Year in Review – Part 2
If you haven’t already, check out Part 1.
This is Part 2, in our series of digging into our data. It took us some time to put this together. The current situation gave us an opportunity to spend time putting this together. In this post, we dive deeper into games sold and their publishers, and the timeframe being used for all the analysis, is April ’19 to March ’20.
Most Popular Publishers in India (by Games Sold)
If we look at publishers by number of games sold, Fantasy Flight Games comes on top with an almost 10% share. While numbers wise, Stonemaier is not on top, they would probably be the most successful publisher on the list given the way Wingspan has dominated sales as we discuss later.
Not too far behind Stonemaier, is Renegade Games, which makes it’s appearance because of Arboretum, one of our best sellers and Shem Philips with the success of the North Kingdom Trilogy and the North Sea Series.
When we look at publishers, we would be remiss if we didn’t analyze the behemoth that is Asmodee. Here’s what the distribution looks like if we group the publishers as Asmodee vs Non-Asmodee.
As expected, Asmodee dominates with more than 20% of games sold belonging to publishers either owned or distributed by them. These include games from: Asmodee Editions, Bombyx Studios, CMON, Catan Studios, Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight Games, GameWorks, HeidelBAR, HeidelBAR Games, Hub Games, Libellud, Lookout Games, Ludonaute, Ludonova, Lui-meme, Palm Court, Pearl Games, Plaid Hat Games, Rebel Centrum, Repos Production, Sand Castle Games, Space Cowboys and Z-Man Games.
What’s interesting to note, is that these numbers are irrespective of some of the most popular games from Asmodee, ie, Catan, Pandemic and Ticket to Ride. (Asmodee, if you’re reading this, please make these games available for us to sell 🙏. Help us help you!)
Most Popular Game Designers (top 20)
Across all games sold, Bruno Cathala comes on top as the most popular designer, or, the designer with the most popular games. Continuing popularity of 7 Wonders and it’s expansions, and lighter games like Game of Thrones: Hand of the King help put Mr. Cathala on top.
Despite being new comers to the industry, the popularity of Wingspan, The Mind and Ganz Schon propel Elizabeth Hargrave and Wolfgang Warsch to the top 20.
Games Sold by BGG Stats
Not to add fuel to the endless debate on whether BGG rankings actually mean anything, but we were interested to see what the correlation between ranking and sales was. I won’t comment on whether this is causation, but there is definitely correlation.
Games in the top 300 make up almost 47% of games sold, with the remaining making up a long tail of spread across 1000 plus ranks.
The next BGG stat we looked into was distribution of games by their weight on BGG. The sweet spot here, seems to be a weight of 1-3, which correlates with the popularity of games like Arboretum, Wingspan, Decrypto, etc.
Most Popular Games in India
Finally, the one that most people care about. Here are the top 10 most popular games sold in India.
Games by total sales
At Bored Game Company, we’ve been the first marketplace for Indian designers and publishers, and hence, it gives us great pride to see not only the #1 spot but also the #2 spot being occupied by games from Indian publishers.
From the international publishers, it’s the usual suspects from the most popular games of the year. Decrypto, Wingspan, Arboretum and The Mind top the list, with Just One not too far behind.
Most games on the top 10 are from 2018 and 2019. This trend follows across all sales, with games released recently being more popular.
That’s all the analysis we have this time. If there’s specific stats that you’d be interested to see, please leave a comment on the post. If you’re a publisher who’d like to see the numbers and performance of your games, please reach out to us by email, and we’d be happy to share.
Finally, stay home, stay safe and keep gaming!
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