Thread: the next big innovation in social play will likely come from tabletop games - Dungeons & Dragons, board games, Werewolf, Magic the Gathering etc

New blogpost & tweetstorm on why:
https://a16z.com/2020/09/01/tabletop-games-go-digital/

1/ Tabletop games are exploding in popularity:
-D&D counts over 40M players
- Magic the Gathering over 35M
- China's top Werewolf game hit 70M players in Y1
All are growing at double-digit rates

2/ Why? Tabletop games are being improved and reinvented by modern digital tools. COVID has further accelerated these trends.

The next generation of tabletop games will differ in a few key ways:

3/ Livestreaming will be the best instruction manual

Watching livestreams on @Twitch @Youtube is emerging as the best way to learn complex activities, including tabletop games like D&D and Chess for which the learning curve is steep

3a/ You can learn to play chess by watching grandmaster @GMHikaru livestream games with move-by-move analysis. Chess hours watched on Twitch have doubled nearly every month this year, totaling >36M hours

3b/ D&D has long had onboarding challenges - user-generated stories, 20-sided dice - there's a lot to learn! You can get your feet wet by watching @CriticalRole or @GirlsGutsGlory livestream. >70M hours of D&D have been watched on Twitch to-date

4/ Gameplay will be powered by players, not parts

Digital and user-generated content will provide tabletop games with endless replayability beyond what their physical parts prescribe

4a/ Wargames like #warhammer that use miniature figurines in large-scale battles have been recreated digitally and improved upon, with games like @totalwar and @vermintidegame reaching massive new audiences

4b/ UGC creation tools have come to tabletop. @PopupDungeon is an RPG where players can create any weapon, spell, or character. @AiDungeon has a GPT-3 AI model serve as the DM for a D&D campaign. In these games, only your imagination limits what happens

5/ Audio will drive continuous play and engagement

As Airpods and smart headphones become ubiquitous, tabletop games are uniquely well-suited for audio-only play due to their ability to thrive as both foreground or background activities

5a/ Many of the most popular parlor games - Trivia, Charades, Mafia - translate well to audio with turn-based play and no materials needed. On @Alexa99, there are over 10,000 audio games in 'knowledge and trivia'

5b/ Busy users can still play or listen to podcasts while cooking or walking the dog. @ZombiesRunGame is an innovative audio fitness game that narrates a zombie story while the player runs (from zombies), recently hitting #1 on Health & Fitness on iOS

6/ Network effects will accelerate via online communities

Tabletop game communities have long been fragmented and hyper-local, but the rise of community platforms and online matchmaking is bringing network effects to play

6a/ @Discord and @Reddit have been game-changers - stitching local neighborhood gatherings into a cohesive online community. There are over 4,500 Discord servers focused on D&D or Magic today

6b/ @wizards_magic began as a trading card game played mostly in game stores and conventions; today digital games like @PlayHearthstone have reached new audiences (100M players) & introduced many to the original card game in an online-offline flywheel

7/ Tabletop games today are exploding in innovation.
Along with their inherent advantages as naturally social games with well-understood systems, they have surprising synergies with modern digital tools like live-streaming, audio, UGC etc

8/ As the tabletop and digital worlds collide, it becomes increasingly likely that the next big innovation in social play will come from a merger of the two.

More on this in the blog by myself & @andrewchen: https://a16z.com/2020/09/01/tabletop-games-go-digital/