A Pair of Promotions

This week's Rolling for Initiative column looks at a couple of promotions from Steve Jackson Games and IELLO Game. The store will have the Go Up A Level card to give out at the next Munchkin day and will participate in the IELLO Games promotion for Mountains of Madness

Commodification

A commodity is a product that is only differentiated from similar products by its price. Case in point, the Cavendish banana (yes, those yellow bananas you find at the supermarket do have a name). Since one looks like another, you cannot tell if they ones you have sitting on your counter at home were bought at Aldi's, Wal-mart, Schucks or Kroger. The only difference between them is the price you paid for them.

Decades ago, companies did differentiate their bananas. Chiquita put a little blue label on them and could charge a premium price of a quarter or more per pound because they were "Chiquita bananas". Over the years though, that blue sticker lost its value as Chiquita stopped doing anything to protect its brand and Chiquita bananas became no more premium than any other banana.

Something similar is happening in the gaming industry. Games that customers used to have to go to a specialty store to get, such as Munchkin, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, etc, are showing up in stores such as Target, Barnes & Noble, even Wal-mart, making it much easier for the customer to find them. The trade off is that the games are becoming commodities, the only difference between one copy and another is the price.

Iello has inoculated itself against the commodification somewhat by producing two different versions of King of Tokyo. The FLGS version comes with Gigasaur while the Target version comes with Baby Gigasaur, meaning that the same version of the game is not available everywhere.  Similarly, as I noted in an earlier post, WOTC is releasing Volo's Guide to Monsters with two different covers, one for the game store and one for the mass market. This may be early steps  brands are taking to protect their value from commodification.

A Quick Look at GenCon

Gencon, in case you missed it, took place this past weekend. I did not go. Missed the sign up date for the Trade Day and had other things to work on but did hear a few interesting tidbits from the show. 

Upper Deck’s Vs. card game attracted quite a bit of attention. The game has shifted format from a collectable version to a customizable one, apeing Fantasy Flight Games LCG system, though of course they cannot call it that. The Cypher System rules from Monte Cook Games also had a successful launch as did Titansgrave and the Fantasy Age rules from Green Ronin, no doubt building on the success of Wil Wheaton’s Titansgrave web series.

 Looney Labs, meanwhile, sold through 200 hundred copies of Batman Fluxx, nearly all they brought, on day one of the show. Not too shabby.

Word of the day on the Exhibit Hall floor, though, was “Kickstarter” as many smaller companies were either selling games they had just produced through Kickstarter or talking about upcoming releases they planned to fund through Kickstarter. Amazon tied into Gencon with a Daily Deal offering a number of board and card games, including offerings from Steve Jackson Games, Iello, Asmodee, Cool Mini or Not and Days of Wonder, among others at discounts ranging from 35% to just over 50% off.

More comments likely on the show later in  week.

Too Much of A Good Thing?

Quite a hectic weekend so far with both Dragons of Tarkir and Star Wars Armada releasing on the same day and I have heard tales of stores blowing through their initial orders of each. Well done, WOTC and FFG, though we do need to discuss increasing MSRP on both products rather than making your Local Game Store absorb the extra reduction in margin. Work on that, would you? 

Meanwhile, last week I mentioned one trend I saw at the GAMA trade show that rather concerned me and that trend is the growth in the number of companies promoting events, typically some form of what the industry has come to call Organized Play. Although I agree that better events and Organized Play has had nothing but positive effects on the industry, the number of companies I saw at the GTS announcing they would launch an OP program or expand on an already existing one blew me away. Among the ones that I remember, Japaneme, Iello and Asmodee all discussed how they were expanding their OP programs, White Wizard Games promoted the tournament program for Star Realms, even Slugfist Games offered retailers the opportunity to purchase an event kit for Red Dragon Inn, while Catalyst promoted the OP program for their Shadowrun: Crossfire deckbuilding game. The most ambitious program I saw was from Upper Deck, which announced $10,000 championships for both their Legendary deckbuilding game as well as the relaunch of their Vs. card game. Couple this with already existing strong OP programs from WOTC, Konami, Bushiroad, Fantasy Flight, Pazio and AEG, plus probably 2 or 12 I have overlooked and what we have is an embarrassment of Organized Play riches, all focused on the Local Game Store (You will noticed I did not say Friendly. I take the Friendly in FLGS as a given. Very few game stores I have visited have proven unfriendly). This leads to a bit of a problem. Who will run all of these events?

Many game stores operate with a paper thin staff, often the owner and a few part time employees. Though nowise as bad as we used to see, most stores still see payroll as their second biggest expense, after rent and adding another employee seriously affects their bottom line. Most stores also run a full slate of OP events already (as I have mentioned before, most game stores have shifted to an OP driven model over the past decade), so the question becomes, where does the staff come from to run all of these new events and when does the LGS run them. Currently we have events already running every night of the week and multiple events on the weekend and we are not an atypical store. In economic terms, we have scarce resources and an allocation problem. 

When I tell companies about the staff shortage problem, quite often the tell me: “Find one of your customers who plays our game and we’ll make them a (whatever the name of the company’s demo team is).” That’s well and good, save for two things. 

#1 As a store recommended demo person, they quasi-represent the store, without any of the control the store could exercise over a staff member.

#2 The company eventually wants them to demo the game at other places, cutting into their ability to run events at my store.

That’s why the Envoy program announced at the GTS attracted my attention. If it works as described, it could help tremendously with the resource program and, provided the Heralds do get extensive training, assuage my concerns about problem number one as well.

KrosMaster Arena and King of New York

The weekend of December 13, we will have a couple of really cool events. On December 13 from noon to 4, we will have a representative from Japanime Games in demonstrating Krosmaster Arena. Come learn the game and take home a cool promo item.

Then on December 14, we will have a qualifying tournament for the King of New York Nationals. Come destroy New York, get spiffy promo cards and the winner gets a seat at this summer's King of New York National Championships.

King Of New York

According to Iello, we should expect to see the long awaited release of King of New York around October 23.  Once it arrived we will host a store tournament for it in December, with the winner receiving entry to the national King of New York tournament at GenCon next summer.