Tariffs, manufacturing gradually leaving China and the ongoing “fewer, better games” trend: Back Office operator Naylor games looks ahead to 2025

When it comes to taking the temperature of the board game industry, few are in a better position than a business which works across everything from freight and trade selling to e-commerce and spare parts. James Naylor, founder of BoardGameWire sponsor Naylor Games and its one-stop shop board game outsourcing operation Back Office, unpacks the state of the industry across 2024, and casts his eye on the potential positives – and pitfalls – of the coming year.

What trends do you expect to have a big impact on the board game industry in 2025, within your segment and more generally?

I’ll focus on one: I think we’ll continue to see manufacturing gradually move out of China. This is part of a broader mega-trend far beyond the games industry as American trade policy (regardless of administration) gets more hawkish. If the impending ‘Trump tariffs’ come in a little lower than the current rhetoric from Trump suggests, then they’ll actually be completely in-line with US trade policy in general. And likely they will themselves gradually accelerate decoupling with China. 

I don’t think this means the business will all be coming to Europe and North America of course (far from it!) but I think we’re going to see good demand in both those regions. We have the huge fortune of managing a complex project that’s manufactured locally on both continents for Earthborne Games – so we’ve got to see this up close. The fact is that, for the right product spec, it can work very well indeed and all within sensible cost parameters. Freight costs end-up lower and the environmental benefits are enormous! It’s just far fewer miles on everything. 

What are the major risk factors for the industry that you have your eye on for 2025, and why?

Once again, tariffs are likely to be the big chaos factor here. If we did see the kinds of numbers threatened on US imports from China – 60% – we’re talking about a substantial up-tick in costs and, for consumers, prices. That inherently will further select for a smaller number of excellent titles as gamers will almost certainly react by buying slightly fewer new titles. Depending on how your business model works, this could be very substantial – especially if you run thin margins on a large product line. Though for us, it’ll mostly be about helping clients with their planning. As far as logistics goes, we’re global and agnostic to manufacturing location. So it doesn’t make a difference to us. I’m a glutton for punishment and would love another Earthborne scale multi-continental manufacturing project!

What were the big positives within the industry that provided opportunities for Back Office in 2024?

For me it’s been seeing the continuation of the “fewer, better” games trend, at least among many of the industry’s smartest players. It sounds counterintuitive coming from a company like us – because that means fewer crowdfunding projects overall to be managed. But we’d much rather see our creators take extra time to get it right and absolutely smash it on a smaller number of brilliant releases. Delivering on a smaller than expected project is just not as fun and energising and delivering the “dream come true game” that resonates with gamers. Because our thing is operations, it means we get to do what we love – taking the time to get everything right! This focused strategy has clearly paid off for some of our largest clients like Eerie Idol (The Old King’s Crown) or Tettix (Deep Regrets).

And what were the major challenges within the industry that impacted Back Office, and how did you overcome them?

It might be controversial to say it but my view is that 2024 was actually a pretty stress-free year overall in the game world in general, at least for businesses – certainly compared to the dark days of 2021. We’ve been watching people learn how to execute on the operational side better and better with this being the year where things have finally normalized for people in key administrative areas like tax inside the EU. The only big wobble has been the Trump tariffs. I think we were all expecting something but the scale of the threat – in rhetoric at least – has been understandably alarming, especially for larger creators where manufacturing is an increasingly relative share of their pie. The fact that the US is still 50% of the crowdfunding market and the vast majority of stock is still being made in China made this the centre of quite a few conversations for us. But as we caution our clients, we can’t be sure what will actually happen yet and the key thing is always to build good financial contingency plans, regardless of who is the US president. You never really know what might suddenly spike your costs, even with excellent forecasting. Even once the pandemic started people didn’t predict the bullwhip effect on freight costs in 2021. 

What were your expectations for Back Office at the start of 2024, and how does that compare to the reality of how the year went?

2023 validated our business after our launch the previous year. So we knew we already did something with fundamental appeal: we have the huge privilege of being able to ask creators a simple question: “would you like to carry on making games but without the boring stuff?” The answer to that is usually a resounding “Yes!” so we thought growth would continue. But we have been bowled over by how much our clients have recommended us to others this year – so it’s absolutely outperformed expectations. We are hugely grateful to them!

And what are you most looking forward to within the industry next year, as potential positive developments?

I am going to sound like a broken record here but the risk factor I mentioned above only makes focusing on smaller, better product lines an even better option! Seeing this continue would be hugely positive. Beyond the kind of companies we work with, average project raises per project actually decreased on Kickstarter itself last year – but this was confounded by many big players moving to Gamefound. So the jury is out as to how many people are really getting their heads around this. 

And speaking of Gamefound… they have been moving at an amazing pace on feature development. It’s brilliant to finally watch Kickstarter under pressure to actually improve their platform which – for a long time now – has been in the doldrums. They have stolen quite the march and I am excited to see where this goes!