Happy Desire Day

I have talked in the past about how my ordering at Fan Boy Three is biblical.

One.

Few.

Many.

In an ideal world every game is ‘forty’. There are a lot of forty in the bible because that was a really big number. It’s like ‘big number shorthand’ in the way that ‘biblical ordering’ is shorthand for ‘Dave orders by anticipating demand’.

Why is demand for some games higher than others? Can you quantify it? More importantly, can you predict it?

What is desire?

Today being Valentines Day it seems apropos to discus desire, even if it’s just in boardgame form.

Again I’ve talked in the past about how there are three essential tiers of customers: a casual hobby base who might want two or three boardgames a year, a hobbyist tier who might buy a boardgame a month and the cognoscenti who probably buy or back at least one boardgame a week.

One.

Few.

Many.

To the cogniscenti desire is intellectual. They know the artists, the designers, the publishers, they have contributed to the hotness – that’s what makes the hotness the hotness. Before the game is even on kickstarter they’ll know whether they want it or not.

(They want it).

Having an intellectual response to a thing is to have a covet reaction. The cognoscenti have to have it, because their whole identity is driven by being the person who has to have it.

Knowledge.

Physical product.

Experience.

We didn’t sell a single copy of MND Management for the first month. Not one. This is because the cognoscenti had it, but not enough of them had played it – which is a cognoscenti flaw. Like a flock of finches, relying on cognoscenti to drive desire based sales is tricky and almost impossible. Until there are enough of them in the sky you don’t see the pattern, because they are all flying in different directions.

A lot of influencers are cognoscenti too.

Having a game that you are excited about but get around to at some point isn’t ideal. But parsing which one you play when dozens are arriving each month is hard.

And so you wait.

MND Management doesn’t have an attractive box or a decent price point. It’s not a handselling game. The games we handsell are games we sell to people who don’t know what game they want, which is to say mostly the casual tier. The ideal game to handsell is reasonably priced, professional looking and quick to explain. You have a huge stack of them – many – so customers feel that buying a copy isn’t a leap of faith. They are taking your advice, and if we have a pile of forty of them it must be good, right? And to be honest, for a casual gamer pretty much everything they buy from me is likely to be a revelation.

Shopping brings its own desire. Purchasing brings a spike in dopamine, and the distance between the act of purchasing and the act of owning is something gamblers call ‘the drop’. The shorter the drop, the more addictive the spike. This is why slot machines work to fool your brain into playing them, why even that wasn’t fast enough for casinos and so we have instant video poker.

Drop drop drop drop drop drop drop drop love.

It’s the middle tier that is difficult to capture, both as a publisher and as a retailer. Hobbyists are like another great biblical reference – the disciple Thomas the doubter. If cognoscenti desire is of the head and casual desire is of the heart, then hobbyists require proof. Proof that this game is going to fill that void.

And this is where influencers come in.

You are an influencer in your store of course. Hobbyists bought stuff before Youtude, Instagram and Tiktok were a thing. They read magazines, watched reviews, weighed up decisions. If you don’t buy everything and you won’t buy nothing, choosing something is surprisingly hard work. Our Roman ancestors would have divined entrails, but here we are, joining Facebook groups and watching Shut Up and Sit Down.

The day after Wil Wheaton talked about a game during Tabletop Season One it sold out. Entirely. Globally.

Desire based demand is impossible to predict, because when those starlings flock you can’t believe there are so many starlings in the world.

Wingspan was one such game. Hence all the bird metaphors. Throw in some bees and I’m biblical again.

Print run after print run after print run – demand was bottomless. Even Bed Bath and Beyond got in on the act. When something is hot everyone wants it and nobody wants anything else.

Influencers don’t have to be a person. They can be a show.

Attendees at Essen drive the BGG hotlist, the BGG hotlist drives a proportion of sales – enough to make it a good arbiter of hot or not. This year there were three games everyone was talking about – Boonlake, Golem and Ark Nova. By the time two of those had hit stores, everyone was only talking about Ark Nova.

Golem doesn’t even appear to have entered distribution.

Ark Nova sold out. Is on rolling reprint like Wingspan and Terraforming Mars was.

Boonlake also exists.

You can’t sell many without desire. But you can’t sell any without stock. How many of the 3500 games released each year break through to evergreen? How many end up on my sale table, that each year seems bigger and lasts longer?

Is there a better way?

By Tabletop Season Three we were getting advance notification of the games in the series. Everyone knew the importance of the show and every game wanted to be on it. It should have run and run on primetime, but folks get greedy when they smell success. The temptation to bend that desire to your service is great.

Can I make somebody buy something they don’t want? Yes. Should I enrich myself at somebody else’s expense?

Should I in fact sell Metazoo?

The answer of course is a resounding no. St Valentine died for love, regardless of which version of his martyrdom you choose to believe.

Why didn’t MND Management zing? Because many of the people who had bought it loved it, but in a way that was clinical. Detached. Because it was too expensive, an odd box size that defied shelving and an odd cover design that defied impulse desire. It’s not a Hollywood rom com box – it’s a quirky arthouse cinema story box, dubbed into a language you don’t understand featuring characters you can’t relate to.

As an industry how can we identify and promote MND Management better? How can we springboard it into wider public consciousness?

The team behind it have – predictably – returned to Kickstarter.

A lot of people think Kickstarter is the answer to their prayers. If only more people knew about their KS campaign, they’d have more direct sales. That somehow direct sales are the only thing worth pitching at. But this ignores the desire of the now, the immediate, the impulse. It requires us to all be cognoscenti – to have a detached relationship with the objects of our desire. So this can never be a maximum strategy for market penetration let alone market domination. It’s a gated community we can’t break out of. A hobby that requires us to have disposable income to spend years in advance of gratification.

And put simply, this is not the way humans work for maximum happiness delivery. Desire by its nature is mercurial. It can’t fit into a two week preorder slot.

Look at the biggest selling games of all time. A thousand copies is great but it’s one twenty thousandth of the copies of Catan sold. Ten thousand copies – a hefty print ruin by anyone’s chalk – isn’t even a drop in the ocean of desire.

We need to be better at this.

And if we are the rewards are immense.

Not even the biggest games companies in the industry are pulling their weight here. In fact, nobody is pulling any weight at all. It’s like a scattershot of hopes and dreams spaffed off into the ether, in the hope that it works.

And for most games it doesn’t.

If you are a publisher or a distributor, head to your local store on a Saturday. See what people touch, what people pick up, where their gaze falls. Think of how people are going to find out about your game. Ask yourself why people are going to buy it.

Why they desire it.

Influencers, I want you to ask yourself a question. Is the game you are going to talk about available? Is it on the market? Is it sold out? Is the desire you are engendering going somewhere, like into a store and buying a copy of the game. Because honestly, that’s what everyone watching you review a game wants. What they desire the industry to be. Connected. Dots joined.

Desire fulfilled, satisfaction guaranteed. Or your money back.

One.

Few.

Many.

I want every game to be a many. I want the gap between desire and fulfilment to be seamless. I want publishers and distributors and retailers to prosper. I want to be able to handsell MND management like I handsell Wingspan, I want a giant stack of Ark Nova and you want that too.

St Valentine isn’t just the patron saint of lovers. He’s also the patron saint of greeting card companies. And if today isn’t about spreading happiness through selling desire I don’t know what is!