This is a column about porridge.
Rarely is the porridge just right. Games retail is often a Goldilocks game – too often our porridge is too warm or too cold, our mattress too lumpy, our young home intruder selves lost in the forest about to be eaten by hungry bears whose food we have stolen.
It would be great, wouldn’t it – to sleep soundly on a full belly of stock for once. Not too much or too little.
Just right.
But I don’t live in a fairytale world buddy. I work for a living, like the seven dwarves. Hi ho, hi ho – it’s off to the game mines we go. Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy and some other dwarves I don’t really give a shit about because this isn’t a column about dwarves or porridge.
Turns out it was all a metaphor.
For Lorcana.
“What do you mean, I get to buy a game that isn’t complete? Who would buy a game where you only get sixty cards out of hundreds, and then you have to buy more packs to get more cards? That seems like a really bad idea” said an earlier version of me, passing on Magic. “What do you mean, you’ve bought fifty boxes of a new TCG sight unseen? Just because people have told you it’s going to be big? We are going to be sitting on those stupid boxes forever, like our Middle Earth the Wizards overstock!” said an earlier version of me, passing on Pokemon. Forever was shorter then.
We sold out in two days.
If you weren’t part of Magic fever thirty years ago or Pokemon 25 years ago, buckle up buttercup. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. Bumpy is the eighth dwarf – he runs the manic minecart ride at Hi Ho Mountain. And trust me, you want to be in the car rather than strapped to the tracks.
Now, unless you have an excellent Ravensburger trading history and a dossier of distro blackmail photos, the chances are you are not going to be filling your hamster cheeks with all the Lorcana porridge you can eat. No, this is going to be more like the start of Oliver Twist rather than the end of Christmas Carol.
But you can still come out of this looking like Scrooge McDuck – assuming you play your cards right.
Or at least sell them. Ravensburger and Disney both need this to work. They have a strong team, a great IP, a fantastic product range and they are pitching for a portion of the Disney merchandising spend. This is exciting for a number of reasons.
Last year was Magic the Gathering’s greatest ever year. Over $1 billion in revenue. This means it is catching up with Pokemon. But Disney merchandising alone – not the movies or the streaming or the theme parks or the videogames – is $60 billion. That’s a lot of mouseketeer money and no matter how big a portion comes our way, it’s a bigger portion than we currently have.
Because the House of Mouse fans are not natural gamers. They aren’t competitive in the way we understand competition and they have no financial filter as – again – we understand it. The heart wants what the heart wants. I learned that from Encanto.
Also see: generational trauma
It’s going to be easy to sell Lorcana. It’s always easy to sell something you don’t have enough of. As people started putting the line up for preorder, stores were hit by huge phishing attacks buying out all their stock. One store had three hundred box orders at the end of their first listing weekend. Nobody yet knows allocation, though rumor has it that it is going to be brutal. You will not have enough.
What you do have is an exclusive hobby retail presales window of two weeks before mass gets it. That’s two weeks for a frenzy to hit every store in the world like nothing on earth. You will buy out your competitors simply to get their allocation. When it hits mass, retailers will be waiting to buy every piece on every shelf in every store.
In
The
World.
A lot of us have talked privately about how this will create a false positive. Nobody will know what demand is really like, because nobody will have enough to bottom out. Magic the Gathering does not have a chain of theme parks. When Pokemon opened a Pokemon centre for a limited time in London’s Westfield Centre, there were eight hour queues. Daily. For a month.
Pokemon – globally – is around three percent of the annual Disney merchandising spend.
So what do we do? What is our function here – beyond selling packs?
Well, this is where Organised Play comes in. I know many of you have wondered – post Covid – what the point of Organised Play is. Well, originally Organised Play was about sales and marketing. Companies would throw you some promo cards or promo figures to run events to support their game, because engaged players BOUGHT MORE. Remember the days when they used to buy that ‘more’ from you? Yes, me too.
The problem with Organised Play is that it became a suckers game. Done wrong, you became a clubhouse where nobody bought anything – and publishers were surprisingly good with that. The problem is, we were bears who were running a rent free staycation for Magic Goldilockses, fluffing their mattresses, making them porridge just the way they liked it – free and copious. And there was always another bear family in Fabletown eager to please. Whole generations rose and died believing that Goldiebums on bearseats was some kind of instant profit generator. Porridge for everyone and Premium porridge for the nicest cottages. And any bear that growled was the Wrong Sort of Bear.
Organised Play stores are third spaces. It’s hard to effectively monetize most third spaces, and yet we succeeded – as an industry. This idea that space should be free and infinite is a distortion of the reality of the fact that space costs money. Time does too.
Of course Disney are no strangers to distorting reality, as anyone who has ever read the original Hugo version with Hunchback after singing along to the Disney version will testify. Spoiler: Esmerelda dies and Quasimodo is entombed alive with her corpse.
Ah, but wait. Let’s turn that frown upside down with a sprinkling of stardust and Disney magic. Because you’ve never had a store like me.
I often wondered what the Disney store would have been like if they had embraced Experiential Retail. Disney fans buy a lot of Disney stuff. They live it, eat it, sleep it and breathe it. But lets for a minute talk about pin trading.
Pin trading happens at the Disney parks. You can buy pins from the cast, from a seemingly ever changing selection of pins. And then you trade. If this was Magic people would say ‘how much for that Goofy pin’ and money would change hands. But this is Disney. Money is no good here.
People
Trade
They trade pins they don’t have for pins they do. It would be kind of weird the other way around, but bear with me. At the dawn of Pokemon kids traded like that too – because getting pins you hadn’t owned was a goal in and of itself. People travel to the parks for pin trading events, simply to score new pins they haven’t owned by trading pins they do.
This could be your store. Only now they can buy packs and Villainous. If you stock Loungefly bags and Disney tat, Funko Disney Illustrator – great game BTW highly recommended – imagine a world of Disney games and a community of like-minded individuals ready to play with you.
Be our guest! No really, be OUR guest.
Imagine a Disney Princess D&D party, ready to go. Mulan the fighter, Meridia the ranger, Pocahontas the Druid, Esmerelda the Bard, Belle the Artificer, Rapunzel the Monk, Elsa the Sorceress, Tiana the Warlock. Or potentially they are all Wizards because they all have familiars… But this is an opportunity to rebrand everything we do, to a whole new community of people who spend money on their passion – frequently beyond reason!
That’s what we are playing for. That’s what Lorcana is offering us. Because yes, being mad keen on a thing can be a barrier to embracing other things. But a well run Organised Play store? The thing you become mad keen on is belonging, attending events, trading, being part of a community that services your needs to buy products and your desire to share that with others.
So there are Fifty Nine Billion Reasons why I’m going in heavy in Lorcana. Not just for the cards or the money. Because these are people you don’t see. People you haven’t engaged. People who were betrayed when Disney shut their stores post Covid. Cast adrift, alone and lost in the wilderness, desperately craving some third space that would welcome them with open arms and a trade folder of shiny Disney cards.
And from August 18th, that is me.
On August 17th at one minute to midnight we are bringing out the product for a midnight launch and case opening. How many products could handle a midnight launch? How many triple A videogames can handle that these days?
You can. Now.
With this.
In the days running up to and after, you will field increasingly desperate calls for any amount of product. Collectors will want to squirrel away multiple cases of product to flip. Don’t let them. This game needs to be in Disney FAN hands, sold by pack not case. Do what we do and limit sales to one pack or four packs per customer per day. Eke it out. Maximise your long term revenue those first two weeks.
Run demos
Sell starters.
Ravensburger plan Organised Play from the get go, but nothing competitive as yet. That suits the market for this game just fine. Disney as a brand skews female. You can play Lorcana multiplayer like Commander. Imagine a night where people were hanging out, playing Lorcana, buying a pack or two, grabbing snacks and sodas, trading cards with each other, maybe trading pins. Think of how Disney could have filled every Disney store with pre-engaged superfans, and marvel at the short sightedness of thinking the Covid online shopping boom had redrawn retail for ever.
You have the one thing money cannot buy.
Friends.
Lean into Cosplay. I just hired a second Cosplayer on staff – she probably doesn’t realize yet why. This is why. If you have craft supplies and craft activities, now is the time. Magic would kill for Magic players turning up in character, but that’s the difference between fans of a billion dollar brand and fifty nine billion dollars of Mouse fanatics.
Disney delivers.
When mass gets this, buy it out. You need it more than they do. Yes, this will deliver a false mass positive and lead to a mass reliant overprint further down the line. For Magic that was Homelands. Every spike, every fad, every second coming has a period where it tries to find its legs. You would say that it has a stellar first year which tails off in the second – if it wasn’t for Bandai continually proving that wrong. With Ravensburger’s strategy you’ll know the glut two weeks before mass does. Before Dragonball, Digimon and One Piece every new TCG went out of the gate like a rocket and then sputtered and died by the end of year two. That’s not the world any more.
Fifty. Nine. Billion. Dollars. Worth of fans.
And criminals.
If there is one other thing I have learned these past few years it’s that dramatic TCG media exposure and burglaries and armed robberies of game stores go hand in hand. Lorcana is already attracting attention. At the moment it’s the good kind – though trying to buy out entire shop supplies indicates a certain desperation among a certain type of retailer.
This is a trading card game. There is no way of keeping your distributor honest except talking about allocations. With each other. Distributors have been known to… hedge their bets on hot product and suddenly find a container of it when the price has doubled. This will happen. And you’ll pay it, simply to be the store who has it. And then somebody else will buy it simply to be the fan who has it.
During the Pokemon boom – and you’ll remember the total worth of Pokemon is around three percent of Disney merchandising annual spend – out of print boxes of Evolution went for ten times list price. At a certain point, it becomes attractive to break and enter and burgle a store who has stock. You are Aladdin’s cave, and it doesn’t take a Djinnious or a magic carpet to spirit your treasure away. Just a van and a brick.
Criminals will case your joint to know when your delivery arrives. Boxes will go missing from couriers. At one point in the UK a lorry carrying Pokemon was hijacked. Merchandisers delivering to mass are robbed and beaten, stock stolen at gunpoint. Stock will be shoplifted. If we were jewelers with $1000 wedding rings, we’d lock them up in a safe every night. But you can’t do that with a pallet of trading cards.
Invest in security cameras. Make sure you have Redcare or the equivalent. Watch out for smash and grab window displays. Train your staff again on shoplifter detection and – more importantly – to tell when your shop is being cased. Does that guy with the baseball cap spend an inordinate length of time checking out your security camera locations? The more you engage customers verbally – you can ask them about Lorcana, kill two birds with one stone just in case – the more an advance man is going to feel uncomfortable.
Store overstock in your house.
Store a case in your loft.
Plan now.
Plan which night Lorcana is going to be on. What Disney activities you can theme alongside it just in case you have no stock. Set aside enough decks when they come in that you can run eight person play sessions just with those if you have to.
Plan your singles folder strategy.
Having an open booster that customers can swap with is a proven tactic that just might be more proven with a Disneycentric fanbase who will want to swap duplicates for stuff they don’t have. Farm out the expensive stuff into singles. Then secure that folder. Imagine it is full of moxes, because in ten years it just might be. A set of D23 promos currently sells for $10,000.
And that buys a lot of porridge.
This? This is the real deal.
Thirty years ago, stores were not smart. It was an untested product that built its own category and in many ways crashed and burned by set six. Look where it is now.
Twenty five years ago, Organised Play barely existed. Stores sprang up only buying and selling Pokemon cards and everyone involved made out like bandits.
These things? Lightning rarely strikes twice, let alone three times. Here it is, the stormclouds gathering. Can you hear the Sorcerer’s Apprentice slowly building to a crescendo? Four months out. Fifty Nine Billion Dollars. Our industry – our stores – have never been better prepared. You have trained all your life for this one moment.
This is it.
I know, I know. You didn’t get enough. You could have sold more. It was too thin. It was too lumpy. But you my friend are in the porridge business now. We might not like it, but we sure as hell are going to serve it.
Happy ever after baby.
The Quantum Retailer 