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August 21, 2006

How to Create a Successful Miniature Franchise

Since I came from the old school of Historical miniature gaming, the "miniature Franchise" phenom is not something I was exposed to until quite recently. Some might ask what is the difference between a "Franchise" (My term, no company actually calls their product that) and non-franchise? By extension, what distinquishes a successful franchise? and by successful I mean commercial success, not just artistic merit...

1) A Rules System as well as figures
A Franchise have to have their own rules systems as well as their own figure line. The traditionalists are used to picking out their own favorite ruleset (if not creating a set of rules from scratch), and then go about shopping for figures from different vendors. A franchise appeals to a more "one-stop shop" mentality. A buyer will usually buy the rules, and use the official figures that goes along with it. A Franchise can enforce that in a few different ways as follows...

2) A Unique background
This usually applies to Fantasy/Sci-fi genre gaming (it's hard to comeup with a unique historical background and ensure uniqueness). The franchise has to have a compelling background, cool story, nice characters, etc in order to suck people in. Many times they'll license media from print or screen to get that recognition (i.e. Lord of the Ring, Starship Trooper, Star Wars all comes to mind). Failing that they need to come up with something different than the usual Tolkienesque knock-offs. So now we have Steam-punk fantasy, Anime influenced post modern skirmish, Fantasy Pirates, what have you. An example of a more successful background is that of Iron Kingdom from Privateer Press (A Steampunk Fantasy setting where "technology" is like another school of magic).

3) Expansive Gaming Opportunity
A healthy and successful franchise must have many areas it can expand into, be it a different rules set of rules focused on a different level of gaming (i.e. GW have Warhammer for skirmishy type of battles, and then Warmaster for "army" level mass battle), or even a differnet branch of service (i.e. WH40k land game leads to Battlefleet Gothic if you want to do space ship combat). One successful setting serves as a hook to another one to keep player's interests fresh. In the Fantasy/Sci-fi world one can also have a associated RPG setting with your miniature gaming to generate interesting background. Note that's been a successful ploy for both Warhammer and Privateer's Iron Kingdom setting.

In the historical front this is slightly different. Today the only successful franchise IMO is Flames of War. They treat the Mid war years (~1943) as the base game. Then they are coming out with Late War expansion, early war expansion, etc. It serves the same purpose as its fantasy brethren in the sense of keeping the game fresh.

4) Cool Minis
Afterall this is a miniature game, so the miniature better look cool. Being a Franchise means that usually the customer has to pay a premium for the figures (nobody pays higher than Games Workshop, but other Franchises also have figures that usually cost more than its non-franchise alternative).
In the fantasy world, this is a given, since figures are often very specific to the setting and designer can always make sure that there are no ready alternatives out there (Look at Privateer's Steam Powered fantasy robots, hard to find compatible figures). In the historical world this is less of a stranglehold, since a Tiger tank in 15mm is a Tiger in 15mm, one can easily use models from anybody, and the fantasy world's tournament motto of "official figures only" has not caught on in the historical world, yet.
One other tool in the arsenal of the franchise is to sculpt figures with a slightly different size than alternatives, thus ensuring imcompatibility. New Battlefront 15mm WW2 are just that much larger than the alternatives. When Warhammer Historical wants to do a "army scale" game called Warmaster, instead of using the defacto standard size for ancients (15mm), it went to a brand new scale (10mm). GW Orcs are constantly getting supersized so they are that much larger than generic 25mm figures. One also wonders if the growing "heroic scale" (30mm) game has the same underlying reason to lock in its customers.

5) Timeliness
Many a successful franchise (e.g. GW's LOTR before 2006) was doing fine until they become tardy in keeping up with new releases. In fact GW made a cardinal error of not releasing any Return of the King tie-ins while the movie hit the theater, which ensured that the game would do poorly (they even blamed their poor financial results on "the waning interests in LOTR", which is complete bullcrap. It's really caused by "no interest in LOTR because there's no new release to spend my $$$ on...".
In this day and age of short attention span and instant gratification, it's paramount for a franchise to have new stuff coming out EVERY MONTH. Gotta have new toys for people to buy and gawk at. Even if someone is not buying those specfic model (maybe because they are not the clan/nationality/period you are working on), the release will keep up the interest, and reaffirm the faithful that "the system is healthy as we continue the release". Any slow down results in forum posts such as "XYZ game system is not being supported", which invariably cause people to bail to some other franchise.

6) Prepainted minis or not?
Wizkid came up with the brilliant idea that a game might catch on more if they come with reasonably priced prepainted figures. This works to an extend when the game launches (i.e. Mageknight, Mechwarrior, Heroclix, etc. were all considered successful when they launched), however I would not call any of them a successful franchise since they all have passed on (even Heroclix which is probably the most successful of the bunch, has pretty much died off).
Other than Wizkid, WOTC is the other big prepainted mini provider. They seems to be doing better: Their D&D mini and Starwars mini all have a dedicated following. The lone exception maybe A&A:Minaitures which I do not know ANYONE in this area who plays it.
My theory is that prepainted minis let people start playing faster, but since it doesn't have the "total hobby" aspect of miniature assembly/painting aspect, people are much less attached to them, so might abandon the game much sooner than if they spend hours painting their little masterpiece. An additional reason may be that so far the prepainted game SYSTEM all seems to be simpler games geared toward getting casual gamers (instead of the miniature grognards) to play, they usually lack the strategic/tactical depth of its more involved brethrens. This means players may "crack the system", then grew tired of it and move on.

7) Availability
The grognards might search through eBay or Bartertown to look for that obscure British Postoffice Rifle unit who participated in the Gordon Relief Expedition, but your regular gamer who's the target audience must be able to find his monthly fix from the local hobby/comic store. That means the franchise material (rules, figures) must be available for the local game store to carry, and that means they must be well packaged in boxes or blisters that screams "paint me!" (not just 50 lead figures inside of a plastic bag which hangs on a peg board and expect anyone to pay money for that).

8) Online support
In this day and age of internet, a franchise must have a nice website. The website must have online store so you can buy their stuff, The website MUST have nice pictures of the figures, it must have a responsive Q&A page where reader's questions can be answered within days (if not hours). It SHOULD also have tons of freebies (like painting demo, free scenarios) for downloading.

A Bad Example
One example of what NOT to do in terms of starting a franchise is provided by Old Glory. A few years ago they tried to launch a fantasy line (that's where the money is right?) SO with much fanfare, Dwarf Wars is born.
The rules are designed by industry veteran (Frank Chadwick's miniature rules are always interesting), the figures looks cool (very animated fantasy figures, much better than run of the mill Old GLory sculpts). I saw the figures at Historicon, and they do look cool indeed.
Then I found out that the rules are expensive at ~$40 a pop. Now as franchise rules go that;s not expensive (FoW and WH both have rules in that range), but these do NOT coming with any color pages, have poor layout, badly edited rules with tons of errors and spelling problems even worse than this blog. Only pictures are hand drawn b/w line drawings which seems to be done by high school kids.
They tried all the points I listed above, but just did them in such a half ass way that it looks like the people doing it just lost interest. They have expansions coming out, but they are just expensive books with the same b/w drawings in them. The rules are in the local hobby store, but none of the figures are. They have a Yahoo group for discussion, but there's hardly any traffic. There's no industry buzz in any of the print/web publications. If I didn't attend Historicon that year I'd swear that this is just vaporware.
Folks, if you want to launch a franchise, launch it like you mean it...

Conclusion
So if you are thinking of launching a successful miniature franchise, make sure you have an interesting background, have nice miniatures, interesting set of rules that provides some depth, and make sure you constantly expand the game play by introducing new theaters and nationality/races, and most important of all, make sure you have new stuff coming out frequently that can be found in many local stores. A piece of cake...

Posted by msoong at August 21, 2006 09:44 AM

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