Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne looks at announcements of three upcoming hobby game products.
I had three pieces of gaming news come across my desk in the past week or so that had me wondering "What are they thinking?"
#1 — Iron Kingdoms: The Undercity. This is a $95 cooperative board game for 2-4 players coming from Privateer Press this August. I know a number of other retailers are quite interested in this, especially with the launch kit with special figures that Privateer offers to retailers that pre-order a certain number of copies. Working out to about $2.17 per figure, it is still a pretty high MSRP for a board game from a company without a track record in delivering pricy board games like this, such as Fantasy Flight Games and Games Workshop have. Given the lack of movement and enthusiasm for their
High Command deckbuilding game and the resistance to the $100 Fantasy Flight Games, I don’t expect to see a lot of movement in this game. At least Privateer will forgo Kickstarter, unlike Cool Mini or Not with their
Zombicide games, meaning that stores that bring in
The Undercity will get to offer all the cool figures to their customers.
#2 — Magic: Arena of the Planeswalkers. This also should release in August (Oh Joy!), and appears to be a revamping of Hasbro's
HeroScape system. (You remember
HeroScape, right? Still a decent demand for the game.) But unlike
The Undercity, Arena of the Planeswalkers will release at a much friendlier price point of $29.99. You can do that when you have the economies of scale of the world’s largest board game manufacturer behind you. So far, so good.
Then we get to gross margin. I've talked before about how retailers have to sell stuff for more than we pay for it, as that is how we stay in business. The cost to stores of
Arena of the Planeswalkers is $22-$24 depending on from whom you buy it. That works out a margin of about 25-27%. Remember, in order for your Local Game Store to stay in business, it needs margins of about 40-50%. This is even worse than the gross margin stores are getting on
Bring Out Yer Dead from Upper Deck. Granted, your LGS is not the target for
Arena of the Planeswalkers; Walmart, Target, Toys 'R Us and other mass merchants are, as they can more readily deal with a 25% margin than the LGS can. I have heard some stores planning to bring in many fewer copies of
Arena than they had planned and mark it at $39.99, just to have it on the shelf. Kinda like with
Star Trek: Catan and some of the Looney Labs
Fluxx variants, it would hurt the image of the LGS for there to be a
Magic board game and us not to have it on the shelf.
#3 — Warhammer Fantasy Battle: Age of Sigmar. As has become the norm with Games Workshop, we have received no information about the new edition of
Warhammer Fantasy Battle, except that it will release July 11. No info as to contents, price, game play or anything. Stores have been told to "have questions ready to ask the week of June 22," and asked, "How can we make this a great launch?" I dunno, maybe GIVE US INFORMATION ABOUT IT 3 MONTHS AGO?
Games Workshop apparently still believes keeping information close to its chest builds up excitement for new releases, but it is deucedly hard to create excitement for their new releases when we only have two weeks lead time.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
