I’ve not been writing and talking about games for as long as most of the people you know in the tabletop world, but I’ve been around long enough to spot trends. The one trend that just will not bugger off and bother someone else is Kickstarter hype, sitting up there on its mile-high pedestal. Rather than be a positive force that pushes new games into the sunlight, like a seedling from the soil, it’s become a manure-laden breeding ground for giants expecting fast results.

Carrying on my odd gardening analogy (I have Covid at the moment, and my mind is addled), Kickstarter has become a field where publishers come with their seeds, and demand giant Gunnera overnight, lest they’re torn out and consigned to the compost heap. It’s fast, fast, fast, or nothing.

Now I could wade in and moan about unrealistic goals. Goals set just to make that first 24 hours look amazing - “40000% funded in 187ms!”. I could also yammer on about the publishers who yank their campaigns if they don’t fund in the first day or two, because the goal they set was never the actual goal. All of that is even before we get to the publishers who don’t even need a crowdfunding platform for their games but use it anyway.

Instead, this rant is somewhat more around the damage I perceive it’s doing to us out here writing and recording our thoughts about games, and the perception it’s leaving Joe Public with when it comes to *shudder* “Content Creators”, as well as publishers.

Because Kickstarter - and to a lesser extent, Gamefound - wields so much power in the modern board game world, publishers are forced into certain things. Conformity is King, so if everyone else produces pages so long your mouse wheel catches fire as you scroll down it, there’s pressure to do the same. Some of the things you find plastered in these “could wallpaper a lighthouse in one piece” pages are quotes from content creators.

For the most part though, these quotes are often utterly meaningless, especially when they come from the Big Names. Check out inspiring quotes like:

That was from the first campaign I happened to click on. I remember the Dark Souls board game campaign too. Nothing against the guys at Steamforged running it, but when you get to the section titled Press & Reviews there’s a full screen of quotes from the likes of Eurogamer, Polygon, Kotaku and more. Cool eh? Except none of them is a review, and in fact, not a single one gives an opinion of the game. It’s all “might be”, “could be” and other non-committal phrases. Go watch some of the videos on campaigns you’ve backed, and read the quotes. Take note of how many refuse to say if something is actually good, or fun.

Caveat: you may find quotes from, and links to, previews I’ve written for Kickstarted games. The major difference is that I - and plenty of others - give our opinions because we aren’t paid for previews. It’s money being thrown at KS hype that I have a problem with.

It’s all hype for hype’s sake, and I’m tired of it. As a consumer, and as someone who wants to give his opinion of games, I just want to know what the game is like. Tell me what’s good, tell me what’s not-so-good. That’s all you need to do.

The trouble is that publishers seem to be far too focused on flashing the cash to garner hype, often at the expense of other things.

Two particular examples spring to mind when I think about publishers leaning too hard into hype at the expense of other things.

Firstly there’s a pretty bad example of a relatively new publisher who made a cracking game based on an existing IP. They paid a creator to create a “Top 10 rules you may get wrong” video for the game, who made a complete hash of it and got three of those rules wrong… Alanis Morissette would have had a field day. The same creator who made a point of saying they were committed to making accurate videos. This sort of thing reflects not only badly on the creator, but also on the publisher, who commissions something in good faith. Paying to get your games hyped is a big thing, but it comes with its risks.

The second example that springs to mind is a UK-based publisher. I’d contacted them in the past to register as a reviewer but got ignored. And I’m not talking about me being butthurt because my speculative email went unanswered, I’m talking about submitting a form on their site designed for doing exactly this, and then following up on the confirmation email. I’m also talking about sending messages direct, and I’m talking about actually talking to their CEO in person at an event.

I don’t mind a ‘no’. I really don’t. People are running businesses, not charities. Being ignored, however, is just a lack of common courtesy. This same publisher went to popular Facebook groups asking “Who do you want to review our new game?”, and people replied tagging me. A nice little bit of validation for me, but again, this went ignored. Meanwhile, they’re now asking for Tiktok creators to make videos - fluff pieces. All too commonly now the word ‘review’ is conflated with meaning ‘anything even remotely related to our game in any way’.

Unfortunately, at the same time, their customer service and quality control have gone down the toilet. The last two campaigns I personally backed were a) massively delayed with almost no updates on shipping, and b) had printing errors, missing pieces, and pieces which needed to be replaced after the fact.

I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent there, I know, but there’s relevance. This drive to make short, shiny, adverts for games is just throwing money into the gears of the machine and shifting focus onto what’s next, instead of what’s here and now. Delivering service to people after they’ve paid their money, not getting them to spend it in the first place. The pressure it places on the content creators to get this marketing pieces done in time means they’re making mistakes too.

It’s not all bad. Myself and plenty of other people making previews for games for free, and giving honest opinions. Opinions which offer some value to Kickstarter pages, which can actually inform you. There are also big publishers who don’t jump on Kickstarter. Stonemaier are my favourite for doing this. They used campaigns for their earliest games, but now the focus is on making games they know will sell, and don’t rely on feeding the machine. The other thing Jamey does which flies in the face of the hype machine, is asking for permanent discoverability when people create reviews of their games.

He’s a clever man, he does marketing and previews too, but the focus here is on what’s happening not just right now, but further down the line, that’s what makes a difference.

I’ve taken a long and winding route to get to anything resembling a point here, I know. That’s just how my brain works when it’s given free rein. I guess I just long for a day when the focus is on what matters in a game. Whether a game is fun or not, and why. Not how many cards and minis are in the box, not the million stretch goals, not the current creator-du-jour spinning word salad to create half-hour videos where they say nothing. Anything which isn’t kowtowing before the might of the Kickstarter juggernaut and hoping to get stuck to its tyres for long enough to make a mark, and for some poor sod to make a few quid by pointing at it and going “Hey, that game might be good!”.

Everyone just needs to slow the f**k down, and focus on making good things. Whether that’s games or ways to tell people about those games.

Yours,

A grumpy middle-aged man.