GAMES: In order to make up for flagging sales, many videogame companies have resorted to an unusual tactic to garner more funds.
By Isabel De La Garza, Senior Writer
Due to the state of the economy, videogame sales have fallen ten percent from their status last year. THQ has shut down and many more companies have been selling assets, closing down, downsizing and laying off employees left and right. Even Electronic Arts, the large corporation behind The Sims and Madden, experienced similar changes. The need to make up for lost revenue led to different solutions. Activision produced a collectible toy tie-in to their Skylander series and other companies have produced movie spin-offs. Some companies have actually gone back to classic board game-style versions of their games.
Rather than a simple board game with just a few basic rules, board games based off of complicated video games have manuals about as thick as that of their game counterparts and are just as complicated. Simple board game editions, such as a Super Mario edition of Monopoly, have declined in popularity and development as board games evolved to become more complicated. Simple games such as Bejeweled have extremely authentic cardboard versions and more complex games such as Bioshock Infinite have the main essence and similar themes of the electronic game only without the first-person-protagonist-led gameplay aspect and with a different story line.
According to Plaid Hat Games’ (the company behind the Bioshock series) Colby Dauch, “Fans of the video game will recognize some of the events,” but the board game goes down alternate paths “in an effort to tell a different story and also not spoil the video game’s story line.” Thus, the game does not alienate players who have already completed the video game version and does not prevent potential new gamers from playing the video game. Though the game is quite expensive at 85 dollars, the company hopes that loyal followers of the series and avid board game enthusiasts will preorder the game and take advantage of discounts on preordered copies.
Whether cardboard copies of video games will buoy the gaming industry is yet to be seen, but it is a novel concept and it will be interesting to see how it pans out.
Courtesy of media.npr.org