Note: Thorne has recently issued a correction to some comments in this column regarding Game Preview Events.  Click here for the correction.

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 the demise of Impressions' Game Preview Events.

Quietly, and without any announcement to speak of, Impressions Advertising and Marketing has shuttered its Game Preview Events program.  Impressions created the program earlier this year as a way to get advance demo copies of smaller press games into the hands of retailers ahead of the actual release of the game, along with a limited edition promotional item to give out to participants in the event.  We participated in the first offering, a demo kit for the Ashen Stars RPG, skipped the second, since we had very poor sales of Cookie Fu in its previous incarnation and would have participated in the third, a new dice game called Sutakku (which just hit our shelves this week) but didn't find it available for ordering the last time I checked the website and, what with running a store and all, we forgot to go back to the site and check to see if ordering had ever opened up.  When we emailed Impressions this week to see about getting a demo set, even though we were ordering it late, we heard back that, due to a lack of retailer participation in the first few events offered, the company had decided to cut its losses and cancel all future events, shutting down the program.

While I understand the reasoning (unless you have a load of money to burn through like Amazon did during its first years of life, no company can run for very long losing money on its operations), it's still a shame to see the program go as it had the potential to fill a gaping hole within the industry.  Thanks to the wonder of the Internets, it's quite easy to find out information about a game long before it hits the store shelves.  Heck, in many cases, our customers find out information about new products long before we do and come in asking about them (Games Workshop and the recent Necron release comes to mind.  We had customers wanting to order specific models, by name and model number, weeks before the official release of said information from the company).  However, what we don't have is a steady pipeline of demo games, especially hard copies of RPGs that we can run in store and display to customers, showing them why the hard copy is superior to the PDF.

Mayfair Games, Fantasy Flight Games, AEG and Game Salute all do a pretty good job of getting out, or at least making available, demo copies of board games, and companies releasing a new TCG do a good job of getting out demo decks (the company relaunching the UFS TCG has contacted the store at least twice now and supposedly a demo kit is on the way and we received an abundance of material from Spin Master before Redakai released) but no company or organization, to my knowledge, is doing it for RPGs.  Granted that RPG sales are a declining segment of the industry, at least at the brick and mortar end, due to the ease with which an RPG can be published in PDF format, it would still have been nice to see more support from retailers for Impression’s preview initiative and more communication from Impressions as demo kits came available.  Given that Impressions is one of the more forward thinking companies in the industry (the company started and organizes Free RPG Day each year, after all) and Game Salute focuses almost exclusively on board games, any other organization considering a widespread demo program for small press RPGs will likely look at the closure of the Game Preview program and give the idea a pass.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those  not necessarily reflect th views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.