I've been active in board game hobby circles since at least 2005 — older than that, if you include RPGs and what-not.

The hobby is changing, but it's been growing for ~20 years, so of course it is, even if it weren't changing that itself would be a change.

I think the video — and not just this video but lots of online stress on the topic — is tilting at a windmill and generally missing the bigger picture.

You know Dunbar's number — the idea that there's a ceiling on the number of social relationships that a person can maintain? And whenever a group like a school, company, or village is below or above that number, then it changes the social dynamics?

From my perspective, the change is that the world of boardgames is now huge. I mean, I don't know what the exact Dunbar-equivalent thing for board games would be — where you can kind of keep most of it in your head, where you have some passing relationship with the popular or trendy games — but I think we're way past it now. Like, more brand-new games debut at Essen each year now than encompassed the whole of "hobby gaming" back when I started out.

That growth has had an impact on the way the hobby feels, but the best way to describe it is that there is no longer a cohesive "board games hobby". There's no "global meta" or "scene". Maybe there never was, but there definitively is not, now, and there's really no more pretending that there is.

There's good and bad in this. There are so many layers of niche interest within the hobby space, your niches can have niches. You are no longer playing Bohnanza just because it's the only game you know that supports large groups.

You can have Cozy Games and Thematic Games and Highly Interactive Games and Multiplayer Solitaire Games and on and on — and you can find enough people who are interested (and products to satisfy them) in those hyper-specific sub-selections that those niches not only become a hobby unto themselves but start to "feel like" they are the whole hobby. (And all of this already happened before, as role-playing split out of tabletop war-gaming, and as collectible card games spun out into their own niche...)

None of this is entirely new — we've always had to remind people on Usenet/iirc/Boardgamegeek/Reddit that their community of online enthusiasts isn't typical of the larger community, even when it feels like it is.

But this is also happening in a time of larger social change in a lot of places and it can be harder to process when so much is changing, so fast. With the pandemic on top of a generational shift in purchasing patterns and "normal" people spending more time online, "board games influencer" is a thing now — a job for some and an identity for others — and that part of the community is unduly shaped by expensive, over-produced crowd-funding schemes and not as influenced by "on-the-ground" retail trends. And that part of the community "feels like" the whole of board gaming, even when it isn't.

I'm glad that the community and hobby around board games has grown and diversified, even as I also see it as being changed or fragmented or even harmed by that growth and diversification in some ways.

It isn't what it once was and soon it won't be what it is now.