Ah, yes, Settlers of Catan. What a great game.
My wife and I are convinced that “Settlers of Catan” is what we will write on the line for “Reason for divorce.”
If you are a math nerd and know how to count dots better than other people do, or know why you should count dots, and also love to play the game according to your own twisted, psychotic rules, then this is the game for you.
But what is so special about it?
Quite a lot. Which is why Catan is probably the single most toxic licenseable digital product ever.
“We got a license to Settlers of Catan” is a statement that irrationally exuberant people make when they have spent some kind of money to get a license, sure to drive their adoption.
People like new toys, right?
People like to play familiar games on new toys, right?
So how could you go wrong here?
It turns out that the real fun in Settlers of Catan is not to be found in the joyless rejection of trade offers from randos on the internet.
The real fun of Catan is in knowing the rules for when you can turn over your final victory point to make someone at your local table so mad that they flip the table over as you crush them.
And yes, I have done this before.
I know more than one person who has smugly admitted they have licensed this particular product for a new digital platform.
And for the first few times I heard it, I was impressed. And then after watching a few of these businesses catch fire, fall over, and then sink into the swamp, I began to wonder about that.
It turns out that some things do not transition well to digital.
I was a director of engineering at Zynga Poker for a while, and unless you are playing with the high spending VIPs, playing Texas Hold ’em on your phone is far from playing real poker. The stakes have to matter, and some random person on the internet named FlibertiGibbet6969-420-67 going all in and LOLing with nothing in their hands over and over again just ruins it for everyone.
Intimate social experiences matter for some people, for some experiences. If you want to know what I mean, go put $100 into an online hold ’em poker game and go play on Christmas Eve. I got cleaned out so fast by sharks, it made my head swim. The filthy casuals all have gone home.
And that is what is true about Catan. The casuals do not want to show you, on the teddy bear, where Catan touched them. It is a savage game. It is designed to make someone angry. It is a comfortable destination for sociopaths to flex their math skills and flaunt their superior understanding of psychological warfare.
And all of that is lost on the internet. No one will trade wool for stone. There is no clever barter with people where you reason with them, to cause everyone to start an embargo against you. And there is no ability to make a 3-for-1 trade in someone else’s favor to break that embargo, to make that person suddenly the victim of everyone else’s ire.
So even though we all love playing Settlers of Catan as a board game, the vast majority of the people who have put it online are making a pale imitation of a shadow of a whisper of a dream.
And when that is your strategy to de-risk your business, you are likely to wind up a pale imitation of a shadow of a whisper of a nightmare.
I am become Catan, Destroyer of Platforms. License me and despair!
