Fantasy Flight Games officially has Star Wars license

[Mournblade94]

This is disappointing. I was hoping Mongoose, or Green Ronin would get this license.

2nd edition Warhammer was great. 3rd edition warhammer... has some nice gimmics. Overpriced. Pretty packaging. Plays worse that the first two editions.

From what I remember fantasy flight games published WHFRP 2nd edition for awhile, and that was good, but I think they took the reigns from Green Ronin.

Well I guess we can look forward to cards and unnecessary dice in the next RPG. I think I will most likely be sticking with SAGA edition for SW.

 

[Retreater]

Yeah. I wish I had purchased SW SAGA when I had the chance.

 

[Mournblade94]

Yeah. I wish I had purchased SW SAGA when I had the chance.

You have to search around. It is rare, some gamestores or Barnes and nobles still have them laying around. I think you might find some reasonable ones on EBAY.

 

[Stormonu]

I'm crossing my fingers on the X-Wing vs. Tie fighter game, hope it is similar to Wings of War.

Haven't played a good star wars starfighter comat game since Star Warriors by WEG, and that was too "fiddley".

As far as RPG's go, they've got to top WEG 2nd edition revised and expanded if they want my dollar. Wasn't fond of the d20 version, and only slightly liked SAGA more than d20.

 

[SpydersWebbing]

I have enough Saga Edition RPG books to last me a lifetime, but I'll gladly look at the rest of their stuff!

 

[GreyLord]

I wouldn't be surprised if that were true.

Days of Wonders, significant though they are, don't have as many games.
Rio Grande Games might be up there.
Mayfair Games likewise.
Z-Man Games is rising.
GMT Games are doing nicely in the wargame section and are branching into strategy games.

Do we count German companies?

Cheers!

Absolutely.

DoW doesn't compare.
Mayfair only really has two competitors, but those games MAY sell enough to compete against FFG (FFG's licenses with BG AND RPGs however may push it past them).

Rio Grande, while seems big in the BG world, still can't compare to FFG in sales in my opinion...especially once you factor in the Warhammer license and Blizzard license that FFG had and those sales (and though Blizzard is going, I imagine FFG will pull in even Bigger sales with the SW license unless they really botch it up).

Z-man though on the rise, and GMT don't even come close at this point in time.

Haba or Ravensburger...they might...I'd say my opinion would put FFG a tad over them...but you can't tell to tell the truth.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

My question is who is Numbers 1-4? I'm thinking they may actually be number 2 or 3 at this point (as Hasbro has bought up all the rest of the really big competition against them and now owns those who may be 1-3 at least).

While I don't know how to quickly get the numbers for FFG, I can offer you this. The sales volume of two German companies - both mentioned here - in 2009 were:

Ravensburger: ~420 Mio US$
Haba: ~140 Mio US$

Games Workshop apparently reported 210 Mio US$ for 2005.

Of course it's impossible (for me ) to extract something like board game numbers from this...

 

[MerricB]

Absolutely.

DoW doesn't compare.
Mayfair only really has two competitors, but those games MAY sell enough to compete against FFG (FFG's licenses with BG AND RPGs however may push it past them).

Rio Grande, while seems big in the BG world, still can't compare to FFG in sales in my opinion...

Note that we're only talking about boardgames here. Rio Grande publishes Carcassonne and Dominion, and we're talking 5x or more people buying those games (especially the former) than any FFG game.

Cheers!

 

[GreyLord]

Note that we're only talking about boardgames here. Rio Grande publishes Carcassonne and Dominion, and we're talking 5x or more people buying those games (especially the former) than any FFG game.

Cheers!

True, But the SC and other games based off of the blizzard franchise are sold in the mainstream bookstores and on Blizzard's own website (that's at least 8 million people that could browse that!). I expect that while there are good sales in Europe, the sales of blizzard games in Korea are pretty high (though you know what they say about Assumptions!).

I'm thinking that may be offset by the new SW license though, at least I'm betting FFG is hoping that's the case.

I'd wager the Blizzard licensed games sell more then Dominion, probably not more then Carc though, at least individually (though WoW may be high, hard to say without knowing how popular the boardgame for that MMORP is in Korea). Korea is the crazy place where they even have a cereal with Starcraft on it and they eat it!

Unless Rio Grande has expanded, they'd have to be rolling in money with the guy doing all the work running in the top 500 on Forbes for how much money he makes to actually be in the competing with FFG (though maybe he is, it only takes a couple million for him to get there).

FFG made 12.9 mil in 2009, and with it increasing notably each year (they had 4.7 in 2005 and that's when I think they were noted originally to be the 5the largest boardgame company in the world, I wouldn't think it would be too hard for them to easily have surpassed 13 million last year, maybe even the 14 or 15 million mark).

I can't find Rio Grande on the 500 list though, FFg was 1832. It's only for Inc. companies though, so RG may not qualify, don't know if RG is inc. or not.

 

[MerricB]

Yeah. FFG must be pretty big now - and LotR LCG + SW stuff is only going to help.

They no longer have the WoW license, though. (I'm very curious as to how it sold - the original WoW board game isn't really that good, and the second one was dull. Starcraft is good, but it's expensive and isn't really Starcraft).

Cheers!