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 reports on the release weekend for Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower, and the results of his retailer survey.

I will discuss the ACD Game Day next week as I did not go to this past week's event.  When feasible, I like to send store staff members to distributor game days and open houses to introduce them to the wonderful people who produce the games we sell and to give them a better idea of how this mildly crazy industry works.

Instead, I want to return to Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower and the results of the pretty intensive two-week sales push Games Workshop put into it.  Really, except for pre-release and other Magic: The Gathering events from Wizards of the Coast, which still sets the high bar for promoting new releases in the industry, I cannot remember another game company providing as much promotional material and support for a single release (though several of AEG's promotional events this year come close, especially Greedy Greedy Goblins).  Unfortunately, the results, according to a convenience sample of retailers I took online, were less than impressive.

Remember, the original Warhammer Quest has been out of print since the late 90s and complete copies of the game are selling for upwards of $600, and some of the expansions for the game sell for $100 to $200.  There is demand out there for the game, and GW said this edition would remain faithful to the 1995 version with only a few additions and deletions players had requested to the rules.  We even considered investing the $3000 it would cost for the 40 copy buy as some of my staff thought it would do really well.  As sales went, I am glad the rest of my staff talked me out of it.

Just 30 retailers responded to my question, "How did Warhammer Quest do for you this weekend?"

My answer was:  I ordered three copies and sold zero.  I went really light on this release, despite the promotion, due to the poor sales in the store of the past $150+ games GW has released over the past few months.  I came in on the low end of the scale as the average respondent brought in between 10 and 20 copies of the game with a couple of outliers pushing the top edge of the scale at over 40 copies, primarily due to the extra incentives and opportunity to receive and sell the game a week early.

How did it sell?  A few stores reported an almost complete sell-through but they had also bought in comparatively lightly at three to ten copies.  Others reported 0-5% of ordered copies sold, giving me a rough estimation of a sell-through rate somewhere between 30 and 40%, not too good for a product with this level of promotion and customer interest behind it.

Of course, I have no idea what Games Workshop’s sales on the game are.  Probably pretty good, but it is important to remember that GW only has accurate sales figures for how many copies of the game IT sold, not how many copies wound up in consumers hand.  That number would require a pretty extensive survey of stores, both GW and independent.

I have higher hopes for the relaunch of Blood Bowl later this year for two reasons:

1)  It's another GW game with pent-up demand.
2)  Stores have months to gin up interest in the game, unlike the two weeks we had to blitz our customers about Warhammer Quest.

Now here's hoping GW gets promotional material out about it over the summer rather than waiting until two weeks before the release date.

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.