Let’s talk boosternomics.
I often use boosters to explain economic problems to work experience students. Let’s pretend we were running a Magic tournament. Everybody who wants to play pays a booster into the pot. We then run a tournament. The winner of that tournament wins all the boosters. 36 players in, one booster box out.
There is nothing wrong with running a tournament like that. Winner take all. Most of the other players can afford to risk a booster entry on being the winner and taking it all. Last I heard, Poker was pretty big. World Series of Poker 2019, $10,000 buy in, 8,569 entrants, $10Million for the winner.
Here’s the thing though. Most people don’t win. Not winning is, how shall I put this? A Negative Play Experience. Is it worse if you were defeated in the final? Worse if you were player 8,569?
Unless you are in a sealed environment where you have to play, over time, the players who constantly perform poorly will either ‘get gud’ or stop playing. The more one player consistently wins, the faster this will probably happen. The more games there are to play, the more options there are to be the king of any particular hill.
Winners like this system. But they don’t like a system that only delivers twenty players instead of 36. Or eight. Or one. Which is what happens over time.
So perhaps a system where everyone pays in a booster, plays a tournament and gets a booster back is better. Flat prize support is fair, its casual, you don’t need to be good to feel welcome. But under this system the only incentive to play better is to feel better. And why would you invest time and money without a Return on Investment?
You see this in replicated in every political economic discourse. Why try if everyone gets the same rewards. Why try if 35 people out of every 36 lose? Socialism versus Capitalism.
My mother used to say that striving was its own reward. But she wasn’t running Magic tournaments.
The original concept of Organised Play was as a sales and marketing tool. People would see games being played and want a piece of that action. They’d want the Dopamine hit from buying and the Oxytocin hit from playing. And the more they’d play, the more they’d buy.
From stores, theoretically. Because the internet didn’t exist.
Richard Garfield’s original concept for Magic: the Gathering was the card game that would be different whenever you played against a new opponent. Everyone would buy a deck and a couple of boosters and play each other and be constantly “oh my godness, what does that card do – I’ve never seen that before!” But it was such a success it spawned game magazines that previewed every card and presented price lists, and the values went up and there were singles dealers… and I think it is safe to say that if Peter Adkinson had any idea of the lightning he had captured in his bottle he’d have done it differently!
Nobody expected it to be this big.
The more people played, the more they wanted to buy, because the more they wanted to win.
Winning itself is a hit. Of Dopamine. Of Adrenaline. Success or failure at the turn of a card. In those days people still gambled for each other’s cards – ante. Yeah, that died fast.
Most early tournaments rewarded the top of the field.
But those folks KNEW that they had won. Knew they had done well. I found it… weird that we were not, as an industry, rewarding participation. I’d come from WizKids – from HeroClix and Mechwarrior. There were always prizes for the judge and the fellowship, to encourage good sportsmanship. Mike Jarvis always won it.
Winning wasn’t everything.
A lot of those games companies made those prize packs and prize figures available for free. It was a thank you for supporting them. It meant it was easy to monetise tournaments and still make them cheap.
Konami had the Negative Play Experience – the idea that if a player wasn’t having fun, they might not want to play. Wizards had EV – Expected Value – the idea that if there wasn’t enough of a prize, nobody would play in the first place. If nobody plays there is no visibility, no community, no incentive to ‘get gud’.
There’s no game.
I used to run a lot of high end tournaments, including two of the three biggest PTQs in UK history. My concept was simple – flat prizing for the T8, mostly flat participation prizing for the field. That way the folks who just come for the day out to see friends get a little Dopamine hit at the end as a thank you – and a big Oxytocin hit – and those big comp players feel that travelling and playing in a twelve hour Magic event was worth it.
Worth it – Expected Value – is a hard thing to arbitrate. Players have an expectation of event cost, an expectation of event quality, an expectation of judge professionalism and only the winner is actually happy at the end of the day, so squaring the circle is hard. They have no expectation of your profit.
Konami believe that every player should get their full entry back in product. But woe betide a store that ran without judge team or top heavy prizing. Negative Review Experience.
The art becomes in doing the math, working out break even, and adjusting it for happiness. Boosternomics.
In the beginning I talked about Capitalist models versus Socialist models. But we are a store. We have product at MSRP and we have margin. And that gives us some wiggle room that the Treasury Department does not have. The Organised Play equivalent of quantitative easing.
My tournaments are primarily priced to be affordable. A tournament that is over-priced is an Oxtocin black hole. Fewer ‘community’ players, more entitled players. EV breeds entitlement – it’s almost the definition of it. Look, we are stores – we are no strangers to RoI. We don’t have a monopoly on it. Top tier players expect value like billionaires expect limousines. Some have flown in. How can your $10, $20, $50 tournament generate enough prizing to justify that expense? They are running a constant balance sheet and its always in the red.
Stop trying to make these people happy.
Your target rich environment are the community players. People for whom opening a booster HAS VALUE. A booster has minimal value to you, just like it has minimal value to a top tier comp player. So use it to spread happiness.
That player who got a bad sealed pool. That player who missed out on the cut. That player who wore a funny hat, or brought his mates up in the car and scrubbed out and now has to wait for them. Five boosters is what? Less than fifteen dollars?
(We joke about the hat, but ‘wear a hat, win a mat’ was a feature at our Yugioh Sneak Peeks for three years, until a guy turned up without one and made this amazing crown out of Yugioh cards while playing. That hat was unbeatable!)
At smaller events too.
You see, those big events – with participation prizes and reasonable entry costs to attract casual players – are potential money spinners. Every player you get above break even is at best an extra booster paid out. Your break even is your T8 prizing and your judge and venue costs. Add it together, take off any participation prize from your entry cost and divide the one by the other.
Every extra player you get is profit.
Smaller events are about expectation management. A tiny number of players is a buzzkill. For you. for the person who turned up. Modern retail is entertainment – sometimes you still have to put on the greasepaint and do the show for an audience of one. The show must go on. That person deserves happiness – they came. Before now I’ve closed the entire shop and taken everyone in it to the cinema.
But first I try to make sure that every event fires. I put staff in. I put random people in to draft for the shop. I was losing money and energy and happiness anyway. Giving everyone an extra booster, or a free event is just another RoI.
Had a guy come in recently, and he told me that he’d
first come as a kid. Him and his brother were buying the old Star Wars
miniatures that WotC used to make, going through a box of commons and uncommons,
trying to work out their money. And I had apparently walked over and said ‘just
have them’, because they looked like good kids who would give them a good home.
I had loads of those figures. But my actions made a difference in somebody’s
life so much that he remembered it.
Came back ten years later to buy all his D&D books from us.
The best Organised Play tournaments give you entry into subsequent tournaments. The prize money can’t buy. Everything else money can buy. Money is the worst, because everyone can see it on the table and do the math. They are conveniently blind to the venue costs and the judge costs.
So anyway, I’m the quantum retailer. I’m always looking for the sweet spot between two competing paradigms. Organised Play stores used to be the exception, and now they are the rule. Organised Play used to be a loss leader – for publishers – and now it’s an income generator. Organised Play used to be sales and marketing to drive in store purchase, and now it’s bums on seats and soda sales. I hoped – and I still do – that Wizards Premium is a step in the right direction.
Wizards used to have a policy they called ‘surprise and
delight’. They would randomly order game stores pizza for FNM. One in every
hundred Helvaults were foil. Mine was. I can testify that there was much
surprise and much delight.
But it is hard to corporatise fun.
Fun is organic, like happiness. Generated in the brain when we open that
booster or feel welcome. When we belong. When our friendly local game store is
there to commiserate us when we lose and cheer us on when we win. For those of
us who have gone down the in store cafe route, it’s a cup of Yorkshire tea and
an award winning traybake. It’s ambience.
Making people happy is an investment. But bankrupting yourself doing it is not. And that makes nobody happy.
The Quantum Retailer 