Ward Batty of Batty's Best Comics and Games in Atlanta, Georgia, recently posted his reflections on what he saw at the recently concluded Essen game fair on the Game Information Network forum.  We reprint it with permission here.  

I just returned from the Speil fair in Essen, Germany, which is the world's biggest game con with over 150,000 attendees. The overall crop of games seemed weaker than last year. But last year was very strong. Of the stuff that will be available here soon, there are some good games but I see a very disturbing trend.

Carcassone the City looked and played great, but will be a tough sell at $50, Submarine I really enjoyed, but, again, it should be $25 or $30 and not $33. Shadow of the Emperor was very well received and is at a decent price point. May sell like St. Petersburg, which has been my best-selling RGG game the last 3 months. Niagara looks beautiful but will be a tough sell at $45. Mall World played OK. Pompeii got very mixed reviews. Around the World in 80 Days looks to be a good family game and was generally well-received. But if it costs $45, it won't matter.

The main thing I'm taking from the new releases is that they are starting to price themselves out of the market and are killing my casual sales, and the hardcore customers are either becoming pickier or are turning to online discounters or both. My boardgame sales used to be 50% of my overall game sales. Over the last three months they have fallen to more like a third, and that isn't because something else increased as much as they have fallen way off. I don't see holiday sales being as good this year because I don't think I can talk that many folks into paying $40 to $50 for a boardgame, and that is the direction the prices are heading. The dollar isn't going to drop and publishers like RGG and Mayfair seem unwilling to look at producing their games for less in China, so I see us as between a rock and a hard place. I think boardgames will become increasingly more marginal for me as a line and that is personally very disappointing since that's why I opened the store.

There are some exceptions like Out of the Box and Face 2 Face Games, but they seem to be the exception and not the rule.