Rich Waldbiesser of Six Feet Under Games in New Holland, Pennsylvania saw the second comment by Steven Olsen of A Little Shop of Comics (see 'Steven Olsen of A Little Shop of Comics') on CCG pre-releases, in which he looked at Magic events in his area, and takes a look at national numbers for Magic events:

Having finished reading the article by Steve Olsen of Little Shop of Comics, I was reminded of a conversation I recently had with Dave Salisbury of Fan Boy Three at Gencon.  During this conversation, I raised exactly the same arguments which Steve has posted in his article.  As a result, I wanted to do two things.  First, I would like to thank Steve Olsen for starting this discussion in a public forum since it was long overdue.  Second, I would like to expand on what Steve has discovered in the New Jersey statistics.

I will look at the Future Sight pre-release as my basis for discussion.  In the United States, there was a total of 17,149 players that participated in the pre-release events.  Understanding that the average player plays in two different events at a pre-release, this gives us 8,575 different players that attended these events.  For the purposes of this discussion, I have determined that the average player spends a minimum of $60 at a pre-release event.  This amounts to $514,500 that is taken away from the stores by just this one pre-release weekend.  If this was to be divided by the approximately 1,000 stores which hosted a Magic Game Day event for the release of Tenth Edition, it shows that this pre-release cost the stores who support Magic year-round an average of over $500 each in lost sales. 

Wizards of the Coast claims that pre-releases are necessary to build the hype for a new set.  I have never had anyone come back from a pre-release and place an order for the product from the pre-release.  I have, however, had people return from a pre-release and reduce their order for the new product due to the amount of money they spent at the pre-release.

When you multiply the effect of this one pre-release, which was not a well attended event in many areas, by the number of Magic sets released each year (4), you can see that the current system is costing each store approximately $2,000 per year in Magic sales alone.  What do the PTOs do the rest of the year to earn their share of this $2,000,000 payout?  In most cases, the answer is absolutely nothing other than get given all of the other premier events such as PTQs and Grand Prix events where they collect another large share of the pie.

Where does that leave us, the brick and mortar stores who support Magic year-round and develop the player base?   We are shut out from the events that could really help us get a payback for our hard work.  Sure, for those of us who spend enough money and run enough events to achieve Gold Tier Premier status, we get to host the Gold Tier tournament but that only generates about $300 in total revenue as payment for a year's worth of work while the PTOs share millions of dollars in revenue off of our hard work.

I don't know how much UDE pre-releases hurt sales for stores as none of my UDE players attend any of the pre-release events.  If they have even half of the impact of a Magic pre-release, large UDE stores could be losing an additional $2,000 - $3,000 per year because of the larger number of releases that UDE has per year.

Again, as Steve Olsen stated, the numbers don't lie.

The opinions expressed in this Talk Back article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.