GenCon Comments

 

GenCon 2025 continued the trend of recent GenCons by selling out attendance (See “GenCon 2025 Sets New Attendance Record”). I can remember the days when 50,000 attendees was considered an amazing number. Now it’s “oh 70,000+ people attending”  even though it is the largest annual convention in Indianapolis and the second largest regular event in Indy, only eclipsed by the Indianapolis 500.

I judge how well a game or other product is going to do based on, not on how much buzz it gets at GenCon or Origins but rather what items my customers ask for after the event ends. This is what happened with Magic The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th editions, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, Vampire the Masquerade, Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh.

Using this metric, things I expect to do well are:

Starfinder 2E—as is their wont, Paizo released the new edition to the channel at the same time the company launched it at Gencon. We have taken pre-orders on this for months and had customers come pick up their copies as soon as we notified them they had arrived.

Gundam—Both the Gundam TCG and the Gundam Assemble miniatures game have had significant interest. The Gundam TCG has proved hard enough to stock in that I expect it to go the way of the original Final Fantasy TCG which, available while it was in demand only through one distributor, saw a drastic drop in interest when supplies became more widely available. Much as with their One Piece TCG, Bandai seems unable to print enough product to satisfy the demand, increasing speculation on the game and making it harder to hold tournament or other sanctioned play, which has become the lifeblood of most TCGs.  Since Gundam Assemble is not a collectible product, at least I hope not, and I have had a number of customers ask about it, both before and after GenCon. Unfortunately, I am not seeing an official release date posted yet and it looks as if initial orders will be allocated.  If they are, I hope Bandai has more product in the pipeline to arrive soon.

Riftbound—Despite the excitement about the game at GenCon, we have not had any customers asking about it. The buzz around it reminds of that around another TCG based on a MOBA, the World of Warcraft TCG which launched with great fanfare and filled tables at GenCon and Origins in 2005, released in 2006, slowed down enough to get sold off in 2010 and petered out in 2013 (See”WOW TCG Calls It Quits”).  The store did make a decent amount of money off WOW but primarily from people wanted to buy the packs in the hope of getting codes to unlock special in-game items.  Actual card play petered out within a year or two. From what I can tell, Riftbound packs do not include Riot Codes, so that will exclude that segment of the market. Will it sell?  Certainly. Will it displace Magic, Pokemon or Yu Gi Oh?  Yes, temporarily but over the long term I doubt it.