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 makes a quick observation on Origins, and then discusses the selling of promotional items.
Origins took place this past weekend and for the umpteenth time in a row, I did not attend. Maybe 'twas me but I just did not see much promotion about it this time. No posters or flyers sent to the store, social media has been pretty quiet about it until this week and I have received far more emails touting Gen Con ("The Best Four Days in Gaming") than I did Origins, so I shall have to live the Origins lifestyle vicariously through Twitter and Facebook.
Every once in a while we have someone ask us about buying promotional items such as Friday Night
Magic foils or
Yu-Gi-Oh! Sneak Peek cards, or we see a store selling promotional items online. Just recently, we spotted someone selling Free RPG Day promotional items on eBay weeks ahead of the official day of the event. (You did know that Free RPG Day is June 20th, right?)
First of all, if you are a customer and you received a promotional item, it belongs to you. You are free to sell it, keep it, give it away, jump up and down on it or whatever you choose to do. Once it leaves the retailer's possession, any agreement the store may have with the provider ends and you the consumer may freely do what you wish with it, including selling or trading it.
What the retailer can do with promotional items may or may not be restricted based on the agreement with the provider of the item. For example, stores have an agreement with Wizards of the Coast that we will not sell the promotional cards provided for Friday Night
Magic. WotC provides the cards to us to use as prizes during the event, and in return we agree not to sell them. In fact, that is why you will find stores that will not take FNM promos in trade until they are no longer Standard legal, so that there is no chance of WotC finding them offering a FNM promo for sale. Similarly, with the Buy-It-by-the-Box promo cards that WotC provides stores to give away with purchase of a booster box from most sets (
Modern Masters being the exception), stores are directed to give away one card per customer, not one card per box, and any cards not given away are supposed to be destroyed.
A similar agreement exists between stores and Wizkids for their
HeroClix OP items. Here it is a bit more of a gray area, as unlike promos from WotC, stores do have to pay for the OP promos from WizKids and some stores have argued that having to pay for promotional items means they are not promos but product. Still, the agreement stores enter into is pretty straightforward. In return for being able to buy OP materials, stores agree not to sell them until given the OK by Wizkids. When this happens, it is usually months after the end, as in the case of the
Fear Itself OP campaign, which ran throughout 2013 but from which stores could not sell any remaining boosters until mid-2014. Same thing with the
War of Light boosters from 2014. Until WizKids gives the official OK, stores cannot sell
War of Light boosters, except as part of a
War of Light OP campaign. Any store you see selling sealed
War of Light boosters is doing so in violation of their agreement with WizKids.
Other promotional items are iffy. I have not seen any directives from Steve Jackson Games or Atlas Games regarding promos from them, and stores were selling the promos from TableTop Day before the event even ended; but the stores had paid for those promos and had not entered into any agreement with TableTop or Geek & Sundry.
In general, if the promos are part of an organized program and promoted by the supplier for the purpose of driving customers into the store, there are probably restrictions on selling them, otherwise likely not.
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.
