Precinct Omega Podcast - News #47 - In and Out

In this business, companies enter the market and companies leave it with a depressing regularity. But what motivates them to start and what leads to their departures?

With the news that Impudent Mortal is back, IDW Games is gone and Freebooter's Fate is, astonishingly, still here, I dig into this question in a little more detail and ask what it means for Precinct Omega.

SCRIPT FOLLOWS:

NEWS

Fri 10th September. My name is Robey Jenkins...

<and my name is Bernard>

And here is the news.

Let’s start with some great news that contrasts heavily with recent cases of companies closing or being folded up by their owners: Impudent Mortal is back!

Founder and OG Impudent Mortal himself, Walt Langhans tragically passed away early 2020, just before the COVID pandemic really got its teeth into our lives. His widow Michele shut down the business, which was really Walt’s passion, while she decided what to do with it, but then the pandemic really got into its swing and it all kind of went quiet. Impudent Mortal wasn’t just an innovative company driving MDF terrain and other materials, it was a bit of a cultural spokesperson of a business. Walt’s meme game was super strong and he always had a funny twist on the hobby to make us laugh.

Now the company is back, with new owner, Jon Russell, at the helm. I won’t pretend that things are super-clear, right now, but it seems like Jon is the owner of a micro-enterprise called Dads Armies, which only barely existed in 2020, with Jon being involved in organizing and exhibiting at a Texas wargames show. However, from the get-go, it looks like Jon is planning to add resin upgrade kits to the MDF staples of Impudent Mortal, which suggests that this is where he was starting with Dads Armies.

He also assures me that he’ll be doing his best to meme at the same level as Walt used to.

Whether this next thing qualifies as good or bad news is probably down to your taste, but it looks like IDW Publishing has dropped out of miniatures wargaming. If your first response to that news was “who?”, let me refresh your memory:

IDW is a comic books publisher which owns the distribution rights to properties including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, GI Joe and Star Wars among others, and they set up a subsidiary called IDW Games to develop miniatures board games. We’ve mentioned them before, a long time ago, in references to a game called Galaxy Hunter that went onto Kickstarter back in August last year. I seem to remember having misgivings about the slightly problematic theme of exterminating alien mutants with giant robots.

Before that, they Kickstarted eleven other games, including Cat Tower which I happen to have played the other day and it was… underwhelming. It’s basically a poorly-conceived alternative to Rhino Hero, which is a lot better.

Anyway, they quietly announced an exit from tabletop games in their annual report, in the context of explaining a substantial write-down of capital expenses - in other words, they have a crap-ton of stock they can’t shift.

Speaking of finding the market hard work, Freebooter’s Fate has some new releases. This fantasy pirate skirmish game has been kicking around for a while, but never really won serious traction despite now having nine factions and some outstanding sculpts courtesy of legendary German sculptor and brain-parent of the game, Werner Klocke. New characters for the Goblin Pirates and Imperial factions isn’t likely to light a fire, but it does remind us that this game and its company are still kicking around.

Finally, I would love to hear listeners’ opinion of a new product on Kickstarter called the dUltimate, which combines a d4, d8, d10, d12 and d20 into a single polyhedral design. It’s not really news. I just think it’s an unspeakable mess. I’d be interested to know what you guys think.

DISCUSSION

You don’t go into designing tabletop games because you want to be rich.

I’ve heard that a lot, both before and after I gave up my day job to design tabletop games. But that position was thrown into stark contrast recently by one of my patrons who works in the digital games industry and who, in passing, pointed out that if an independent designer had a game in the Steam Top 20, they were basically set for life and asked what it was like in the Wargame Vault Top 20.

Well, let’s just say that I’m not set for life.

But despite it being a truism that this isn’t an industry one can get rich in, people still keep getting into it… and out of it. What makes this keep happening?

Welcome, Jon Russell, to the industry. I don’t know how much experience you had before you took on Impudent Mortal, but you were clearly already getting started and I wish you the best of luck. In some ways, I think Jon’s in one of the most interesting and least precarious fields of miniatures wargaming: mostly making laser-cut MDF terrain, with some stand-alone models and now adding resin customization packs to that range. Laser-cut MDF kind of appeared from nowhere, led by Microart Studio, when Infinity the Game started really kicking off and it quickly expanded to being the terrain medium of choice for individuals and clubs all over the world.

Although miniatures manufacturers are under threat from the massive proliferation of 3D printers, and terrain ought to be under the same set of cross-hairs, it doesn’t seem to really be the case. There’s something about the clean lines of laser-cut MDF terrain that lets it compete, toe-to-toe with the printed alternatives. For one thing, printing terrain takes a while and uses a lot of material. Even so, it’s still a lot cheaper. The go-to option for terrain tends to be FDM rather than SLA, which is quicker, but less well-suited to high detail finish. MDF, meanwhile, sees your high detail finish and laughs in your face. It’s just MDF. But that, I think, is a large part of its charm. It can do large slabs of mostly-featureless space much better, quicker and more consistently than printing. And even though home laser-cutting is a thing that’s available, it doesn’t really seem to have taken off among hobbyists the same way that 3D printers have.

This is just a gut feeling, but it’s always seemed to me that the blocky finish of even the most sophisticated laser-cut MDF terrain works precisely because it stands in strong contrast to the more organic, complex look of our miniatures. Aesthetically, we can appreciate a table filled with terrain that serves to emphasize and promote how nice our miniatures look, whilst still being good-looking and immersive in their own right.

But it is curious that Games Workshop has otherwise stayed well away from this market. Partly, I think, it’s a question of volume. To meet the kind of demand that their terrain products enjoy, GW would have to have laser printers working at pretty insane levels. But I think there’s also a problem with quality. Because of how the laser-cutting machines work, the cost of higher quality and greater detail is a longer time needed to cut each sheet. Whereas, when you are casting plastic sprues, it takes pretty much the same length of time to cast a sprue, regardless of how complex the sprue is. Plastic in, plastic out. So you can increase the detail and complexity of a kit without diminishing the ability of the machines to meet output targets.

Laser cutting, meanwhile, is always going to be a relatively slow process making it one ideally suited to the micro-enterprise.

I should also mention another laser-cutting operation, by the way. Iliada Game Studios is back in operations after its owner-operator, Ali, had to take a long break to undergo chemotherapy. He is recovering well and already sharing new designs for 28mm fantasy and historical canal-themed terrain that would, incidentally, be just perfect for Carnevale, from TTCombat.

But as Jon Russell moves in, so IDW moves out and this is of intense interest to me. Board games are exploding, right now, mostly driven by the possibilities offered by Kickstarter but also by the rapidly dropping costs of creating high-quality prototypes. We’ve already talked more than once about the investment by venture capitalists in Steamforged Games, for good or ill. And we went over the irresistible rise of Asmodee Games just a couple of weeks ago. So why did IDW get in and why did they get out?

The first question is the easier one to answer, I suspect.

When a company owns a licence for a bankable intellectual property, there are a lot of reasons to make the most out of that licence. The first is simply money: the more you leverage a licence, generally, the more money you can make. The licensing of Star Wars has made LucasArts and, now, Disney, vastly more money since 1977 than ticket sales ever did or even could. So if you’ve got a licence to, say, GI Joe that allows you to make board games, branded lunchboxes or keyrings, then generally you should do that thing. Branding a common item generally adds value of at least 100%. So a £3 keyring with a valuable brand on it becomes worth £6 at no additional cost.

But tabletop games are a somewhat different prospect. Sure, you can just slap a brand on a pre-existing game - Warhammer 40,000 Monopoly, I’m looking at you - but if you want to develop an entirely new game, it’s not just a product you can casually stick branding on and walk away. The player experience of the game is going to reflect back on the brand and vice versa.

The reason Asmodee has been so successful is that they buy up the rights to distribute games that are already popular. But this is why their entry into miniatures wargames with Star Wars Legion is so interesting - even though the original game was developed by FFG, it was done only after Asmodee bought FFG. Making it an in-house development. And now Asmodee has taken it away from FFG entirely, banking their own reputation on sustaining its success so far. In-house game development, without the safety buffer of FFG or Mayfair Games or whoever to insulate them from the consequences of failure is a new thing for Asmodee and, as I said before, they’re not used to operating under those rules. It’ll be interesting to see how it turns for them.

Meanwhile, SFG took the money but continue to operate under their own steam as a development house. The Foresight Group might have pushed a couple of their own yes-men into the strategic leadership of SFG, but the job of actually developing new products remains firmly in the hands of people who know what they’re doing.

I don’t mean to suggest, I hasten to add, that IDW Games was populated by people who didn’t know what they were doing. But they clearly weren’t an independent subsidiary, as evidenced by the casual way in which the parent company made the IDW games staff redundant when the numbers weren’t seen to be good enough.

The lesson here is that an intellectual property alone cannot shift a game. Ares Games learned this with Battlestar Galactica. Even Games Workshop has learned this lesson, as shown in their dramatic improvement in marketing strategy and community engagement over the last few years. Disney, of course, are the past masters in this game, so it’s no surprise that their miniatures game licence has ended up in the hands of Asmodee, who have the chops to handle it even if it’s a new market for them. Compare and contrast with Warner Group, whose DC and Harry Potter miniatures game licences have gone to Knight Models.

Whatever you might think about Knight and their recent performance, there’s no arguing that, well... they’re not Asmodee.

And so to Freebooter’s Fate.

I have no idea how well this game might be performing in its native Germany. I can only assume that the answer is “better than it is in the UK”, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of it being played here. The miniatures line reminds me a bit of Anima Tactics in that it includes a few absolute bangers, a lot of mediocre efforts and quite a bit of dross. If you want to visit the Freebooter’s Fate website, you’ll have to know a little German even on the “English language” version of the page because it’s only about half translated. Still, check out the Brotherhood faction for most of the bangers, in my opinion.

I’ve not played the game; it looks a bit too fussy for my tastes, to be honest, but I’ve heard good things about it. Still, it’s in print and releasing new minis. Werner is still sculpting freelance for other people, mostly Reaper, which I assume keeps the lights on while he tinkers on Freebooter’s Fate in his free time.

He can get away with this precisely because the game is entirely his own creation. The miniatures, game rules, art and intellectual property are all his own. If he has income from other work coming in then the pressure to drive Fate to success isn’t urgent. There are no corporate masters threatening to take his job away. And if I could ask Jon Russell why he decided to get into this business and buy Impudent Mortal, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he told me the same thing.

PRECINCT OMEGA

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how I felt like I needed to take a new, longer look at my strategy. It wasn’t enough to keep doing what I was doing, because that wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go. I needed to be more ambitious and, frankly, to be prepared to take on more pressure if I was going to make this work.

I’m happy to say that I got some useful insight and suggestions from patrons and other followers. One - Ashley - reminded me of the SMART acronym. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but SMART is an acronym for setting goals which varies slightly depending on who you ask. But I’ve always taught SMART as being Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timebound. It’s a great tool for goal-setting. You articulate a specific goal - as specific as you can make it. You make sure that it’s a goal that can be accurately and fairly measured. You keep it within achievable limits, whilst still being challenging. You make it relevant to the work you’re doing; and - perhaps most importantly - you set a time after which you will judge whether the goal has been achieved and, if not, why not and what you’re going to do about it.

SMART is a terrific tool for setting workplace goals for subordinates or teams. It’s a little less good for setting them for yourself, although it’s still useful. And I think, even though I spent the best part of a decade teaching SMART and how to apply it to managers in various organizations, I had forgotten to apply it to myself. So, thank you Ashley for the prompt.

Meanwhile Tomas Rawlings of Auroch Digital pointed me towards a strategic tool called Red Ocean/Blue Ocean. Now as a direct application, I suspect that this is a tool that is more useful for venture capitalists with a surplus of cash and a dearth of imagination. But as a way of forcing one to analyze the obstacles a business is facing in a new way, I’ve found it very useful.

Inevitably, the people behind this idea have furiously monetized it with endless books, seminars and training tools to really scrape the bottom of their idea’s barrel. But the fundamentals of the idea are available for free at blueoceanstrategy.com.

Essentially, the metaphor is one of sharks.

Sharks in a red ocean are furiously competing with one another to fight over access to the bloody meat they already know is there. Whereas sharks in a blue ocean have to hunt down their own meat but, once they’ve done so, they have free rein to go at that meat… until, of course, the ocean turns red and all the other sharks turn up.

The implied conclusion of the idea is that a blue ocean is necessarily better, because it represents the opportunity for a business to exploit a new market uncontested. Now, there are issues with this idea, not least being the many, many examples of companies that are first to a new market or innovating a new market tending to fail; and those that don’t only succeed by pouring money into the marketing necessary to persuade customers that the problem they are innovating against exists at all.

However, this is largely irrelevant to me. My market is red. It is red as blood. There is one, enormous shark swimming around above us in water that still looks blue, while I and a thousand other smaller fishes are flailing around in the bloody cast-offs fighting to survive.

So by the terms of Blue Ocean Strategy what I should do is stop doing what I’m doing and do something else and, I need to be straight with you guys, this is always an option on my table. I could shut down the Patreon, turn off the podcast, mothball my designs and put my suit and tie back on.

I could admit defeat.

Or, I could take a look at the other steps in Red Ocean strategy and consider them as a viable way forwards: beat the competition, exploit the existing demand, make the value-cost trade-off and make a strategic choice of differentiation or low cost.

By the way, I have no idea what the value-cost trade-off is. But the others, I’m cool with. Feel free to enlighten me in the comments.

Now, those of you with some insight into this blue versus red strategy might now be shouting at your device “no, Robey! You haven’t understood the blue water strategy!”  Bernard, would you like to do the honours?

<No, Robey! You haven’t understood the blue water strategy!”

To which I say: ah, but I have!

<Pikachu shocked giff>

Part of my challenge here has been to perceive my publishing enterprise as my core business when it kind of isn’t. Right now, of course, it makes almost all of my meagre income, with a small addition from Patreon. I make nothing at all from this podcast and nothing from my YouTube channel except courtesy of my patrons. But… if there is blue water anywhere in what I do, it’s here. Sure, there are other, more successful media channels, like Uncle Atom and Ash Barker. But whilst they review games and talk about the culture of wargaming, there’s really no one else tackling the process - no one else, as far as I can tell, is really talking about how our particular sausage is made.

So I’m not giving up, yet. I’ll keep fighting for blood in the red ocean of publishing, because that’s where I earn my scars. It’s where I make the biggest mistakes and take the harshest criticism. It’s where I have the greatest potential to show development not merely in myself but in the business I am trying to grow. But I also think that the media side of what I’m doing is important because, even though it makes me relatively little money, it represents the blue ocean where I can swim unimpeded and uncontested. There’s not much meat here, as yet, so if I only stayed here I would die of starvation. But if I can keep myself going off the proceeds of the red ocean battle, stay patient and keep plugging on, well… hopefully the meat will come to me.

Also, however good I might happen to look in a shirt and tie -

<You do look pretty sharp.>

-I do indeed Bernard. But however good I look, the work itself is bad for my soul.

And if you would like to help save my soul and make the blue ocean a more rewarding place to swim, then please do stick around to the end and follow the link to my Patreon, where you can help support the podcast, the videos and new game content from as little as £1 per month.

PROGNOSTICATIONS

Back to design, next week.

If you subscribe to my YouTube channel -

<And you really should>

Quite so. Well, if you do, you may have noticed that I’ve started something new, looking at the process of miniatures wargame design through a detailed lens in a series called Game Design Tutor. This is going to retread a little of the terrain already covered in the design episodes of the podcast that I do fortnightly, so I’m going to try to find topics for discussion in these non-news episodes that look at aspects of game publishing that aren’t likely to get swept up in the Game Design Tutor series.

Next week, I’m going to take a look at the thorny issue of “editions”.

Why do games go through new editions?

Why are there so many of them?

What do they offer the publisher?

What do they offer the player?

Some people roll their eyes at “yet another edition of X”, but is it just a cynical cash grab or is there something fundamental to the concept of miniatures wargames that makes them inevitable?

I’ll tell you *my* answers to those questions and more… next week.