While everyone else was still breathing a sigh of relief that the Millennium Bug had been vanquished, to very little fanfare, a small hobby-website went live.  In the first weeks of the new millennium then, Scott Alden and Derk Solko started BoardGameGeek (aka BGG).  It was to be a board game platform based on a 1990s computer gaming news website that Scott Alden had worked on called 3DGameGeek.com.  Using this underlying framework, BGG was built round a database that now contains of over fifty thousand games including reviews, photos, rules addenda, and lots of other information.

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The vast majority of these data were User contributed, though in the early days, there were no User accounts and Scott Alden took submissions by email and would copy and paste the information into the website hard-coding the User names.  More content meant more traffic though and very quickly, the infrastructure began to creak under the weight of the content that the enthusiastic supporters provided and the visitors it encouraged.  In the early days, the website looked very different to its modern rendition.  In 2003, the website began taking advertising revenue to help support the site financially, and the following year BGG formally started their Patron program so supporters could contribute financially too.

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As well as being very generous with their time, supporters were also generous with their cash, so much so, that by 2006 Scott Alden was able to work on BGG full time, an event that was accompanied by the first of several a major site redesigns.  Advertising and Patron support weren’t the only sources of revenue, however.  From the very early days, the site had supported a market place, sales from which generated a small income to the site.  Additionally, in November 2005, BGG held its first convention, BGG.CON.  And all the while, functionality was increasing to include, logging game plays, subscription services, forums, video hosting, collection curation utilities etc..

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At this time, BGG felt like a community and many people made BGG feel like a second home—a group of friends getting together to talk about games.  Since then, BGG has gradually changed.  Perhaps the first occasion when The Powers That Be fell out with a considerable portion of the community was in 2009 when they tried to rebrand BGG as “Geekdo”.  The idea behind the name was quite a good one, with its origin in the Japanese, Dō or 道, meaning “way”, implying a body of knowledge and tradition, as in TaeKwonDo, Judo and other Asian martial arts.  Thus, Geekdo was often subtitled, “The Way of the Geek”.  The purpose was to bring BGG and the new RolePlayerGameGeek and VideoGameGeek together under the same banner.

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Unfortunately, a fondness for the BGG brand coupled with the fact people did not understand the need for change or indeed how to pronounce it (Geek-doo, Geek-dow or Geek-doe?), did not endear the Geekdo concept to many of the site Users.  Underlying the objections was perhaps a more insidious concern though—the feeling that maybe this change meant the preparation of the site for sale.  This was reflected in the way the new brand name was commonly referred to online as “Geek dough”, implying that the change was all about money.  Commercialisation of BGG has always been a problem for a large proportion of the User-base, who have invested their time and money in the site; they see it as a community, their community, when in reality it belongs to Scott Alden and it is his to do what he wants with.

– Image from boardgamegeek.com

Since the Geekdo fiasco (which has since been quietly dropped in public, though it still exists behind the scenes), there have been a number of other controversies.  The increase and changes to forum moderation have put the noses of a small, but significant and vocal minority of the User-base out of joint.  Additionally, changes to the layout of the website designed to make it more modern and User-friendly have alienated some of the high-level Users.  These people had no problem with the high density of the material, indeed many, being Geeks comfortable with programming and complex games, positively liked it.  People fear change, but to a large extent, whether these changes are for the better is a matter of perspective.

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For example, abandoning the popular mascot, Ernie, in favour of an “orange blob” was controversial at the time though it arguably made BGG more inclusive and less “white” and “male”.  Changes to the main page and hiding the old customisable front page (now called the “dashboard”) may have made the site more User-friendly to new people, but did the opposite for some who were already very familiar with it.  There has been an undoubted increase in the commercialisation too.  The BGG store (distinct from the Marketplace mentioned above) was started ten years ago as an outlet for hard to acquire promotional games items.  The prices of these items have increased considerably over time though and more recently the Store has stocked high-end accessories too.  BGG has also moved further into the world of retail, opening the GeekGameShop, which sells games, competing directly in the US games market.

– Image from boardgamegeek.com

More recently, there have been controversial changes to the old GeekMarket.  This was a very primitive way of selling games, but with the ability to subscribe to games through the database, it was cheap, flexible and very effective.  With changes to the market places required by the US Internal Revenue Service, there has recently been an upgrade to the GeekMarket.  At the moment this is only available in the US, but with a 6% sale commission fee (up from 3%) plus an additional 2.9% + $0.30 for payment processing via Stripe, it is considerably more expensive to the User than the old facility.  Additionally, at least in the early stages, the postage options have been more restricted, removing “cash on delivery” making low value and no-ship sales (e.g. at conventions) non-viable.

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This and various other changes to the site seem less User-friendly and more driven by financial considerations.  In the last week, there has been a further development—BGG has signed a partnership agreement with Gamegenic, “to show the community suitable sleeve sizes and optimal gaming accessories for games played on the popular YouTube video series “GameNight!“, i.e. essentially product placement.  This is another way that BGG has changed over the years—initially all the content was User-created, but now BGG hires people to create the most visible reviews and other content.  GameNight! is a weekly video show published on the BGG YouTube Channel.

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Like Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight Games, and Catan Studios, Gamegenic is an Asmodee studio.  They were set up three years ago, prior to the spate of acquisitions in 2020 and 2021 and the subsequent purchase of Asmodee by Sweden’s Embracer Group AB.  The concern many people have is that this partnership between Gamegenic and BGG is a preliminary to Asmodee taking over BGG.  This fear is not totally baseless as Asmodee have form with this approach having acquired other companies after first signing a partnership agreement with them (Esdevium and Heidelberger among others).  Further, Asmodee showed their interest in board game media and online resources when they acquired the French-language boardgame site, Tric Trac and the online gaming platform Board Game Arena.

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While the long term is unclear, the short-term is more transparent.  The partnership agreement between BGG and Gamegenic will likely lead to the most visible content becoming increasingly laden with product placement.  There will be increased promotion of Gamegenic products to the exclusion of all others with potentially skewed opinions, rather than an unbiased presentation of the best products available. Whether this is a slippery slope or not only time will tell.  On 20th January 2020 though, BGG celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and over that that time it has grown to the point where it has around five million visitors to the site per month.  It would be a great shame if its independence has gone by the time it reaches its twenty-fifth anniversary in three years time.

– Image from boardgamegeek.com