It’s Black Friday and pretty much every retailer is having some kind of sale. This includes game stores and game websites. When I first entered the hobby a few years ago I was a sucker for board games on sale. I would buy anything that seemed vaguely interesting and had a big discount. For the most part these ended up being OK games from big publishers. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Queen Games’ sales on Amazon.
I never had time to play all of these games. So now I have more games than I can store and I’m not particularly interested in playing the OK ones when I’ve also been paying full price for some great games. Now I have a few piles of games I’ll be trading, selling, and giving away.
Besides cluttering my house with unplayed games, what is the result of board game sales? The MSRP of a game is usually as low as it can be to cover the production, transport, marketing, and sale of a game, and allow for some profit at each stage. So there isn’t a very large margin to lower for a sale. The discount is also usually at the retailers step.
The games that go on sale are therefore games that the retailer wants to get rid of at a lower profit or even at a loss to recoup some money and free up retail or storage space. So the majority of games on sale are not that good. This is why I bought so many OK games on sale. The good games didn’t need to be discounted to sell.
But there is another reason games go on sale besides not being good enough to sell. Sometimes more are produced than the market cares to buy. So you have very good games end up with steep discounts so stores can free up space.
A problem that arises from these two different reasons for a sale is that the perceived value of a game can be lowered. If a $60 MSRP game is regularly available for $30 it isn’t a $60 game anymore even if it’s a great game. In the ongoing struggle of online stores vs brick and mortar stores this is the biggest divide. Online stores have much lower overhead to pay for, so they can manage a larger discount and still make a profit. Brick and mortar stores usually can’t afford to match that discount even on games they want to get rid of. And no one wants to pay $50 for a now $30 game. This can also be applied to other, similar games. Game X and game Y are of similar weight and quality. Game X is on sale at 50% of MSRP. So game Y is also worth only 50% of MSRP. So an over production of game X can lower the perceived value of game Y. This can be quite frustrating to the producers of game Y.
These steep discounts can also lead to buyer’s remorse. For example, I preordered Seafall.
I’m still looking forward to playing it, but my copy is still in shrink and it’s now selling for half price. Some companies like Fantasy Flight Games have introduced minimum sale prices for their games to protect the games’ perceived value and help brick and mortar stores. Does this actually help? I’m not sure.
In short getting things you want cheaper is great. But be careful of buying things only because they are cheap and be aware of how discounts can warp the perceived value of designer’s and publisher’s hard work in creating a game.
That goes with everything, not just board games.