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New Phyrexia? Mirrodin Pure? or a DOUBLE release?

Well I’m hoping that Wizards releases TWO products come April. Namely BOTH New Phyrexia AND mirrodin pure. Honestly Phyrexians got much of the more interesting stuff like infect and powerful removal. Wizards is playing a lot of games and teasing that it could be one or the other, but with the release of faction packs we can see that they are really playing with the idea of splitting into two dual identities for this set. Furthermore they have been playing around with set releases, such as some previous blocks had 4 (or 2 mini sets) also they have been playing with the idea of releasing more bigger sets. This would fit well into that strategy. IF they do not go with a dual release I would guess that they would go with New Phyrexia. This is because once again phyrexians got a lot of cool stuff and their existence is heavily felt in this set, however there is no mention of them in the title names. It’s just Mirrodin this and Mirrodin that. Phyrexians are supposed to be this big threat and their defeat of the Mirrans in the storyline would provide just so much fodder for future storylines that I just can’t concieve that Wizards would allow the Mirrans to win. The last side of the coin? Is there any good reason to have the Mirrans win this round? Their not bringing back Affinity, so just forget about it!

How to set up a Google Adsense account and get paid to write articles or make videos about Magic the Gathering

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Should a game store have a game room? If so what are the options?

This article reposted from lloydwrites really hits most of the issues square on the head.  I’ve added some comments in italics.

The question of whether or not a store should have a game room is highly contentious. Fortunately, both camps are on good terms and no one is likely to persecute you for your decision. In face, you might develop a serious case of “green grass syndrome” at some point during your store ownership as you consider all of the pros and cons of each side.

Advantages

Adding game space has one primary advantage and several corollaries descending from that advantage. The advantage is marketing opportunities. It does no good, however, if you don’t actively take advantage of it. That’s another article, though, so on with the advantages.

Branding.   The game room allows you to present your store as the place to play games, not just the place to buy games. You can use this to shape the image you present to your local market. Market your store as a social gathering place to encourage people to visit and increase the time they spend there.

Competitive Edge.  If you’re the only store in your market with a game room, you have a competitive edge against the other store. If you have the largest game room, you have an edge. If you have the best tables, the coolest design, or the most people showing up for your tournaments, each of these is a reason for players to go to your store instead of the competition.

Manufacturer Opportunities Some manufacturers require a game room for opening a direct account, or for other preferential treatment. Having a game room can entitle you to better discounts on certain product, better availability, or certain direct-to-retailer incentives.

Organized Play You can leverage the game space to host game leagues and tournaments. Offer prizes from your own inventory or take advantage of game manufacturer-sponsored events. These events often bring new players to your store, increase the amount these players spend, and encourage players to visit more often. Each of these factors increases sales. Regular events can create very large sales increases, especially if the owner is involved. The owner’s personal interest is a weighty endorsement. Regular play encourages new purchases. Combine the two and you might see sales of a single product line increase by $1,000 a week.

In my experience as a game store owner the business model of having a game store with a game room, I find that you also generate concession sales of candies, drinks, and the like.  The profit margin on these items is often significantly higher than on gaming product.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages are numerous and range from problem behaviors to purely financial reasons. They range from minor to serious in their value, and individual store owners apply different weight to each of these issues. If you plan to have a game room regardless of these problems, you should be prepared to handle them before you open.

Pollution of the Player Pool Once gamers start getting together, they share information. Some of that information is good. One Warhammer 40k player shows up for the game with his army laid out in Army Builder format, and his opponent compares the nice clean printout with his scribbles on spiral-bound notebook paper. Before the day is over, you’ve sold yet another copy of Army Builder. Some of that information-sharing is bad. The CCG crowd is particularly notorious for this–they share the concept of buying their cards from online discounters, and your box sales begin to decrease with each new set. Some players advise others to download books from file-sharing sites instead of buying them from your shelf 12 feet away. Players from a competitor’s store might encourage the new players you created at great investment of time to go play elsewhere. Gamers might also get together to form a club. It sounds exciting and fun, but the club’s first organized action is often asking for a discount. They feel if there’s no benefit to joining the club, that nobody will join. Do you give the discount and reduce how much money your biggest spenders spend, or do you risk alienating the club members? Also many gamers will often seek to make money by either liqiudating game pieces they no longer use, or trading up.  These gamers will see you as a competitor and some will start to actively try to damage your reputation for their own financial benefit, and you will lose customers.  They will essentially open up a store within your gameroom.  If you try to enforce policies preventing this from happening you will lose more customers as those who used your gameroom for their own purposes stop coming.

Mess Drinks, food, loose cards, CCG wrappers, miniature sprues, spilled paint, glue–if you sell it intact in your store, you can probably find pieces of it in your game room at the end of the day. Over the course of the day, cleaning up after this mess or hounding the gamers to do it themselves can take a heavy investment in your time (or the time of the people you’re paying an hourly wage).  Also spilled drinks and food items can damage other people’s property, and fights can break out.  In a restaurant model workers will receive a tip for taking care of the mess.  As a game store owner, you won’t.

Theft You know people will steal from you at some point during your career. You might not have thought that they would steal from each other. Do you kick somebody out when you suspect he’s stealing? What if you’re wrong? No matter what you do, you’ll lose customers over it. Similar to theft is the concept of “trade ****.” You know the crowd. These are the competitive players of CCGs (or now CMGs) who trade their commons or uncommons for “money rares” from the new or younger players. I’ve heard a player cheer “I just made $70 off that guy!” moments after the new player left the store. At some point, those players wise up and you have a customer who probably won’t return and might tell his horror story to his friends.

Cheating If you run tournaments, you’ll encounter a variety of cheating methods that will make you cringe. Players not marking off damage to their ‘mechs in Battletech. The Magic player the others call “Howling Mine” because he keeps drawing extra cards when he thinks he can get away with it. Mis-marked or loaded dice. Marked sleeves. The cheater chases off other players and leaves people with a bad impression of your store. When players are caught cheating or even if there is an honest misunderstanding about a game ruling you can lose that customer.

Liability How much insurance do you have? Care to find out the hard way? Wait until a player in the game room leans back on a chair and falls, or somebody has a bad problem with a hobby knife, or a fight breaks out over a tournament ruling. If these people were playing at home, the problem might still have happened, but at least you wouldn’t be on the hook for it.

Cost The game room costs money. You pay rent for your space, and whatever space you devote to your game room costs a certain amount. If you pay a total of $15 per square foot per year (after adding your rent, CAM and any other charges) for your 2,000 square feet, and you devote half of that to your game room, you spend $15,000 so that gamers can have the privilege of playing games in your store. The game room also has hidden costs. Who’s running those events? If it’s you, then you presumably pay somebody to run the counter. If it’s an employee, you pay his wage. If you’re giving customers a discount, it still costs money. You can get volunteers to run some events, but volunteers can’t do all of it. Better Alternatives This thought is the main point of contention with the game room. What else could you do with the $15,000+ it costs to maintain that game room each year? If you think you can make it more productive with an aggressive TV commercial campaign, then you should rent a smaller location and spend that $15,000 in advertising. A more common approach is to spend that money on inventory to fill that other 1,000 square feet. Another $15,000 in inventory could earn $45,000 in annual sales over and over again without all the hassles that come with the game room. New product lines or deeper stocking of current product lines can earn be as much of a competitive edge as the game room. This list doesn’t include all the points on either side, but it does represent the major arguments. At least one list has identified about 30 complaints against, for example, most of them falling under the broad category of “unwelcome behavior.”

Comments and questions are always welcome in the forum. Lloyd Brown III www.lloydwrites.com

Konami (Yugioh) vs. Hasbro (Magic the gathering): Who’s winning?

Well let’s look at how these CCG titans compare against each other where it counts… the stock market!

As of the date of this article Konami stock goes for $16 each and is significantly down from April of this year.  In June of 2008 there seems to have been a real dive in profitibality as stocks soared to more than double it’s current valuation.  Before the dive stocks seemed to hover around the $25 mark.

Hasbro on the other hand has a stock valuation of $42 and has been on a steady climb since things took a dive at about the same time as Konami’s stock.  In fact Hasbro has resurged after the crash and has actually gone up and beyond their former being in the $20?s in 2006 and reaching the $30?s in 2007 and 2008.

Of course these companies have diverse  investments outside of their respective trading card games, but seeing the overall success of the parent let’s us see how big of a “warchest” these companies have and let’s us guess as to the mindsets and goals that the companies may have.

Things at Konami are looking pretty scary and we COULD use this to interpret their recent releases of pretty much guaranteed best sellers of tins and the legendary collection as efforts to up profitability, but we’ll get to that later.  Konami’s other investments outside of licensing the Yugioh tcg include it’s investments in primarily the video game industry.  Konami is at heart a video game company, and a large investment in a product line like multi million dollar projects such as the creation and marketing of Metal Gear Solid can have a significant impact on the company’s bottom line.

 

Hasbro also prints up many many many games and toys outside of the Magic the Gathering product.  In fact, while one product line can fail (such as Hecatomb) it is possible for the parent company to continue to grow due to the strength and variety in it’s other investments.

Hasbro’s divisions are doing well however and it is less likely that Hasbro’s higher ups will be pushing their underlings to make radical changes to formulas that already work.  (of course there is a certain amount of variety that has to happen in card games as new sets are released.)

Konami on the other hand should be willing to try more risky strategies to regain their footing, stock price, and profitability.

Round 1 (overall health of parent company).  Hasbro wins.  Magic the gathering status… unclear.

Yugioh cards printed since gold series 3 have been on cheaper material.  No doubt about it.  The cardboard feels waxy and kind of sticks together.  Yugioh cards were always printed on cheaper cardboard.  In fact if you rip a yugioh card you will see that there is just paper inside, whereas if you rip a magic the gathering card, or even a pokemon card, you will see a colored strip in the paper which gives the card more durability.   Yugioh sells 9 cards in a pack for MSRP $3.99.  Magic the gathering sells 15 cards in a pack for MSRP $3.99.  Magic the gathering OBVIOUSLY costs more to produce per pack (maybe even more than double).  Yugioh has STEPPED UP their profitability by making cards cheaper.

Round 2 (profitability per unit).  Yugioh (konami) wins.

Magic the Gathering has long promoted limited formats such as draft and sealed.  This sells a heck of a lot more product.  They also use a game mechanic called “rotation.” which causes secondary market card values to stay healthy enough to prevent sales from taking a dip.  There are significant numbers of people that buy product and draft packs on a regular basis.  HOWEVER Yugioh has a much larger casual market.  They also have a children’s tv show.  When you go to small stores and deli’s you are MUCH MORE likely to see a box of yugioh cards as casual audiences equal greater profit margin for retailers.  (hardcore gaming customers are more likely to seek discounts since they are repeat buyers.  furthermore Magic the gathering players are usually older which means they can travel further and have more autonomy in their choices of where to buy packs.)  Yugioh booster boxes also have a much smaller retail footprint than magic the gathering booster boxes which make their inclusion onto crowded retail counters easier.  So who wins this round?  According to Guiness’s world book of records Konami has the world record as in terms of numbers of cards sold.  Due to superior design for retail spaces and better profitability for partners (retailers) it seems that Yugioh wins this round.

Round 3 (overall sales) Yugioh wins Round 3