Re: card/board games as income source

[WFreitag@aol.com]

>> Making money? Maybe, but reasonable expectations are key... even assuming 
I 
>> come up with a game that's every bit as accessible and appealing I hope it 
>> could be. How long ago did Trivial Pursuit come out? How long since Magic: 
 
>> Gathering? How many other boxed games during that time span have made an 
>> impression outside the dedicated hobbyist market, or yielded riches for 
>> their inventors?
>>  
>
> Pictionary comes to mind. 
>

Sure, I wasn't suggesting that there weren't others besides Magic and Trivial 
Pursuit. The card games Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Apples to Apples have also 
done very well (the former two, though, benefiting from enormous up-front 
investment).

The question being addressed, though, is how good an investment of time is 
card/board game design, from a financial point of view? Look at it this way: 
every year there are dozens of hit songs, while it's years between hit board/card 
games. The ratio is it least a hundred to one, and maybe higher. And yet, I 
doubt many financial advisors would suggest to their clients that they should 
improve their financial situations by attempting to write hit songs. Even if 
the clients were known to have genuine talent. (Unless, perhaps, the clients 
were already-established professional songwriters with more than one hit already 
to their credit.) But however bad that advice would be, trying to improve 
one's financial situation by attempting to design hit card/board games is at least 
a hundred times worse.

But leaving "hits" aside, modest profits from designing _good_ card/board 
games are a different matter. Card/board game self-publishers like Looney Labs 
and Cheapass Games earn enough to make their efforts worthwhile. As for making a 
living, someone _might_ be making a living from Cheapass, which has by far 
the larger catalog of the two companies, with 50-some games. But Looney Labs (a 
household of three adults, whose family name actually is Looney), publishing 
about 10 games, always has at least one full-time professional day job salary 
coming in.

- Walt