Typical. Just after I write a blog post praising Fantasy Flight Games, they go and do something that makes me wary. Yesterday, FFG announced their intention to be taken over by French board game company Asmodée. This comes just months after Asmodée took over Days of Wonder, publishers of the enormously successful Ticket To Ride board game (among many others).
The Days of Wonder/Asmodée takeover didn’t especially concern me as, despite their success with a number of product lines, Days of Wonder seems to have been struggling for some time to come up with another big hit; I can see how that merger could potentially be in their interests. Fantasy Flight on the other hand is a much larger company currently in its prime; it isn’t immediately obvious what they’re getting out of this, but I assume they have their reasons.
I’m especially nervous about this because Asmodée itself is part of the Eurazeo group, a publicly listed investment company with its fingers in a large number of different pies. To say the board game industry has had a fairly difficult relationship with the stock market would be an understatement. The most notorious example is that of Hasbro’s buyout of Wizards of the Coast and Avalon Hill. Hasbro began the 2000s owning the largest war games company (Avalon Hill), RPG (Dungeons and Dragons) and card game (Magic: the Gathering). It ended that decade having royally screwed all of them up, although Magic has since clawed its way back and D&D has just had a successful relaunch.
The problem is that PLCs’ main focus is on shareholder value, not necessarily on delivering good product for consumers. Add to that the fact that they almost always have to borrow to afford these buyouts and the focus within those companies inexorably becomes about profit. And if they don’t return the right numbers to keep the board happy, they have their work cut out explaining how their business works to a bunch of people with no knowledge of the industry. The result, if Wizards is anything to go by, is creatives getting the chop, gouging and a company which is less viable than it was before the takeover.
With all that said, as I said before, Fantasy Flight have always seemed like a sensible company which has learnt from the mistakes of its predecessors. It’s entirely possible that their current business model, with several highly successful product lines and more on the way, are the perfect fit for a PLC and that all this takeover will mean for them is access to resources and in particular capital to allow them to expand. There is a bigger question in continental Europe where a lot of FFG’s games are licensed to companies which are not part of the Asmodée group and what will happen to those companies (either merger or they’ll take a big hit being the most likely answer), but generally, this could be all steam ahead for FFG.
What makes me worry though is this: it has already been clear for quite some time that FFG have been lining their ducks in a row in anticipation for Star Wars: Episode 7. They currently publish or will soon be publishing three Star Wars roleplaying games, two Star Wars card games and three Star Wars miniatures games. Of these, Star Wars LCG and X-Wing are two of their biggest sellers, and the incoming Imperial Assault looks set to be as popular if not more so than these two. Like Disney-Lucasfilm, they have opted to ditch support for the prequels-era in favour of a line of products that very much harken back to the original films.
By December 2015, all these product lines will be very firmly established, and no doubt FFG are keen to have these games on the shelves of every supermarket, toy and book shop in time for Black Friday next year. No doubt, Asmodée’s takeover will help them in that respect (let’s ignore the plight of the specialist retailer here for a second), and there is a good chance they will be wildly successful. If, as everyone hopes, Episode VII is a hit and results in a new mega-franchise to rival Marvel’s (owned by the same company), then this could result in a significant boost for the company.
But there are two things that concern me here. Firstly, what if the new JJ Abrams’ film is rubbish? I’m sure it will make a lot of money either way, but a weak film will lack the sort of fanbase that FFG are hoping for. They’ll probably be safe for Christmas 2015 either way, but Christmas 2016 will be another story if the film is widely perceived to be another Phantom Menace. That potential will dry up and if any of those games are produced in large, unsellable numbers, a lot of money will be lost.
If the film is good, there’s still the question of what happens when the franchise winds down. Again, past precedent is not encouraging. Games Workshop almost collapsed in the mid-2000s when their cash cow in the form of the Lord of the Rings films came to an end. If FFG get big based on a film franchise, they are unlikely to be able to convert huge amounts of the mass market over to buying Twilight Imperium 4; they’ll be dependent on more franchises.
Under either scenario, there will come a point in which the company, while still profitable, will need to contract compared to its height, at which point the money men step in. And that’s when I get nervous. When Asmodée’s expansionist plans were limited to companies like Ticket To Ride, we weren’t looking at an investment company navigating its way through a boom (as distinct from a more sustainable period of growth). Now the fortunes of what amounts to a very large chunk of the industry is going to be at their mercy.
Hopefully, Episode VII will be a success and FFG will find the success it is hoping for for several years before it reaches that crossroad, by which point the relationship with the money men will have matured enough to avoid any panics making things worse during the inevitable lean years. But as of yesterday, an awful lot of my hobby suddenly became hitched to the fortunes of JJ Abrams’ film career, and so I’m nervous.