Metal Gear Solid's Board Game Has Been Cancelled
IDW was supposed to be releasing Metal Gear Solid: The Board Game later this year, but after a succession of delays the company has decided to walk away from the project instead.
kotaku.com
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The Metal Gear Solid board game has been cancelled
- Thread starter Deleted member 12323
- Start date
kotaku.com
Womp womp.
At least I still have that super expensive limited edition MGS Risk that I have never actually played, though.
At least I still have that super expensive limited edition MGS Risk that I have never actually played, though.
They were actually told by Era that they weren't allowed to make a Metal Gear without Kojima so they cancelled ;)
I tried to play it once and everyone besides me got frustrated with the rules and quit.
Sigh.
Which is why this is odd.
Nobody, anywhere, ever, was going to try to actually play this game. So why would they bother wasting time trying to work on the design? Nobody else producing "board games" like this does.
I assume they mean "we wanted to add more minis but had trouble securing deals to get them made"
Happened to me with Halo Risk. Still collecting dust in the closet, waiting... some day, dammit... some day.
This isn't true at all. I've worked with tons of board game publishers and they very much do a lot of playtesting, even for licensed games. In this case, I'd imagine that their license wasn't super long, and there was some deadline for getting it into production, which they just weren't going to meet. So they let it (and the advance they probably paid) go rather than put out a bad product. It's possible they just didn't think it would sell and let it go due to that.
There is no way it would not have sold, especially as a kickstarter. The license pretty much prints money and there are lots of recent examples where people clearly buy the minis only.
A candyland themed reskin with a snake mini would have sold like hotcakes.
Risk is such an impenetrable game, and the extra MGS elements just made it even more chaotic.
Ironically, MGS Risk is NOT the most insane Risk variant I've ever played. I think it's called Godstorm? The one where you play as a bunch of mythological figures and one of the regions you can conquer is the LITERAL FUCKING UNDERWORLD.
Then I'd imagine that Konami was really stingy with the license terms and it ended up not making financial sense. Some of those licensors don't realize you need years to maximize sales of something like this.
Sell Metal Gear to Sony and then make the board game, MGSV:Director's Cut, and Metal Gear board shorts along with Metal Gear the floaty and sunscreen.
Have a look at https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?category_id=34&woe_id=0&sort=most_funded&seed=2689263
And games like https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/806316071/batmantm-gotham-city-chronicles
See if you can spot a theme.
Really?
I'll admit that I haven't played regular ol' Risk a whole ton, but I've played some versions of it a couple times (Starcraft Risk maybe?), and some derivatives of it (History of the World, and Britannia) and the rule-set always seemed vey simple to me.
Its maybe not as simple as Ghost Castle or Fireball island, but it's around the same ballpark as Monopoly or Cluedo isn't it?
(Maybe years of wrapping my head around a new Uve Rosenberg or Stefan Feld game every week has warped my perception of what counts as 'impenetrable')
As for the news, well at least this doesn't have a Kickstarter project attached to it, so there are no backers out-of-pocket.
I do have to wonder what the design challenges were, because we have had a few stealth games come out recently that they could have pulled design 'inspiration' from, such as V Commandos, Shadow Tactics: The Board Game, and ReichBusters.
My wife loves die hard so I got her the die hard board game. Went on YouTube to look at how to play to get a feel for it and my eyes glazed over from all the rules. Good thing I hadn't opened it yet
Wow, upon scrolling to the comments I thought it was shinkawa but after reading your post I went back and omg. It's hideous. It's like a bastardized version of shinkawa.
It probably would have sold, but 'like hotcakes' is not guaranteed.
To give some sort of comparison, Resident Evil 2: The Board Game, pulled in just under £1mil on Kickstarter, and last time I was in a FLGS, copies of it were on sale for 25% off, so not exactly flying off the shelves.
Resident Evil 3: The Board game, did similar KS numbers (its not on shop shelves yet).
Horizon Zero Dawn: The Boardgame made £1.3mil and has been 'a shitshow' with parts still not delivered to backers.
No idea how much Steamforged Games paid for the licences, but £1mil(ish) to cover IP right, years of development, design, manufacturing, shipping and distribution probably isn't printing money in the way that you think.
Also, the thing about buying a game 'Just for the minis' is that, if the minis are no good for a D&D/Pathfinder game (Yes, other TTRPG's exist but they have nowhere near the same support or following), then what other use are they?
(I guess Batman is such a colossal IP that it gets to be an outlier)
So in the case of this MGS game, they kinda had to get the game right as well, because it absolutely would have hit tables, and if it was a bad game, it would be discovered very quickly, and while they'd always have the money from KS backers, FLGS sales would probably dry up very quickly, and they need those sales to make the game worthwhile as a profitable endeavour.
FAKE EDIT: I just remembered that IDW themselves have a few Kickstarters for licenced games behind them - TMNT, Nickelodeon, Legend of Korra and Batman.
The only project to crack the £1mil funding mark was....... yup, it was the Batman game!
People just really like Batman don't they?
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