything in particular? Probably not. A chunk of those who are predisposed to wargames would be lost to video games. Price increases for gaming products has not followed the CPI (various reasons, the switch to tin, color printing, increased printing costs...).

Taken as a piece of the puzzle though, it does allow a view of the overall history of gaming and where things might be today. Mostly just interesting enough to figure someone else might be interested as well.

As a side note - based on some other research I did several years ago - that number of $190 million is roughly $60 million too low for the US wargame and miniature market (was around $250 million in 2009). Lots of fragmented information went into arriving at that number though.

One thing you'd need to take account of is the appearance and growth of Card Gameslike Pokemon, Magic The Gathering, Digimon etc.

To be honest, I'd say that takes far more of a share of potential tabletop wargaming players than computer games.

And I'm in no doubt whatsoever that they take in 100's of millions more cash than tabletop wargaming.

I'd probably say that for every 'serious' wargamer (as in, complete armies), you probably have 5 times as many 'serious' cardgamers.

Very interesting thought. I honestly wouldn't even have a clue how to begin to put the numbers together.

I would think this would be something that players in the market would have researched fairly extensively. I wonder if we could get a marketing manager from PP, Malifux or one of the other companies out there to shed some light on it.

So who ever is going to GenCon next month. Grab one of these folks and buy em or beer and get us the info.

 darefsky wrote:
Very interesting thought. I honestly wouldn't even have a clue how to begin to put the numbers together.

I would think this would be something that players in the market would have researched fairly extensively. I wonder if we could get a marketing manager from PP, Malifux or one of the other companies out there to shed some light on it.

So who ever is going to GenCon next month. Grab one of these folks and buy em or beer and get us the info.

If they will give you a ball park figure and/or an exact one.

But I'll put it to this way. In 2012 I was thinking of throwing a 6 figure amount into one of these newer conventions. I took a full year of data mining to get my results and in the end I pulled out of the notion. Not profitable in my eyes.

It would far more profitable investing into an anime convention and as a added bonus you get to see all of those cos play girls in those vip parties. I'm too pld for most things but I still like my Eye Candy every now and then.

Actually rolled it back into my regular business and that was the right thing to do.

Icv2 reported last year that there had been an explosion of interest in the tabletop market and that it had doubled in size from 2008. Given that and the numbers above are we looking at 190 million being the low ball estimate and 500 being the high estimate?

 Compel wrote:
One thing you'd need to take account of is the appearance and growth of Card Gameslike Pokemon, Magic The Gathering, Digimon etc.

To be honest, I'd say that takes far more of a share of potential tabletop wargaming players than computer games.

And I'm in no doubt whatsoever that they take in 100's of millions more cash than tabletop wargaming.

I'd probably say that for every 'serious' wargamer (as in, complete armies), you probably have 5 times as many 'serious' cardgamers.

There is somewhat regular research in the CCG markets that is available from several sources. The last one which I saw was from a year and a half ago and it put the US market at $1.1 billion with another $2.3 billion globally. In addition, the secondary market for MtG alone (resellers of individual cards) was larger than the total sales of GW.

I was more focused on the wargaming side of things as opposed to all table top games.

CCGs no doubt took their toll on miniature gamers - but they also brought a lot of new blood who would never had played miniature games to begin with.

 jonolikespie wrote:
Icv2 reported last year that there had been an explosion of interest in the tabletop market and that it had doubled in size from 2008. Given that and the numbers above are we looking at 190 million being the low ball estimate and 500 being the high estimate?

And they are right.

I was referring to "little plastic man dolls" and my apologies for not being clear on my previous comment. I really wanted to invest into a convention like that. But that is never going to happen now.

The future is still bright for board games as a whole where you can get hours of entertainment for a small amount of money.

In a way it is like game apps on the smart phone is where the money is than just the video gaming industry.

Sweetie got me hooked on a simple bejeweled type of game so we play together then myself playing World of Tanks,... as an example.

I'm all for the board games sector of the industry as it brings people together to play a game.

 jonolikespie wrote:
Icv2 reported last year that there had been an explosion of interest in the tabletop market and that it had doubled in size from 2008. Given that and the numbers above are we looking at 190 million being the low ball estimate and 500 being the high estimate?

Hard to say really. Again, because of the way a lot of the numbers are found - it leads to a lot of +/- to them. The $190 would be straight inflation adjusted for population. The $250 million was based off from talking to a lot of people and pouring over what information is available publicly. The ICv2 growth is based on roughly the same type of information. If you were to assume roughly the same volume of figures but adjust for real price as opposed to inflation based prices - that market would have gone from $10 million in 1980 to around $103 million today (as opposed to $43 million for inflation + population). Rules have also gotten more expensive. From the same magazine, there was a review of a two army starter set (miniatures, rules, paints, foam storage trays...) that retailed for $14.95. The reviewer said that it was high quality, but he could not recommend it due to its high price. Today, something like that would go for $75-100 (as opposed to an inflation adjusted price of $43.24). The old black and white rulebooks were normally less than $10 (inflation adjusted to $28.93) where now, most are color and sell for $40+.

Taking that into account, it would be reasonable to place the war game and miniature market of the table top games in the $500 million ball park. That doesn't include RPGs (another can of worms), CCGs (listed above) and non-traditional boardgames (stuff other than Monopoly and Candyland).

I think I had figured GW at 15% of the US market a while back - and that would also correlate with a $500 million dollar figure.