Changes Coming to Asmodee, Days of Wonder and Fantasy Flight Games

The big news that hit the game industry last week was the announcement by Asmodee that the company will become Asmodee North America and will offer Asmodee, Days of Wonder and Fantasy Flight Games products under the new structure. The reason for the change as given by new CEO Christian Peterson:

“The marketplace has long been distorted by providing one-size-fits-all sales terms to every retail account, regardless of its channel of sale. The growth in demand for games over the last decade, in our view, has been fueled not only by fantastic product, but by the support of specialty retailers who incubate personal connections between players, facilitate tournaments and leagues, provide instant product availability, and increasingly provide a ‘third place’ that is instrumental for so many gamers to enjoy and discover our products. The retailer cost of providing such channel services is significant, and so we’re now making policy changes to ensure that the sales terms provided to those retailers, relative to other channels, are positively reflective of the value they add to our distribution chain.”

If everything goes according to Asmodee NA’s expectations , all of the changes planned by the “new” company  should go into effect by April 1^st and there are some fairly major ones, most of which will affect the channels of distribution. However, one will have significant impact on the consumer

Changes affecting the channel—The three companies will remain independent in terms of product, however distribution will consolidate, starting January 1^st .  This means that Alliance will no longer have exclusive distribution rights to the Days of Wonder line of products, which include Ticket to Ride and Small World. At the same time, Asmodee NA will reduce its distribution partners to 5:  Alliance Distribution, ACD, PHD, GTS and Southern Hobby. This means that distributors such as Aladdin, E-figures and Mad Al’s, among others, will no longer stock the Asmodee NA product lines and retailers wanting to carry them will have to have an account with one of the five authorized distributors.

A second major change affecting the channel is, instead of raising the price on the combined company’s products, discounts on products across the line will drop to 45%, reducing the margin of gross profit anywhere from 3 to 5 %. Much as with WOTC’s reduction in margin earlier this year, this reduction comes straight out of the gross margin of distributors and retailers. It remains to be seen what Asmodee NA does with the extra percentage.

Changes affecting the consumer—One major change in Asmodee NA’s operations that will directly affect the consumer is a new requirement that any retailer wanting to sell Asmodee NA’s products must sign an independent retailer agreement before the retailer can purchase any Asmodee NA products. There are several items in this agreement but the main one that appears to affect consumers is that retailers, unless they have a separate agreement with Asmodee NA, can no longer sell any Asmodee NA products online. Only retailers that have an agreement with Asmodee NA to sell online will be able to do so and I would imagine this agreement will have some restrictions on MAP (minimum advertised pricing). This means, for example, a lot fewer online sources selling FFG’s Star Wars Imperial Assault for $65, 35% off the MSRP.

These are the major changes planned by Asmodee NA. What actually happens we will know after April 1^st. 

Top 5 Games for Christmas

Based on our sales for 2015, these are 5 most popular games, in terms of numbers sold, for 2015. The list includes both board and card game, but no collectible ones:

1.  Cards Against Humanity--Cards Against Humanity LLC  "A Party Game for Horrible People"

2. Catan (and expansions)--Mayfair Games  The game of exploring and developing the land of Catan.

3.  Munchkin (and expansions)--Steve Jackson Games  "Kick down the door, kill the monster, steal its treasure."
4..Ticket to Ride--Days of Wonder  Collect the cards to build the tracks you need to win.

5.  The Resistance--Indie Boards and Cards  Uncover the spies among you before they sabotage your mission.

Why We Passed on Halloween Freighter.

I took a look at the Halloween Freighter set at the Alliance Open House in early September and thought it a cute add-on that we could sell a couple of in the weeks leading up to Halloween.  Notice I said “weeks” there.  This is not the sort of item in which the vast majority of our customers have an interest.  A comparatively small percentage of them like Ticket to Ride and an even smaller percentage of them would purchase a novelty item like this (to give you an idea, we still have most of our original order of the Ticket to Ride Monster Expansion that released over a year ago and we ordered lightly on that).  We expect those customers with an interest in the Ticket to Ride line to come in one to two times a month.  With the odds highly against them coming into the store during the brief period before Halloween, ordering it the week of the 31^st just didn’t make sense from a sales point of view.  Perhaps if it had been called a Pumpkin Freighter, we could have sold it as a fall seasonal item, extending the selling season.  As it is, with all the mass merchants around us marking everything tagged Halloween to half price on All Saints Day,  our customers are trained to expect that of all Halloween merchandise and would be loath to pay full price for it.

Ticket to Ride Halloween Freighter

The Ticket to Ride Halloween Freighter Train and Station Set from Days of Wonder, and to a lesser extent Asmodee Games’ City of Horror, is a perfect example of the importance of paying attention to the seasonal product life cycle (PLC).  According to the Alliance website, the Halloween Freighter set released on October 25^th.  My sales representative went over it with us during our weekly sales call on October 30.  We are a two day ship, meaning that, if we had put the order in with him, it would have arrived on November 1, or one day after Halloween, meaning we would miss the entire window of opportunity for selling Halloween themed merchandise  (I guess I could take a charitable look at it and view this  as a 364 day window of opportunity  to promote Halloween merchandise but too many other holidays in the way).

More on TableTop

I had the opportunity to talk with Boyan Radakovich, associate producer for the show, about its genesis and the main thing about the program that concerns retailers, the link directing viewers to Amazon if they desire to purchase a copy of that episode’s game.

TableTop originated out of Google’s desire to move towards providing more professionally produced videos on YouTube, getting away from user generated and scattershot material such as “Keyboard Cat” and “Charlie Bit My Finger”. While some videos racked up huge viewing numbers, millions of more didn’t.  Google funded the project with approximately $100 million and tapped actress, writer and producer Felicia Day to create a channel.   Day, best known for her webseries “The Guild, then contacted occasional Guild guest star and gaming aficionado Wil Wheaton to create a series for the new Geek & Sundry channel.   introducing people to games he liked.  Wheaton turned to Radakovich, a creative consultant for the games industry, to bring the idea to fruition.  The result is TableTop.

TableTop’s first season will run 20 episodes, with a new episode released every other Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time.  With that release schedule, Radakovich expects the first season to run through early 2013. I found it interesting that the shooting schedule ran a total to 10 days with two episodes shot per day.  Each episode took approximately six hours to shoot, not counting post-production, so by my count, that meant the crew put in 12 hour days during the filming of the first season.  The company has already shot all of this season’s episodes, so no use contacting them to see if they will feature your game this year.  A second season will depend on how successful this one turns out as YouTube will not decide until late 2012 whether to fund a second season.  Success for TableTop will be determined by number of views and subscriptions to the channel.  No idea what Google will consider good numbers but the Small World show, first in the series, has racked up just shy of 600,000 views.

The retailers I have talked with have overwhelmingly embraced TableTop.  The only complaint is the link on each video directing the viewer either to the publisher’s homepage (in the case of Days of Wonder) or Amazon to purchase the game.  Radakovich says that, after getting feedback from the gaming community, including retailers, the show will remove the links soon. 

With the exception of Settlers of Catan and Munchkin(both of which are among our best sellers), all of the games featured on TableTop (save for Get Bit, out of print when I last checked) have seen a spike in sales since appearing on the show and it appears the same at a number of other retailers.  Radakovich hopes that retailers will use TableTop to further grow the gaming community in their area and especially wants to make sure retailers take advantage of the two week lead time between the announcement of the next game featured and the show on which it appears (Castle Panic is next) to stock up if needed. There’s even talk of a DVD compilation available after the end of the season, which would be a great sales tool should it happen.