[CtH] Microgame Marketing Thingy!

[guildofblades]

Our color copier runs about $.04 a page, but only because we are always bargain hunting for cheaper toner. If bought at regular prices, it would be about $.065 per page.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com

[Mike Holmes]

Hmm. We sell games smaller than that at The Forge booth.

At GenCon, IIRC, they were giving away what was essentially small copies of Vampire: the Requiem, that had rules enough to play, sample characters, and a sample scenario to go with. They were crippleware in that they didn't include chargen rules - most importantly the splatty parts. But otherwise it was a full game in color, saddlestitched like you plan, and about the same size.

All of which is to say that I think that if you have a game like VTR to sell and are planning on selling many thousands of copies of a large book and lots of supplement material, that the cost of something like this might be justified. And then again, it might not be either - I don't know how well that game is doing. My point is that I think it's of dubious usefulness as a marketing tool. I'm never going to purchase VTR, and I've read that little book thoroughly. It's even more dubious to me that it makes sense as a marketing tool for an indie game.

Again, why not sell it? Just seems too small? We sell stuff like that all the time.

Mike

[Josh Roby]

I really need to get some hard numbers so I can start throwing them around.

The idea is that these would cost me pennies to make each copy, and that people at GenCon leave the Con, go to their hotel rooms, and then try and figure out what to do next.  If they've got this cute little game already at hand, hey, why not play that?  And if they do that, how likely might they be to visit the booth the next day?  As I've got it now, CtH is all about traffic management at the Con.  Maybe they go home and go to the website, and that's nice, but hits do not equal sales.  So I lay out forty, fifty bucks for a thousand copies, and expect fifty or so visitors to the booth, and a handful of book sales.  But 'a handful of book sales' is enough profit to justify the forty-fifty bucks on the Microgame.  (Even if it doesn't work out, forty-fifty bucks spent to find out that that doesn't work is not a big loss.)

Contrast that with the VtR handout thing that White Wolf produces, which I assure you is more than pennies a copy (glossy color, I'm assuming).  These are designed to go home with you and build brand for White Wolf.  They're designed to make you want to buy in to the Vampire product line that day, the next day, and weeks later, based on the production values of the handout (gee, is it black with red type?) rather than the actual play of the game.  Is anybody going to play the VtR handout in their hotel room that night?  The appeal of encyclopaedic games like that is the immersion and fetishized memorization of the big gothy world; the VtR handout cannot offer that, and I sincerely doubt anybody would play the anemic version.  Which is not to say that the handout won't work for White Wolf; it's just not going to work by being played.  It implies the big gothy world and expects sales on the basis of that appeal.  They'll spend a few hundred dollars on their handouts, get ten or twenty new fans of the line, and expect to see a return on that over the next few years as their new fans buy multiple books in the line (and hope for a pyramid-scheme effect as playgroups buy multiple copies of fatsplats).  Costs justify again.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

You touch here on something I'm considering with Shock:: A free little book with a completely built world in it that you can play. Then, at the end, it says, "There are rules for building this stuff. Go buy them!"

I'm not certain this is a good idea, though. First off, promotional materials have to be perfect. That means that they have to leap into the hands of passersby, and that means excellent graphic design, color, and sleek professionalism, all of which cost money and/or time. Ironically, folks will pay a little bit for something that's not professionally made, but they won't even pick up something that's free if it doesn't look good. Something about it not being worth anything to anyone, then. Or, worse, like they'd be doing you a favor by picking up what is obviously a promotional item for your product, and they're leery of what they'll have to trade you when you appear to be asking nothing.

Nonetheless, I'm very, very interested in what you produce and its success. I'd love to see that I'm wrong about this.

[Josh Roby]

Agreed, Josh.  That's why I went with a very basic, streamlined, sort of "Danish Modern" look for the CtH booklet.  Given my manufacturing plans (xerox or laser printing at best) I didn't dare put in photo or art that had difficult greyscales, and kept the cover to simple vector art.

For your Shock: booklet, would you be including characters (and therefore not the matrix)?  Maybe space to scribble down minutae?  Perhaps in your case it would be most useful to make the booklet functional and consumable, so playing it has the players filling it out and using it up?

[Mike Holmes]

It's been not only my observation, but that of others, that free handouts of anything do not generate any play. That is, you hand out 1000 of these thingies, and you get 0 return. No matter how cheap they are, it doesn't matter, even when they're the expensive glossy things they don't do any good.

OTOH, if you sell them, then they do some good. Yes, I'm saying that 1000 free copies will generate zero play likely. While if you sell 30 copies at $4 a throw, you make some money, people will play the game, and people do come back for your other products.

Now, I could be wrong. But shoving free stuff into people's hands at GenCon seems pretty useless from everything I've ever seen. Basically makes work for the convention hall workers who have to drag bags of the stuff to the dumpsters each day. Can anyone give me the stats on Kat's "War Stories?" What was that, to photocopied pages stapled to each other?

Mike

[Josh Roby]

You may very well be right, Mike, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was the case.  Assigning a cost-point to a product can increase its perception of value.  If I do this and it falls on its face, I'll be sure to post a follow-up here, and we can "settle" the matter one way or the other.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

Yeah, please do, Joshua.

[Mike Holmes]

That's probably the best strategy. Seeing as you were intending to sink the costs anyhow (and they're not tremendous).

Mike