Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne shares his observations on this year’s Free RPG Day, which shared the weekend with the release of Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG: Chaos Origins.
Once again the store had a great Free RPG Day (see “Thoughts on the Upcoming Free RPG Day“), with a line of people waiting to get in when we opened. We had a longer line waiting for free roleplaying stuff than we did for Free Comic Book Day, but that does make sense given that we focus more on tabletop games than comics.
Foot traffic was up about 20% over a typical Saturday and sales were about 40% over a usual Saturday. RPG sales doubled, but I ascribe a significant amount of the increase to the Yu-Gi-Oh! Chaos Origins Premiere event that ran this past weekend. Unlike recent Premiere events, which ended with us having about half a case of booster boxes remaining, the lure of the first full art Yu-Gi-Oh! cards proved too tempting for local Yu-Gi-Oh! duelists, who descended on the set in droves and cleaned us out by the close of the business on Saturday.
Back to Free RPG Day though. This was the best one we have had in recent years. There was a wide assortment of offerings from which customers could choose and a surprisingly small number of Dungeons & Dragons/5E-compatible supplements. Not only did we give away our entire order of items but we managed to clear out nearly all of the Free RPG Day items left over from previous years including Cosmic Patrol, which has been kicking around our storeroom since 2015. The only Free RRPG Day item we had left over by the end of the day was the Enter the Collection supplement provided by Renegade Game Studios back in 2021. As usual, I do have a few thoughts about the event:
Three copies? Really?
If you are an RPG publisher, this is your best opportunity of the year to get a print copy of your product into the hands of the exact group of consumers interested in your product, but in order to do that, we need to have more than three copies of your offering to put on the table. While not as bad as the one-copy samples some publishers used to include, even with us limiting people to two selections, almost all of the three-copy titles were gone within the first two hours. We ran out of the Vampire the Masquerade supplement almost immediately and had customers asking about it for the rest of the day.
Bigger is Better
I estimate about a third of the supplements provided were trade paperback-sized and those were the ones most people passed over, choosing instead to take items from previous years, mainly because, according to the ones I asked, they were bigger and the customer felt they were getting more value with their selection. I can understand making the book smaller to save on printing costs but the purpose of the event is to get your supplement into the hands of people who might buy the complete book later.
No Kickstarter
I was happily surprised to see very few, if any, books included that advertised the publisher’s upcoming crowdfunding campaign for the game. There were several of those last year, as well as a few directing the customer to the publisher’s website to buy the book rather than to the FLGS. Maybe I overlooked them, but I was certainly happy to see that trend gone.
Thanks Gaming Days LLC. for another great Free RPG Day.
Comments? If you hosted a Free RPG Day, how did it go? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
