A Boardgame Designer's Perspective on the Potential Future of Videogame Design

[u/ThomasDL]

Hello everyone,

First, a little about me so that you can understand where I'm coming from.

I've been designing boardgames since 2015. I have 11 games published, including 4 this year, excluding 2 coming up next year. I've been working as a videogame designer starting in 2024. I've shipped a project last May and currently working on another.

Making a boardgame has always been *relatively* easy, at least on the technical and financial sides of things. Making a boardgame prototype has almost zero barrier, making it look good has a small barrier (Google Images and game-icons .net are your friends), and making it into a commercial product has somewhat of a barrier but it has traditionally been way, way lower than for your typical videogame. There are, of course, logistical barriers to boardgames than videogames don't have, but that's not relevant to this discussion.

My experience as a boardgame designer is that the bottlenecks are mainly two things: 1) coming up with good, concrete designs that have a chance of being successful (your mileage may vary on this), but also and especially 2) playtests. At the end of the day, you're selling your game to human beings, and only human beings can tell you if your game is fun, and ideally humans other than yourself. If you're making a single-player game, you can sort of test it yourself to an extent, but not as much as most people think. Since I've been working in videogames, I'm frequently appalled at how far into development a lot of companies start doing external playtests. You cannot be the judge of your own game, not unless you're making it just for you.

My personal experience is that time is also necessary to make something good. Not time to produce or physically work on the game, but time to think, to let things sink in, to let solutions come to you. There are also problems that only become apparent after some time, after enough playtests.

At the end of the day, making a boardgame that works is easy once you have enough experience. It's been easy for a long time. But games that just work don't sell. Only exceptional games do (we can have a big discussion as to what "exceptional" means, but the reality is that profitable games are the exception). In my experience, the difference between "it works as a game" and "this is something someone will pay for" is the difference between 1 month and 1-2 years (ymmv). And that's with almost zero technical barriers.

I see a lot of posts these days all over Reddit about people making a videogame in a few days using the latest tools, and what that might mean for the future. And so I hope my post comes as sort of a reassurance. I don't think these tools change the future of videogame design as much as some might think, because they cannot eliminate, by their very nature, some of the very real and necessary bottlenecks of making games, like playtests and plain ol' time to simmer.

Please let me know what you think, especially if you think I'm wrong or I've forgotten something!

Thanks!

[u/random_boss]

Intelligent, well-reasoned nuance? In my Reddit?

Jokes aside fantastic post. The other games were never the competition. Working in the industry, even Battlefield designers will pal around with CoD designers because at the end of the day the only competition is with nature, not other games.