Over at the @SPI wargames page a discussion was started…yeah the same one that is started every 6 months usually after some dude goes in for the annual physical I imagine.
You know what I mean:
Our fearless SPI wargamer fresh from his basement lair full of SPI flatpacks and magazine games has ventured into the WORLD –
“How am I doing Dr?”.
“Well Mr. Grognard not so great, you are overweight, short of breathe, and the cholesterol is too high.
But if you keep living in the past, bemoaning the future even worse than you think. Your metal state will age you faster than too many cheetos!
Try getting out and meeting new people, smile a little and breath some fresh air. All that moldy carboard from the 70’s cant be good for you.”
Mr Grognard comes home and then posts the end is nigh for wargaming post. 🙂 … again. LOL.
That was an attempt at humour people…..ahem…
Anyway now with context set, I retorted nonsense to the above…apparently the mods there believe that is offensive, so it was removed. Their page so be it. Lets all adhere to group think and self reinforcement.
I then posted a longer rebuttal with facts. Discussing the continued growth of our fine niche hobby, and how there are many more younger wargamers and EVEN more importantly, MANY MORE AVENUES for younger wargamers to enter the hobby.
– Deleted. I mean really. Lame.
So lets have a look at the hobby as it stands today, without an exhaustive assessment, more of a 30000 foot overview. More detailed than the trail of tears posted above but by no means an exhaustive study of the marketplace.
On facebook there are 14,000+ wargame members in the group Wargamers. I’d be willing to bet that there are 2 or 3 or more wargamers who dont frequent the toxicity of Facebook for every one that does. Other assessments I have seen peg the market at around 200,000 all in. I suspect it isn’t that big by any means. We do have to allow though for the massive resurgence in board gaming. Players will drift to our orbit as a natural evolution, plus we have lots of warriors recruiting!
New gamers are finding our hobby by a variety of means. We have more new games like or hate ’em that open the door to the hobby. Root, the COIN system, C&C system, small magazine games, card based games and war themed strategy games. Then of course we have all those miniature based board games….you know the ones that do $1M plus on Kickstarter. Those in my mind are war themed board games that really give us a sense of the potential scale of our hobby, and an opportunity to recruit new gamers.
Flying Pig Games just raised 75k for their Gettysburg title! Amazing. There are many, many good things happening in this hobby. Whoot! The sky is not falling.
We are seeing a significant volume of new games hitting the market. Publishers don’t publish unless they can cover their costs. Which is another myth we need to break soon in another post. Yes you can make money publishing games.
Lets also remember just because SPI did huge print runs, not all were sold, and even fewer were played. Print run size is not the metric to measure for market size back I dont think. I suspect SPI did a lot of channel stuffing to stores to dump stock.
My point here is that the with so many diverse titles, and topics being printed even in smaller runs of 500 or so the games are being bought. We can set aside the argument about whether they are played once or more or even at all. That is not the discussion here. The question is more is the hobby viable and will it exist in 25 years? – YES.
So as we take a step back, look at what is happening in the hobby outside the confines of the three color, 240 counter, 12 page rule book world of SPI [Yeah, yeah I know, I own lots of SPI monsters too..its a dig! 🙂 ] and we can see that a vibrant community exists. Those people are not just all 60-70 years of age.
The community is liberally populated with young gamers who are seeking innovation, usability, better rulebooks, higher quality components and a rich gaming experience. Some of those gamers are even starting their own blogs, and YouTube channels.
This is why I shared a while back the video of the 12 yr old lad, taking to minis, and creating a channel.
This is why I started our ‘Voices you need to hear’ series about Younger, Newer YouTubers, you will note nearly all of them so far are under 45 and only one was over 50.
If I look at the viewers on my small channel 7.6% are 25-34 years of age, 23.9% are 35-44 and the rest are 45 to 54 at 42.2%. This blog has 5,600+ subscribers. We are strong!…well at least 1/2 a Legion strong!
I would say the blend of ages of people at the Con I just attended in St Louis was about the same mix too.
I think the 45 year old gamers and up make a lot of sense to me, if we think about life stages and all that good stuff. We might play games as a youngster if we have an interest in history. The 20’s and 30’s are spent establishing ones life and habits, and miss behaving! From 40’s onwards we may well be ready to devote time and money to hobbies as our disposable income goes up [ not true for all of us but true enough at the level of detail we are dealing with here]. Hence the bulk of BigBoard viewers being in that 45-54 category.
Well. I guess I could go on. But you get the point, and I really wanted to be able to share my now extended thought from the SPI page that was deleted with folks over there. So that they could see it was not all doom and gloom.
My Goodness get over it fellas. Its a great time to be alive in wargaming. Get out and meet some new people, play on line with VASSAL or TTS or PBEM. Roll those dice! Make a friend.
Yet the myth persists.
Why do wargamers believe that wargaming is a dying hobby?
Great post! Wargaming is not a freakin tragedy!! Yes, there are unplayed games and lives have time limits. So what? I take those kinds of morose reflections about as seriously as I take the posts that tell me it doesn’t ‘count’ when I play a game solo. We need less ‘looking within, hobby introspection, theories of the hobby, and, ‘what does it all mean? ‘…and more joy…yes, make a friend, indeed. Buy games you maybe wont play (if you want), and embrace the fact that your child probably wont play them either. it aint tragic.
Not sure there is any data – but did the appearance of the 1st wave of gameboxes (PS, XBox, etc…) hurt the hobby?
I don’t see the hobby dying due to old age necessarily, but I do see the hobby struggling with the quality factor – which is maybe related to more people being involved, the general ease of printing a game, and the (possible) flood of new games / rush to get them out the door? Naturally I think there are sectors of the hobby that suffer more from this (looking at you Mr Magazine Game) than others.
Nice post!! I don’t know why the subject matter should be “offensive” or subject to censorship on CSW. As you say, “their page, their rules” and that is, of course true. But this is not anything like a subject to be avoided.
To my jaundiced eye (and a discussion of how jaundiced *my* eye is, in particular, probably WOULD bring about an immediate scrubbing from any online community!! 😀 ), the biggest future threat to” wargaming as we know it”, is in **how we know it**, or what it might become in future. Simply put, if the future of wargaming looks more like the oft-pilloried Charlie winner, “U-Boot” than it does like, say, the now-sailing-through-Kickerstarter “A Most Fearful Sacrifice”, then wargaming as we know it is doomed to the fate of the estate sale. Because the Euro-game influenced (or “sullied”, I’d say) brand of wargaming, with more emphasis on shiny bits and bobs, oversaturated color production,values, physical design catering to the attention-deficit, quick play, worker placement dynamics and all-ages accessibility is NOT the same vision as that of the grognards of old (you’ll note I don’t even mention historicity, since that’s pretty low on the list of your average eurogame fan). It is, however, popular and lucrative, and has a much larger potential (and actual) audience. And the closer it hews to computer gaming and app-based technology, the more future-leaning it is. So, which flavor of wargaming would YOU figure will stand the test of time?
That said, I see both numbers of grognards “dying off” like Velociraptors and T-Rexes… and I also see some influx of gamers in their 20s and 30s, although, I must say I “sense” more of the former than the latter. I don’t know whether the Old Guard is dying off faster than younger “old souls” with the proper perspective can replace them with new vigor. Getting an accurate view of those numbers, I think, holds the answer to this question.
Looking at the rolls of popular and productive designers is also a mixed bag. The age range of the best, most widely recognized “movers and shakers” in the design space tend to skew older, with some notable exceptions, I’m sure. And no true “wunderkind” springs to mind that is ready to be the New Richard Berg, or to replace any of the other elder statesmen once, God forbid, time continues to take its toll. Those same people got their starts at SPI when they were teenagers or recent college entrants, in a lot of cases. We don’t even have the equivalent of such a “talent farm” in wargaming these days.
It’s an interesting discussion, though, although I, of course, won’t be around to know how it’s going to play out. I just would rest easier knowing that the hexagon and the 1/2″ to 5/8″ unit counter (not to mention a reverence for historical subjects) will still be the most common form factors “shaping” wargames by the end of this century.
“Why do wargamers believe that wargaming is a dying hobby?”
Because they’re dying and they’re narcissistic. Most people believe what’s true for them is true for everybody.
This is so true.
Our perception of the world is tinted and biased by our own surroundings. If it doesn’t affect us, it doesn’t exist. If it’s something that affects us, it’s “happening everywhere”.
Wargamng is a bit like gardening. You don’t see a lot of youngsters interested in it. But people start playing (i.e. gardening) when they reach certain ages, start reading books, watching documentaries…
In the end, the argument that no one can refute is that the industry is booming NOW.
Who knows what will happen in 25 years?
Another pandemic?
A real “Next War”?
Let’s enjoy the moment, while it lasts!
Great post.
🙂
This is why initiatives like the Georgetown University Wargaming Society (GUWS) are so important. I use games in my grad school classes, and my students take to them (they beat my lectures, LOL). Just trying to pay it forward…
The GMT COIN series is now popular with a younger-ish crowd, so its a start.
Agreed. I know teachers who use games in High School as well.
So…what’s new? I was reading the debunking of the hobby’s death in the nineties in ‘The Europa Magazine’. I still see younger players around the place. If there is a “real” issue, it is people who played these games 30 or 40 years ago are still playing them with the (largely) same group of people.
indeed