Still further growth for hobby games: ICv2

ICv2 has been tracking the hobby games industry (in North America) for years. The last few years have been a story of continual growth and record sales. From their August update it looks like 2022 will continue this trend.

As always they have broken the industry update into several smaller articles, each looking at one aspect of hobby games:

For board games, Wingspan remains the number one, with HeroQuest proving the power of nostalgia. The latest version of HeroQuest began on Hasbro’s quasi-crowdfunding page, before hitting retail, and is clearly selling a good number of copies. My current favourites Ark Nova and Lost Ruins of Arnak are also in the top 10 here.

Dominion continues to rule other card games, although looking over this list reminds me I am more of a board game player, since Codenames is the only game on this list I play.

Magic: the Gathering stays top over Pokemon in the hobby channel, although these positions are reversed in the mass market channel. CCGs as a whole have really taken off in the past couple of years with Pokemon product especially flying off the shelves.

Warhammer 40,000 continues its rule over the miniatures games category. The story here for me is that Reaper’s Bones line of miniatures finally has a large enough presence to break the top 5 chart here. The story in this category seems to be a combination of Games Workshop getting its act together and of RPGs driving sales of miniatures for people to look as as they play.

Speaking of RPGs, there is little change to report here. Dungeons and Dragons is number one, with Pathfinder a distant but steady number two. Games in the other positions change every update, but never threaten first or second. The D&D 5E line in the table above refers to all D&D 5th edition compatible product that isn’t sold by Hasbro/WotC.

There’s no such thing as endless growth of course, and 2018 was the last year that hobby games failed to beat the previous year’s sales. Not that long ago. For now though the category is booming.