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 the ways awards could help sell more games.

In case you missed them, the ENnie Awards were announced at Gen Con last Friday.  Paizo Publishing's Rise of the Runelords 10th Anniversary adventure took the Gold Award for Best Adventure, Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms got Gold for Best Cover Art as well as for best RPG System overall.  There were a slew of other winners but unless you attended the award ceremony, are on an email list or check your social media feeds regularly, you probably won’t know what they are.  And that's a shame.  Ditto for this year's Origins Awards (unless you regularly read ICv2, see "Origins Awards Winners").  Lords of Waterdeep took home the Origins Award for Best Boardgame, Doctor Who from Crucible 7 was Best Traditional Card Game, Best RPG was Marvel Basic RPG from Margaret Weis Productions and WizKids' Quarriors claimed Best Family, Party or Children's Game, but no one really knows that unless they check the origins Awards website.  Again, that's a shame because it means the awards don't mean anything to the industry and can't mean anything to the public and they could.
 
Have you ever seen a game tout its awards on its cover?  Ticket to Ride and Blokus are the only ones that spring to my mind immediately.  Blokus proclaims its Teacher's Choice and Mensa Select awards on the cover, while Days of Wonder now puts a sticker on every copy of Ticket to Ride announcing its four "Game of the Year" awards from various countries, plus that over 3 million copies of the game have sold.  No other company of which I am aware does this and they really should.
 
If you don't think awards matter, consider the effect the Academy Awards have on movie box office revenues.  On average, winning Best Picture boosts a movie's total revenues by about $14 million.  Win a Best Actor or Best Actress award?  Expect to see your asking price to do a film increase by 20% for the next picture.
 
Even getting nominated boosts a movie's take at the box office.  Originally, producers expected The King's Speech to take in about $30 million.  Not bad for a movie that didn't involve people flying and things blowing up.  After it received a total of 12 Academy Award nominations, though, its box office shot to $200 million and after winning Best Picture, total domestic and international gross came to over $400 million.  Winning Best Picture increased revenues for the film over 12 times.
 
Studios realize this.  That's why you start seeing ads for movies again as Oscar nomination season draws closer and why movie industry trade publications, both print and internet, fill with ads touting one movie or another for an Oscar.  The awards generate more money.
 
Granted this is anecdotal, and winning either an Origin Award or an ENnie will bump sales of your product into anywhere near movie box office levels, but they could help bump sales IF EN World and GAMA would start making a big deal about them ahead of time.  Make announcing the nominations an event.  I never heard about the EnWorld nominations until they announced the winners last Friday and the Origins are almost as bad (see "Origins Nominations Announced"). Awards are an imprimatur that someone else thinks you have a good product, but not if those making the awards don't make a big deal about them during the period leading up to them.
 
Several years ago, I helped a mother and her son in the store.  He was interested in several TCGs but wasn't sure which one to try.  I mentioned in passing that one of them had won the Origins Award the previous year.  I didn't think much about it, because our industry doesn't make a big event about them.  However, when it came time for the final decision, the mother said "Well, why don't you get this one?  It did win an award" and that is the one they bought.  We don't think much about awards but they can be a magic word to our customers' ears if we work to make it so.
 
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.