As discussed in the earlier thread, we did set up a Forge booth for Spiel Essen this year; I just returned from Germany yesterday and am still waiting for our freight to arrive, in fact. I'll report on the project in the following for anybody interested in how to go about organizing something like this.

Preparations

First, let's talk about the logistics prior to the convention. The reason for why we haven't had a full-blown Forge booth at Spiel since 2006 has largely been because we don't have many people with solid economic interest in doing the booth here in Europe; there are fans, but designers are few and far between. The usual pre-convention confusion was ultimately resolved when I made a reservation for the booth, thinking that I wouldn't get hurt too much even if nobody else wanted to participate.

As it happened, I got a solid partner for the endeavour from Jim Raggi, an American indie designer who happens to live in Finland. We'd first met with Jim about a year back, so I haven't known him a long time, but he's a solid indie enterpreneur who could be trusted to pull off his part. We split the expenses 50/50 with Jim, which made the booth border-line profitable and gave us the minimal staff we needed to run it. The door was technically open for others to participate as well, but I didn't really have the time through summer to actively hunt for participants, so ultimately we went with a minimal ownership base on the project.

For expenses, the Spiel mini-booth costs a bit under 900 euros; they cite 550 € as the price, but that does not include the mandatory wall-rent and VAT that bring the cost up. We also had to get some furniture for the booth, but that proved to be a relatively minor expense, as my brother Markku dug up some old furniture and handily modified it into pieces that could be fit on an europallet for freight. Freight for the furniture and the respective stocks of Arkenstone and LotFP is apparently shaping up to be something like 250 €. Adding the personal travel and accomodation costs meant that we'd need to make sales to the tune of ~2000 € for Arkenstone to break even.

On the product front we had the wide but shallow Arkenstone retail library, consisting of over a hundred different indie titles, usually 2-6 copies of each. For frontline products that were actively marketed at the convention we chose our own products, of course, which meant in practice that the flagship line consisted of Zombie Cinema, The Shadow of Yesterday and Lamentations of the Flame Princess. After talking about it with Jim we decided to do a slight thematic split in the booth, stocking Old School Renaissance products and the other, mostly Forge, indie games on somewhat separate shelfs; this enabled us to present OSR as the distinct, exciting cultural trend that it is, as well as having a distinct cashier operation for Jim, lessening general anxiety about cash-box cock-ups.

For staff we had what I would consider a minimal crew: I and Jim were there with large heaps of both cultural and economic motivation, and then we had my brother Markku, Jim's wife Maria, Sami Koponen and Christoph Boeckle rounding up the booth. Christoph had an ashcan for his upcoming game Unspeakable with him, but otherwise the monkey-crew was unimbursed, highly motivated and absolutely essential to the booth. In hindsight I'd say that the 2x5 meter mini-booth could take roughly 10-12 members in a crew and still find sufficient things for everybody to do; we were slightly overworked all through the convention as it were. Perhaps 6 publishers would be optimal.

Most of our Spiel-related work before the convention concerned preparing furniture, product and on-position marketing materials; I also spent considerable working hours researching a Finnish export grant system that ultimately didn't actualize. As it happened, I'd say that we probably could have done more work with pre-marketing the booth in the Internet to positive effect, so that's something to keep in mind in the future. We also failed to create a visible Forge banner for the booth, having so many other things to worry about and no high-quality logo to work with. I'll definitely have to get somebody to paint a suitable banner for us before doing this again, one of the most typical customer refrains at the convention was that they had trouble reading my mind to realize that ours was the Forge booth.

On the other hand, the catalogue I worked on before the convention proved to be quite useful in actual practice, so I'm happy with that part. The catalogue introduced all the stuff we had to sell in 20 pages, including a prominent OSR section, a section on the trend of romantic drama in indie rpgs and some fluff about Arkenstone and such. I had three copies of the catalogue at hand at the convention, which proved a suitable number.

The booth layout we had rested on a single demo table for Zombie Cinema, some shelving and a couple of product display tables for the flagship products. I opted for the open booth layout I'm familiar with from Finnish conventions and the Forge Gencon booth. In practice we had sufficient room for one demo and 2-3 customer interaction spots at one time. With the 3-4 people concurrently in the booth this usually meant that we had two or at most three customer interactions going on at once.

Actual Convention

Christoph already got some photos of the booth into the Internet. Here's the left side of the booth, with the OSR stuff and Jim's base chair; you can see the product shelf on the right and know that it's the tail-end of the convention from how Zombie Cinema and TSoY have encroached into the shelf as other things have been sold out. Here is the right side with Markku on the right and my typically distinguished self on the left; the banner in the back reads "die Arkenstone" due to the shelving cutting off the buzzword.

The convention was typically exhausting and monomanic as we roped in customers and displayed the joys of independent gaming for their enjoyment. The customers were usually amiable and very prepared to part with their cash. OSR proved a tough sell, for many customers it was not an option despite half of the booth staff (myself included) being rather zealous about it. The most requested games that were not there were Fiasco and Apocalypse World, while the games with concrete lift (aside from the flagship line) were Dread, Grey Ranks and Polaris. In general the dominantly German customer base proved nice, curious and cultured with a marked preference for non-geeky, non-American games.

The booth next to us was an interesting indie computer game developer from Atlanta. The main product was a rogue-like CRPG called Legerdemain. The sales model was interesting in that the game itself is free, but they're also selling a cluebook/novel packaged with the game as a sort of deluxe model. We had several interesting discussions - my sort of independent crazies.

The high point of the convention for me was meeting Thomas Biskup - the guy sauntered all innocent-like to the booth as our very first customer on Thursday morning, keen to check out Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I made an ass of myself, babbling something about my great respect for his work. Luckily Thomas didn't get offended and in fact returned on Sunday to buy Zombie Cinema. Awesome, as the Americans say.

The second-best time was when Sami scouted out the local Glorantha society, which was selling Hero Wars Deluxe Edition at 5 € per copy. I bought them all and promptly added them to the retail section of our booth - it being a travesty to sell the game at just 5 € and all. I gave out some like candies to booth people and whoever, but most came back to Finland; I'll probably mark them up with a completely unfair price tag and sell them to people who can actually appreciate this historic gaming product.

As I hinted at above, the booth monkeys were crucial to smooth functioning of the booth; both Christoph and Sami started fine and progressed to surpass the owning class in their sales skills as we honed the booth operation. We could have done miracles for another week if not for the fact that I was overworking them by a factor of magnitude. As compensation we fed the monkeys with bananas; as the wise man remarked on the second day, "You feed the monkeys and then they fling the poop." As it happened, the poop was well and truly flung.

The days at Spiel felt long in comparison to Gencon and such, and I wasn't too keen to do anything too elaborate after-hours. We did get a session of Unspoken in on Friday night with Christoph, Markku and Sami - perhaps somebody'll post an AP report about that soon.

Results

Much of the customer base was what I came to call destination shoppers, people who already knew about the Forge brand and just needed our help in choosing what to buy out of the wide selection of products. The cold customers roped in were amiable as well, though; my estimation is that the average cold customer at Spiel was a softer target than they'd be at Gencon, in fact. This might have been because people come to Spiel specifically to buy (no other programming), or it could be a cultural difference.

The destination shopper usually spent between 50-100 euros at the booth, buying 3-5 games, perhaps. The cold customer would typically be impressed by Zombie Cinema and grab that. I understand that the Arkenstone sales revenue from the convention overall was about 1800 euros, which means that we're so close to covering our expenses that I don't know yet whether we're a bit over or a bit under - it depends on the exact proportions of retail vs. direct sales and some still outlying minor expenses. The OSR section didn't do as well, but I understand that Jim was happy about the experience and is looking forward to more international conventioneering. Christoph sold five copies of the Unspeakable ashcan, hopefully to people who'll find it interesting and worthwhile to try out.

Ideas

Obviously enough more on this later, but for now, some snippets of thought on the experience:

• An anonymous customer gave me an obvious idea: whyever didn't I finance this booth with the ransom model? We could've asked the community for a 1000 €, say, and then made it open for any indie publishers to attend. Considering the recent successes of the ransom model this doesn't seem that unrealistic, and it would take an enormous load of responsibility off the shoulders of the small European indie operators like me who are trying to establish an indie presence within the thick European convention network. Definitely something to think about.• The overall experience of the convention was exhausting but positive for me, so I'm open to doing it again. Right now I'm considering whether to go for Role Play Convention in Cologne next spring, or perhaps some other conventions coming up all the time in Europe, or if we should wait and plan patiently for the next Spiel in 2011 (perhaps combined with Lucca). There are other things to do out there aside from conventioneering, so it might be that I'll leave these major international adventures for others for a while before making any decisions.• The OSR seems prominent in the Internet, but it's still a young and somewhat shallow cultural movement in comparison to even such a relatively recent phenomenon as the Forge is - not many customers knew about or were interested about the OSR. It seems obvious to me that the cultural capital exists for OSR to be a big deal, but it needs more entry-level products and feasible commercial projects to have an impact on the ground.

Anybody else who was at Spiel, feel free to comment, especially if you can think of anything we could've done better.

Great write-up Eero! Makes me wish I'd gone to Spiel Essen once in the eight years I lived in the Netherlands!

Cool that you met Thomas Biskup. I've killed many hours in ADOM. :)

What types of products do you believe were needed for OSR to really work? Are you talking a complete commercial (indie) release starter product that is just "done right" . . . ? Or is there a need for a whole product line that is cohesive with adventures, supplements, etc.? Do you think it's Germans who are not interested, or Europeans in general, or just gamers?

I'm curious because (to me) it seems as if there's enough OSR stuff available to offer a fair variety of options, but you're saying there needs to be more. I actually wrote off OSR as being "done to death" and struck it from my list of potential development products.

I mean we've got a post bu Jim Raggi in FEB10 here which talks about the over-saturation being a myth, ok. I get it, Jim is empassioned about OSR. I'd expect nothing less.

But what then is the genre really, truly missing in order to become something which is more than a series of niche products in the eyes of the consumers? (I get that any answer is speculation, but it's relevant to the success of the OSR side of things at the convention, and I find it fascinating since I was a 0e/1e gamer in olden days.)

Hey Eero, thanks for the write-up! Good job with the booth. I’m looking forward to hear about your next endeavours. I think you’d find RPC to have more of a convention flair to it, also with the opportunity to run demos and even full games, with a huge space dedicated to actual play where chairs and tables are already set up.

As I mentioned in an earlier thread, there has been an “Indie Island” run by German fans at RPC for some years straight, so it would be a good idea to get in touch with them before you plan anything for RPC in earnest. I don’t think it would make much sense for two “Indie” booths to compete for customers. Just an idea that creeps up in my head: In order to keep the operation low profile, why not ask to join them as a booth monkey? They had SS and WoN at the booth last year anyway. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t mind you bringing along Zombie Cinema as well. Just musing.

- Frank

Hello

Ack, my pics are horrible. Need to get a real camera. Thanks for the write-up and the nice words. It was a pleasure! Let it be it known to other Forge booth managers: I'm for hire!

Jim put up his own thoughts about the endeavour, for those interested. He raises some interesting questions about visibility and just plain old explaining what you are selling.

Here's the interview I did with Eero on the Forge booth. I hope, the quality is acceptable. It was not all that easy with my home equipment and the background noise.

→ PiCast — Spiel 2010 — Arkenstone Publishing

Have fun!

Nice, PiHalbe!

And here is the video interview done by DORP TV.

Yes, for RPC we'd definitely need to get our ducks in the row with the German operators. I would like to do more cooperative stuff with indie folks from Middle-Europe in general, in fact. It already looks like we'll be coming back to Spiel next year (I'm motivated at least), so that's another point of discussion - a Forge booth at Spiel would definitely benefit from having at least a couple German-speaking participants, too. Anybody feels like clueing me in on who to contact regarding Indie Insel and whatnot, feel free.

I sure sound stupid when I speak English. That DORP TV film is being embarrassingly popular among my friends now.

Mathew wrote:
What types of products do you believe were needed for OSR to really work? Are you talking a complete commercial (indie) release starter product that is just "done right" . . . ? Or is there a need for a whole product line that is cohesive with adventures, supplements, etc.? Do you think it's Germans who are not interested, or Europeans in general, or just gamers?