In part, the closures in the mass market are not the most serious thing. Cold comfort to anyone whose job ceases to exist due to a store closure, but physical retail was pretty badly overbuilt in the United States even before the Retailpocalypse got underway. Nowhere else in the world has anywhere near the commercial square footage per capita that we do. A correction has been long overdue and a large correction is taking time to run its course.
As a person of Ukrainian descent, I have naturally found the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 to be particularly unnerving. A corner of my ancestral homeland was poisoned with a elemental-level toxicity worse than anything science had yet produced, and for which there isn't much in the way of practical mitigation. Though the Earth has proven to have healing processes of greater efficacy than expected -- all sorts of flora and fauna in the Exclusion Zone live more or less normally now, including a few hundred residents who refused to leave -- there was massive organic death and decay in the immediate aftermath of the meltdown.
The Chernobyl power plant had a support city built specifically to house the plant engineers and staff and their families, the city of Pripyat. Pripyat is a ghost town today, abandoned and rotting, shell husks of former buildings. They are in many cases unsafe to enter now, on the verge of collapse and exhibiting deadly protrusions and unsupported weights. You can take a tour of Pripyat in person if you're just a little on the edge like my friend Adam, who did just that, or you can explore the city in a virtual simulation in the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Abandoned buildings are always going to have a similar aesthetic, but it struck me as I started to read more about the big box husks and the hulking shells of the retailpocalypse that it evoked Pripyat so much. And that had me thinking: What parts of the current hobby game industry seem like they could melt down in an explosive disaster, with the graphite debris instead being massive unsold stocks, red ink, and closed stores and publishing studios?
You probably think I'm going to cite Magic, and you'd be wrong. Even in the wake of a significant disruptive event to Magic (even moreso than the turbulence we've been riding through as of late), Magic: the Gathering is a once-in-a-lifetime game design triumph, melding gripping thematic resonance with deep, extensive replayability. For everything that is wrong with Magic, past to future, as a game product measured against the field, it is so robust that Wizards of the Coast could stop printing cards tomorrow and never produce another product, and the game would continued to be played for decades or longer. If anything, Magic is undervalued right now, a sentence that seems like it should surely be a mistake of some kind.
Other trading card games, though? For certain. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh depend on a large but fickle mass market to make their hay. In a world where the youth target audience for those products flits from one new shiny game to the next, between the worlds of the physical and the digital, from Minecraft to Fortnite and thence to Apex Legends, from fidget spinners to Jelly Bean Flavor Challenges, it's only a matter of time before those TCGs spend a few consecutive cycles out of favor, and collapse. The rest of the anime TCGs are basically zombies already, primarily played by the degenerate side of the weeaboo cohort and purchased from online chop shops.
Board games are clear candidates for meltdown because we keep getting these almost-kinda-maybe starts of the process. Even now with over a dozen new titles releasing per day (clumped around Gen Con and Essen Spiel conventions but averaging that rate) there is no shortage of dreamer garage publishers desperately crying into the wind, "Me Too!" As we've discussed before, no alpha gamer of even the keenest level of devotion can possibly ingest all this content.
Miniatures games not called Warhammer seem also to be in a precarious state. I have always thought of the miniature wargames category as one that is particularly vulnerable to being supplanted by a video game surrogate. Warhammer is the least vulnerable of all, with its decades of IP that would readily skin a digital wargame offering (and already have done so multiple times) and its superior model quality and distribution structure. But it is still vulnerable in some small measure. While other wargames have the capability to fill niches and still capture an enthusiastic analog audience, I suggest we are due for a correction.
Comics are definitely headed that way. Comic book IP has never been stronger, from the top of the majors to emerging work from the indies. But the entire comic industry is built on a content distribution system that seems to take a perverse pride in being able to tack on the compound modifier "last remaining" to almost every one of its processes you'd identify.
Even in the event of meltdown, there is rebirth. Maybe we'll even get real mutants next time, with powers, not like the mostly normal aftermath we're seeing in Pripyat decades after the ions soared.
The Chernobyl power plant had a support city built specifically to house the plant engineers and staff and their families, the city of Pripyat. Pripyat is a ghost town today, abandoned and rotting, shell husks of former buildings. They are in many cases unsafe to enter now, on the verge of collapse and exhibiting deadly protrusions and unsupported weights. You can take a tour of Pripyat in person if you're just a little on the edge like my friend Adam, who did just that, or you can explore the city in a virtual simulation in the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Abandoned buildings are always going to have a similar aesthetic, but it struck me as I started to read more about the big box husks and the hulking shells of the retailpocalypse that it evoked Pripyat so much. And that had me thinking: What parts of the current hobby game industry seem like they could melt down in an explosive disaster, with the graphite debris instead being massive unsold stocks, red ink, and closed stores and publishing studios?
You probably think I'm going to cite Magic, and you'd be wrong. Even in the wake of a significant disruptive event to Magic (even moreso than the turbulence we've been riding through as of late), Magic: the Gathering is a once-in-a-lifetime game design triumph, melding gripping thematic resonance with deep, extensive replayability. For everything that is wrong with Magic, past to future, as a game product measured against the field, it is so robust that Wizards of the Coast could stop printing cards tomorrow and never produce another product, and the game would continued to be played for decades or longer. If anything, Magic is undervalued right now, a sentence that seems like it should surely be a mistake of some kind.
Other trading card games, though? For certain. Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh depend on a large but fickle mass market to make their hay. In a world where the youth target audience for those products flits from one new shiny game to the next, between the worlds of the physical and the digital, from Minecraft to Fortnite and thence to Apex Legends, from fidget spinners to Jelly Bean Flavor Challenges, it's only a matter of time before those TCGs spend a few consecutive cycles out of favor, and collapse. The rest of the anime TCGs are basically zombies already, primarily played by the degenerate side of the weeaboo cohort and purchased from online chop shops.
Board games are clear candidates for meltdown because we keep getting these almost-kinda-maybe starts of the process. Even now with over a dozen new titles releasing per day (clumped around Gen Con and Essen Spiel conventions but averaging that rate) there is no shortage of dreamer garage publishers desperately crying into the wind, "Me Too!" As we've discussed before, no alpha gamer of even the keenest level of devotion can possibly ingest all this content.
Miniatures games not called Warhammer seem also to be in a precarious state. I have always thought of the miniature wargames category as one that is particularly vulnerable to being supplanted by a video game surrogate. Warhammer is the least vulnerable of all, with its decades of IP that would readily skin a digital wargame offering (and already have done so multiple times) and its superior model quality and distribution structure. But it is still vulnerable in some small measure. While other wargames have the capability to fill niches and still capture an enthusiastic analog audience, I suggest we are due for a correction.
Comics are definitely headed that way. Comic book IP has never been stronger, from the top of the majors to emerging work from the indies. But the entire comic industry is built on a content distribution system that seems to take a perverse pride in being able to tack on the compound modifier "last remaining" to almost every one of its processes you'd identify.
Even in the event of meltdown, there is rebirth. Maybe we'll even get real mutants next time, with powers, not like the mostly normal aftermath we're seeing in Pripyat decades after the ions soared.
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