Overthinking it: one more thought regarding the Charles S. Roberts Awards

 

 

 

Panzer triumphant - winner of the Game of the Year award.

Note: this should be my last post about the CSRs for a while. Having said that, there should be some unboxings and AARs of nominated games in the chute.

 

Sorry to harp on this, gentle reader, but something I saw on FB got me thinking about something I’ve written about before, but I may not have got my point across as clearly as I thought I had. This happens sometimes. So I'm having another go at it.

A designer with a small publisher who had a game nominated for a Period category in the Charles S. Roberts Awards had made a comment about not winning that award. As someone who has never won anything to speak of, I get it – winning, by all reports, is a really good thing. “Household name and product endorsements” stuff. Well, maybe not for wargames. But, I think this approach to it misses the point.

The thing is, once the nominations are up, the CSRs become a popularity contest. Certain companies are going to dominate simply because they have a greater reach in the marketplace than anywhere else. There were some surprises in this year’s announcement; as solid a game as by all reports it is, I did not see Panzer: North Africa (GMT Games, 2024) winning the Game of the Year– but ultimately, many of the category awards were predictable; you wouldn’t have been drawing 20-1 odds on betting Thunder on the Mississippi (Multi-Man Games, 2024) for Best Operational Game.

For a smaller publisher, winning is the point. Publishers like GMT, Compass Games, Vuca Simulations, and Multi-Man Publishing, print at scales an order of magnitude larger than a lot of other industry stalwarts like Worthington Publishing, Revolution Games, Thin Red Line Games, PHALANX, or Flying Pig Games. These in turn still arguably have a bigger footprint in the hobby than the likes of Catastrophe Games, Three Crowns Games, Conflict Simulations Ltd, or SNAFU Design.*

I haven’t yet checked this yet, but I believe the 2024 awards have brought the first nominations for both Three Crowns and SNAFU (I will follow this up – I’ll add an update at the bottom of the post if I’m wrong about any of it). Now, CSL and Catastrophe Games have been nominated in previous years (CSL for the first time last year, for The World Undone, 1914: Serbia (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2023) and 1854: the Alma (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2023), while Catastrophe Games’ Zurmat: Small-Scale Insurgency (Catastrophe Games, 2022) was nominated in the previous year). Neither company is in a position to put a lot into promotion or advertising, and I’m guessing the majority of their sales would come through their own online portal instead of so a CSR nomination might nudge a few extra orders their way. Or maybe not; As I'm writing this, I'm realising that this is a hypothesis I haven’t tested yet.

I've heard some folks in the commentariat talk about the bounce that occurs when a game wins an award (mostly in the family game sphere), but I haven’t spoken to anyone in game publishing about a real or supposed “CSR effect” on sales. There might be something to it; then gain any effect might be negligible. This post was going to be a short rant about the value proposition of wargame awards, but I think I’ve just talked myself into following up on this. I’ll reach out to some companies and see if anyone’s willing to talk about it. If I can get enough engagement from people at the coalface, I’ll collate my findings and present them here on A Fast Game in a full report with graphs and charts. I can’t imagine everyone who checks in being interested in this, so it (probably) won’t be a series, just a one-off. Also, I won’t let it get in the way of session reports, unboxings and the occasional wargame review, the meat and potatoes of A Fast Game. This will be more of a side-quest for me. As with everything here, stay for the stuff you like and skip the stuff you don’t.

OST Volume 4. Panzer North Afrika beat this and three other titles to claim
the Best Tactical Game. I just really like the cover illustration.

 

* I wasn't trying to play favourites with this selection. I just wanted to highlight what seems to me a fairly distinct strata of wargame businesses. All of her companies mentioned (with the possible exception of Thin Red Line Games)here have been around for at least eight or ten years in a pretty unforgiving business environment. They must all be doing something right.