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 notes a new twist in the Diamond Comic Distributors saga and shares his thoughts on the Gen Con releases that will make the biggest impacts.

The Diamond Comic Distributors bankruptcy saga sending (see "Diamond Bankruptcy Continues to Rack Up Fees") just took another interesting turn, at least based on the daily emails the company sends.  Emails like their Diamond Daily newsletter come from Diamond Comic Distributors and have the following address at the bottom:

Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. 10150 York Road, Suite 300 Hunt Valley, MD 21030

As of this week the Diamond Daily email is coming from Diamond Comic Distributors II, using the same email address but has the following mailing address:
Diamond Comic Distributors II, LLC.
10150 York Road, Suite 300
Hunt Valley, MD 21030

Same mailing address but it appears Diamond has quietly created a second LLC through which to send some of its correspondence.  Just one more small, strange twist in the continuing story.

Gen Con 2025 continued the trend of recent Gen Cons by selling out attendance (see "GenCon 2025 Sets New Attendance Record").  I can remember the days when 50,000 attendees was considered an amazing number.  Now it’s "Oh, 70,000+ people attending,"  even though it is the largest annual convention in Indianapolis and the second largest regular event in Indy, only eclipsed by the Indianapolis 500.

I judge how well a game or other product is going to do based on, not on how much buzz it gets at Gen Con or Origins, but rather what items my customers ask for after the event ends.  This is what happened with Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, Vampire: The Masquerade, Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG.

Using this metric, things I expect to do well are:

Starfinder 2E.  As is their wont, Paizo released the new edition to the channel at the same time the company launched it at Gen Con.  We have taken pre-orders on this for months and had customers come pick up their copies as soon as we notified them they had arrived.

Gundam.  Both the Gundam Card Game and the Gundam Assemble miniatures game have had significant interest.  The Gundam Card Game has proved hard enough to stock that I expect it to go the way of the original Final Fantasy TCG, which saw a drastic drop in interest when supplies became more widely available.  Much as with their One Piece TCG, Bandai seems unable to print enough product to satisfy the demand, increasing speculation on the game and making it harder to hold tournament or other sanctioned play, which has become the lifeblood of most TCGs. 

Gundam Assemble is not a collectible product (at least I hope not), and I have had a number of customers ask about it, both before and after Gen Con.  Unfortunately, I am not seeing an official release date posted yet and it looks as if initial orders will be allocated.  If they are, I hope Bandai has more product in the pipeline to arrive soon.

Riftbound.  Despite the excitement about the game at Gen Con, we have not had any customers asking about it.  The buzz around it reminds of that around another TCG based on a MOBA, the World of Warcraft TCG, which launched with great fanfare and filled tables at Gen Con and Origins in 2005, released in 2006, slowed down enough to get sold off in 2010 and petered out in 2013 (see "WOW TCG Calls It Quits").  The store did make a decent amount of money off WOW, but primarily from people wanted to buy the packs in the hope of getting codes to unlock special in-game items.  Actual card play petered out within a year or two.  From what I can tell, Riftbound packs do not include Riot Codes, so that will exclude that segment of the market.  Will it sell?  Certainly.  Will it displace Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh!?  Yes, temporarily but over the long term I doubt it.

Comments?  Anything you saw or heard about at Gen Con that you think will make an impact?  Will Diamond be a viable entity at this time next year?  Send them to Castleperilousgames@gmail.com.

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.