Can a Game Company Publish TOO Many Games?

Aug 18, 2010

I ran across this post by Zev Shlasinger, the head man of Z-Man Games, where he publicly asks if his company was producing too many games.

It reads as follows:

Am I coming out with too many games?

Yes, I am. I have a hard time saying, ‘no’. I like many different games and some really excite me and I want to do them right away. My friends joke saying there is a Z-Man special, say ‘hello’ to me and I’ll publish your game!

I try to justify it by saying many are the small card games so it should not be too much of a wallet hit. Also, since the themes of all the games are so different, some will appeal to one group and others to another with some crossover.

But no matter how you slice it there are a lot of games coming out.

I will be pushing some back to 2011. Unfortunately, with Essen around the corner, many of the games are co-productions to be available for that show. So I can’t push many back easily.

The newsletter usually has a good indication of what is coming out when and when this new issue hits at end of the month or so, it will have a more updated version with some titles off the 2010 list (which means they will be done in 2011).

As for more promotion – we do send out review copies, attend conventions, have a Z-Force crew that demos in stores, send demo copies to stores for their libraries, have banners here and on my website (sometimes weeks or months in advance). I also post the rules to the games weeks in advance.

I don’t have the facilities to do video reviews or things like that. But if anyone else has other promotional ideas, feel free to email me.

Hopefully games won’t get lost in the shuffle and that eventually they will be discovered. But I will try real hard to reduce the number of releases for next year.

A little FYI to all out there.

Thanks to everyone for their support.

Zev Shlasinger, President
Z-Man Games, Inc.

You can read the post itself and see the comments over at BGG.

If we look at Z-Man Games own website we can see that there were seventeen releases for this year: Wars of the Roses, Dungeon Lords, Neuroshima Hex: Duel, Prophecy: Dragon Realm, The Golden City, At the Gates of Loyang, The Swarm, Martinique, Rattus, The Speicherstadt, Road Kill Rally, Duel of the Giants, Power Struggle, Hornet, Merchants of the Middle Ages, Hansa Teutonica, Hotel Samoa. Peeking at the latest edition of the Z-Man newsletter also includes these upcoming games: Earth Reborn, Parade, Burrows, The King Commands!, Magical Athlete, Malta!, Prolix, Kings & Things, Mines of Zavandor, Trollhalla, Inca Empire, Pocket Battles: Orc vs Elves, and De Vulgari Eloquentia.

That is one heck of a lot of games to be coming out of a company in one year! Of course there are a lot of genres and styles covered as well as various price points to fit any budget but the fact remains that Zev’s release calendar dwarfs most of the competition. I suppose, as someone who was member of the “Cult of New” long before there was such a cult, more is better in my opinion. But is it possible that there are too many games coming out from Z-Man? With the economy here in the US (as well as much of the globe) in the doldrums most of us don’t have that disposable income to purchase every new game that catches our eye. This could lead to quite a few good games getting swept under the rug as wave after wave of releases hit.

I’m sort of on the fence as to if there are too many games coming out so I’m curious as to your thoughts.

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...