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 talks about Free Comic Book Day and its impact on game sales, and the problems caused by the HeroClix release schedule.

Sitting here writing at the computer in the quiet of the evening after a very busy Free Comic Book Day.  How busy?  At one time we had a dozen people lined up at the register wanting to give us money.  We almost never have lines at our cash register (expect maybe for people waiting to get the key to the bathroom), let alone a line of a dozen.  Certainly made us happy though.  Though we primarily sell games, with roughly 10% of our sales coming from comics, we have participated in Free Comic Book Day for the last several years, both to say "Thank you" to our comic customers and to offer a reward to game purchasers, since we have noticed a significant cross-over betwixt the two ever since we started to carry comics more heavily.

Our comic and graphic novel sales quadrupled those of a typical Saturday but our miniatures, RPG and boardgame sales doubled.  CCG sales also increase but nowise as strongly as these other categories.  I would love to see similar results during our next "free" event (Free RPG Day), but doubt it, simply because RPGs have not penetrated the popular mindset nearly as thoroughly as comics have (though generally comic book movies- while doing quite well at the box office- do not translate into equivalent sales in the comic book industry, Watchmen and Scott Pilgrim excepted).
 
So with a very successful day behind us, why in the world do I sit thinking "WHAT IN THE SAM HILL WIZKIDS?"  Because I am still trying to figure out the rationale that led them to release not one but two new sets during the same period that Wizards of the Coast releases a brand new set.
 
As you might have noticed, WOTC released the third set in the Return to Ravnica block, Dragon's Maze on May 3rd.  Dragon's Maze pre-release events rant the weekend before, April 27th and 28th.  Any Magic related event tends to ties up significant numbers of people and capital.  So what does WizKids do?  Release an Iron Man 3 gravity feed, game and starter set three days before the Dragon's Maze pre-release weekend.  Not content with that, what comes in the following week?  Why, it is the Teen Titans gravity feed display.  Then, a day later, what to my wondering eyes should appear but 20+ cases of Dragon's Maze (not on tiny reindeer).  That's three major releases within a week's time of each other.
 
"But Scott, Magic players and HeroClix players don't cross over much, so the two product lines are not competing for the same customer dollar, so why are you complaining?"  Quite simple.  While 'tis true that the customer base does not cross over that much, thus a customer deciding how to allocate dollars is not torn between Magic and HeroClix.  However, the retailer DOES have to allocate scarce dollars and other resources between the two as the money to play for all three of them comes out of one account and the staffing and event development to promote all three releases has to fit into the same employee payroll budget and schedule.  That's not easy with one release, let alone three.  Given that WOTC has a regular release schedule for its products and the best overall event support in the industry, most stores will easily decide to focus on the week of Magic events, rather than on a one-off HeroClix release. We toyed with the idea of a midnight release for Iron Man 3 but decided focusing on Dragon's Maze made better use of scarce resources as did focusing on the DM launch as opposed to pushing an event for the Teen Titans release.
 
We had this happen with Yu-Gi-Oh! Sneak Peeks a while back and I have noticed Konami has not scheduled a Sneak Peek competing with a Magic Pre-release in quite some time.  Hopefully, for the sake of my bank account, WizKids will do the same with future releases.

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.