CCG's and Branding

"Deal or No Deal: The Boardgame" does exist, and that's not too big a surprise; any successful TV game show will spin off a mass market board game. I think that for most of the folks here, the mass market is not a realistic possibility, and many of us wouldn't design the kind of games that become mass market successes even if it was, so this may not be a big concern.

But, there certainly is the infusion of licensed material into hobby games. Eagle Games has made a cottage industry of releasing board game versions of popular video games (Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Age of Empires), and Fantasy Flight is getting into the act as well (Doom, Warcraft). Fantasy Flight has also released games based on the works of Tolkien, HP Lovecraft, and George RR Martin, among others. I don't think this is necessarily a bad trend. These games are based on commercial properties, true, but the designers are using them as source material in original games, many of which have been quite excellent. For boardgamers who are fans of the source that is being emulated, it's a win-win, as you get to play a fun game about a subject you're interested in.

I suppose there's a sense in which this is bad in that in a lot of cases, it seems that the publisher acquires the rights to design a game based on the licensed property, and then does the design in-house. So, even if you have a great idea for a game about a popular license, you may not be able to go anywhere with it; in fact, you may face even more of an uphill battle since the publisher may have exclusive rights to the license. At the same time, there are success stories. I'm pretty sure the designers of War of the Ring were unknowns who just designed a game about LotR, and they managed to get it published. So, it can happen. I am working on a game based on Indiana Jones, and we'll have to see at some point, if the game is good enough for publication to be a possibility, whether we can find someone to pick up the game and acquire the rights, or whether we'll have to retheme to something more generic.

I can't think of a lot of examples of the more "shameful" version of licensed games, in which the license isn't organic to the game design but is simply slapped on the box cover and some of the components -- eg "NASCAR Monopoly" or what have you. The only one I can think of is "Ticket to Ride: Marklin Edition", but again in this case, it was a brand new game with new mechanics. This game may be an interesting case study for how the hobby market could potentially benefit from licensing. My guess is that the SdJ sold more copies of TtR than the Marklin license will, but I confess to having no idea how popular Marklin's products are. Even so, this more "shameful" trend might not be an entirely bad thing, if it gets some good games some broader exposure, and the hobby grows as a result, but it would be bad if it got to the point where only licensed games could get published. I hope that won't happen, and don't think that it will, but we'll have to watch and see!

-Jeff

If I understood what you are implying here, then I question this. Almost every game on the top 16 of the Comics and Games Retailer CCG list has one of the following going for it:

a) it has a license and/or is affiliated with a homegrown television show

b) it has a brand affiliation with a long-standing well-known RPG license

c) it is created by a company with a vast amount of money who used a large bankroll to get people to buy the game in spite of its lack of license

d) it was one of the first CCGs on the market and has continued to create new releases to stay on the market

About the only CCG in the last couple of years that I can think of that didn't have one of these advantages and which sold well (at least for a while) was AEG's Warlord game. I think even Warlord has had declining sales. Hekatomb falls in category "c" above, and it's sales have been acceptable, but not spectacular. Hekatomb's sales are much lower than other successful WotC products.

Retailers are VERY loathe to try a new CCG unless it is both licensed and returnable. They want next to no risk. I spent days at the GAMA Trade Show pitching our game to people and asking around. I can promise you that if we weren't offering full returnability on the first box of boosters and first box of starters with each set AND if we didn't have a license, then almost none of the retailers would have paid any attention to us. The CCG market is very tight right now.

These limitation are NOT necessarily true if you are producing a traditional card game. Both fans and retailers are much more willing to invest in those right now.

While I occasionally use the term "mass market" myself, most CCGs aren't in the mass market. The vast majority of them are primarily available in specialty hobby chains (which is where their primary player base shops for these games most frequently). Decipher had some huge licenses and got into more traditional book store and mass market channels, but Decipher has suffered a lot over the last couple of years. Upper Deck, Sony, and Hasbro are the only ones who regularly penetrate Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, etc. with entire product lines. Other people occasionally get into the mass market, but rarely stay there. A few more (like Nightmare Before Christmas) have branched into video store sales as much or more than specialty hobby game stores.

The mass market is hell on wheels. The big chain stores want you to produce at massive levels and may, if you are a new publisher, demand returnability on 100% of everything they buy.

The other reason people get licenses is art costs. Let's say you spend only $50.00 per piece of full color art. That's pretty low in some circles for full color art from a known artist. Now, let's say that you release 300 card sets and plan on releasing four sets in two years. You just spent $60,000.00 on just art alone. That's insane for all but the best selling CCGs. If you get a license, you pay the licensing fee, but then have a ton of art (or TV stills) that you can leverage.

CCGs are a tricky thing unless you are designing solely for kids and have a TV show. You still have to design a good game then, but you don't have to design a complex game. Most CCGs aimed at adults have to be complex and strategically rich or the adults will move on to another game and sink your CCG.

We have a number of things going for us that most start ups don't, and I still feel that even with a license producing a CCG right now is going to be very, very tough. I can't even imagine how tough it would be without a license. We probably would be fighting just to get noticed by distribution.

I apologize for any confusion that I interjected into the thread.

Cheers.

Will someone go start a site called CCGDF.COM so these threads will go away? =) I was almost temtped to move this, and future CCG topics to the Off Topic forums. Yes, I used to play CCGs just like most everyone else, but they really aren't on topic for this site, especially in large doses.

-Darke

Lee, I moved the other thread to the Admin forum, so that we (the admins) can discuss it there. We'll let everyone know what our stance is on this issue in a few days, I'm sure.

Cheers!

In the beginning, there was collectible cards. I currently have the star wars return of the jedi complete collection which contained many pictures of the movie. Now besides looking a them, they are somewhat useless.

Then MTG arrived with a CCG concept. Now instead of making collectible cards with pictures of the licensed theme, they made a game out of it to make sure the people can play with them instead of just collecting them. So from this point of view, the CCG has a "plus" compared to classic collectible cards.

Now the problem is that the CCG itself is viewed as a derived product and not as a game. They try to make a game out of a license instead of making a game and then applying a license. Consequence the game rules are bad.

Decipher is a company that only create CCG from game license. The reason might be to reduce cost on art work, like somebody else said. I have played at least 3 CCG from decipher and I can say one thing, they all sucks.

So you ask yourself, if their games are that bad, how come they can still sell cards. The reason is that when decipher make a card game, the product they sell is not the game, it's the license. So buying card from decipher would mean that you buy them for the artwork and collectibleness rather than the game.

When you play a CCG, you can sometime see the difference between game that started as a game, and a game that started as a license. I always compare Yu-Gi-Oh with Duel Masters; If you take a look at these games you can clearly see the difference here. Yu-Gi-Oh which was based on a manga has really bad rules. But kids buy card because they want to collect the monsters as seen on TV. And since it's a CCG well they can also play with them. While duel masters, from a designer point of view, has really good game rules. They made a anime series to attract the kid to their game, but it did not surpass yu-gi-oh's popularity.

Finally I don't think that CCG should be removed from this forum since we are speaking about the design aspect of the game in a CCG. We are not talking about new expansions and CCG that are going to get out. Or what is the best combo you can make with this card.

For our game, Powerstorm, we picked a genre, we designed a game, we built a 500 card alpha test environment of our own homemade characters. Once we had that tested, we got a license. So, for us, the license was wholly secondary to whether or not we liked the game. I built a game that I and my friends liked to play and then we found the art.

Licenses are interesting when it comes to game design. At one level, you feel much more of an obligation to get the characters "right", to make them simulate the characters you are licensing. If you make up characters, nobody can say whether or not you got the character just right. I think this is not unique to CCGs, but is also a phenomenon that affects licensed miniatures games, and licensed RPGs.

From a marketing standpoint, licenses have a built in audience. So, as a startup company, we felt that a license was required to get us into distribution at any appreciable level. We also were concerned about art costs.

A license is a huge, huge risk. While art costs are cheaper in the long run with a license, if you buy custom art for one set and the set fails, you only owe for one set of custom art. A license, however, has guarantees that are due even if you fail to release a single expansion set.

Some games, like Decipher's Star Wars, sold well as a licensed game, and then they lost the license and released a substantially similar game (Wars) with unlicensed characters and the game tanked.

Top Cow has some of the best art in the comic industry. We are proud to be doing business with the folks at Top Cow. But we are convinced from talking to our own playtesters that a bigger license (Marvel or DC) would, almost by definition, drive sales more. Such a license also would have bankrupted us as a startup even if it weren't held exclusively by Upper Deck. So, the combination of factors brought us to desire a license, to need a license, and to get the license.

I think other CCG manufacturers are in the same boat.

CCGs have one thing in common with RPGs. Both attract players, the great bulk of which, stop playing a game frequently if it doesn't have new support products. Sure, I know a handful of players who dust off a CCG from the 90s or an RPG from the 80s. But the vast majority will abandon such a game if it doesn't have new product support all the time.

Board games, in contrast, are things people are more willing to pull out and play even if there isn't a new fangled version of it coming out.

This puts more game design and development pressure on the CCG designer (and the RPG designer) to constantly create add-ons for his products if he wants people to regularly play the game. At the same time, in the current market environment, there's a little resistance from players about spending money on yet another CCG. So, while you need to create new products to pay for a license and to avoid having players abandon your game, there's the paradox that many players want to play CCGs but don't want to spend a ton of money on them.

Willi_B mentioned "The Spoils" trading card game. They were my neighbors at the GAMA Trade Show. You aren't hearing a lot of hype around them, because they are kind of secretive. They had a cool booth and presentation, but it said a whole lot of nothing. They were keeping a tight lid on things. I think that is changing now. As they become more open about what they are doing you will hear more about them. They are doing a really interesting type of marketing -- direct marketing straight to top Magic players. Scott of Tenacious Games knows a lot of the top Magic players and he's getting them on board with his game.

Upper Deck did the same thing on a less personal level, by offering tournament invites to all the top pro tour CCG players in the world.

First, thank you FastLearner for that post. I agree 100% with everything you said.

Next, I hope I can be truthful about this statement: Never, ever, ever will I post ads to help pay for the site. I *may* consider ads in the future from sites that are from active members, but I will never spam the members of this community with non relevant ads to help pay for the site. I have always either paid for the site myself or relied upon donations, of which they're have been plenty.

By bandwidth I didn't mean actual bytes transfered, but rather the number of posts about a particular topic. Please forgive me for using a misnomer. We currently enjoy an unlimited bandwith / storage plan with our ISP.

And lastly, believe it or not, it is *necessary* to limit the types of discussion on communities such as this one. Think of it as pruning rather than restricting or censoring. Believe me, if the moderators here had not taken a very active role in what this community was about, then it would have failed very early in it's infancy. It takes a great deal of work and discretion, I might add, to know when to step in and, more importantly, when not to interfere. Our policy has always been a hands off policy whenever possible. I'm sure if you ask anyone who's been around long they will agree with this statement.

But to clarify, we do not have any plans to restrict the discussion of CCGs. As I said, video game talk is really the only topic not considered acceptable, and even then we're happy to point the person to the right resources to help them with their problem/issue.

Nuff said? Hope so!
-Darke

Chad, I can't really speak to how the Spoils is going to turn out. I thought it was incredibly odd to be next to a couple of guys at GTS who were being entirely secretive about their product. Heck, I just got my license two weeks before the event, so I was there only with my gift of gab and some art samples eager to talk to people about the overal goals and play style of my game. I personally don't see how telling people very little or nothing about your game is a marketing strategy, but that's just me.

As for our company, we haven't fully decided, but I think our sales package for Powerstorm is going to be very different from anything on the market. We will have fixed starter decks (not so unusual) and the we have boosters. Our boosters, however, are packaged so that every box as a whole has one copy of every card. So if you buy a box then you get one of everything. But if a store owner mixes the boosters, you can still buy by the booster and not know exactly what you are getting so that you can play drafts. We think it's going to cap the upper limit on the money we will make, but we think it's going to attract people who like actually playing CCGs, but refuse to give somebody $300.00+ per set to get one of everything.

Players we have talked to thus far said that they are much more likely to buy a full box of a game if they can get one of everything than they are to invest whole hog in a totally randomized collectible card game system.

I think that, right now, launching a new CCG that is randomized with lots of chase cards is VERY risky unless you have a helluva license and/or a ton of cash.

We may be stupid to be contemplating it, but I think the model is very different and may attract players with lighter wallets who still like building their own custom decks for organized play events.

Here's something to ponder. City of Heroes CCG did sell in OK amounts in some parts of the nations. I don't know how the second release will do, but the first scored in the top 16 CCGs in Comics and Games Retailer magazine. Distributors I talked to said the game sold OK for them. This, without almost any advertising (at least I saw almost none).

What that game had going for it was a license and a company with a reputation (AEG) behind it. Not much in the way of tournament prizes.

In fact, City of Heroes CCG is more fan-supported (player locator, comprehensive rules, etc.) than any CCG I've seen in recent years.

So it's clear that you can launch a licensed CCG without blowing a lot of cash, but I'm unclear that anyone other than a company with a strong reputation and past hits can get fans to jump on board this way.

Of course their sales model plus their rules are interesting -- kinda like Pirates of the Spanish Main -- where you can buy one "battlepack" and play out of the pack to learn the game. That's a pretty impressive notion to let people try the game. I think that this is something that non-CCG publishers can learn from: that having a cheap entry cost to "sample" the game is a very nice idea.

One thing I am sort of puzzled by, though. The Ogre Cave Audio Report asked this question: why don't more people buy a pair of CCG starter decks and just treat them like a non-collectible two player game? My vote: they would except that most starter decks are terrible, and people are psychologically afraid of getting sucked into a bigger expense if they like the game.

And to you too. I hope the YMG crowd brings home an Origins award. If you do, I'll buy you and Rob a drink at GenCon. Take care, Chad.