Purple Pawn recently released its annual Game Industry Survey for 2012. The report contains the results of a survey sent to over 7,700 companies in January and February 2013. The results were surprisingly upbeat. Under 5 percent of companies closed in 2012, only 15 percent reported doing worse than the year prior, and 50 percent of companies reported their sales results were "great" up 6 percent last year.
The surveyed companies made money by means of traditional and modern tabletop games, excluding sports and video games, but inclusive of:
- Board games
- Card games and collectible or trading card games
- Tile games
- Dice games and poker materials
- Role-playing games
- War games and miniatures created for tabletop war games
- Puzzle or solitaire games (but true puzzles like jigsaw, brainteaser, etc.)
- Any product or service used to create, enhance, organize, market, sell, ship, or package these games
Yehuda Berlinger explained in the report:
Among the responding retailers, the top five performing game lines from 2010 and 2011 – Hasbro’s Magic: The Gathering, Mayfair Games’ Catan products, Rio Grande Games’ Dominion products, Game Workshops’ Warhammer 40K products, Paizo’s Pathfinder RPG products, and Days of Wonder’s Ticket to Ride products – were the top again this year. Pathfinder products outperformed D&D products by 2 to 1, just as they did last year. Cardfight: Vanguard is a new entry that topped the charts at several retailers, while gaming accessories, including card sleeves, continue to be strong dependable sellers. The top selling product lines are just that: lines, not just products. Magic, Catan, Dominion, Warhammer, Pathfinder, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, Yu‐Gi‐Oh are families or products with multiple entry points and mix‐and‐match expansions.
Genre franchises properties seem to be driving purchases:
2012 brands that drove mainstream game sales included movies like The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit, The Avengers, Battleship, Brave, The Amazing Spider‐Man, Madagascar 3, and The Lorax, book series Fifty Shades of Gray and The Hunger Games, and TV shows CSI, Glee, Doctor Who, A Game of Thrones (also a book series). In 2013 we can look forward to the next Iron Man, the next Hunger Games, the next G. I. Joe, the next Star Trek, the next Thor, the next Hobbit, the next Monsters Inc, a Superman reboot (Man of Steel), The Wolverine, Dreamworks’ The Croods, and maybe a late year Mortal Kombat.
For more information see the survey results at Purple Pawn.
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