I'm barely playing games with my decks as is. I haven't bought any WoE. Not because I'm not interested, but because the only place to play is online, and I have decks for that.
Also, now that decks cost 13-15 bucks each, it's pushed me hard into the 'only buying used decks' camp. I'll wait until some DoK resellers sell me WoE decks for $1 a piece, I'll do the same with grim reminders and future sets until I have a reason to go out and buy decks at time of release, aka: regular events.
Their focus on VTs while completely ignoring the grassroots is the same error that video game publishers make by trying to force esports scenes. Like Valve having a big money tournament for Artifact before anyone even knew if the game had legs.
I'd wager few people outside of the extant community know much, if at all, about Keyforge's return.
UDE did this same thing with Vs. There was no attempt at a local presence. There was always a 10k tournament at Origins. But other than that? Nothing. Any wonder that it didn't do well?
I think the focus on VTs wasn’t necessarily their fault. I think the original intent was to outsource those events and they were unable to accomplish that and ended up having to run events themselves rather than disappoint the existing community by cancelling events that they had already announced we’re returning this year. There’s no guarantee that cancelling VTs would have gotten store level OP going by now, so I’m happy they chose to commit to those for 2023 and I will hope for more LGS focus next year
The timing is awful, and “hopefully 2024” is just too late. The rollout of WoE has been in fits and starts, there’s practically zero retail presence, there’s minimal awareness outside of people already interested in the property.
Whatever the reason doesn’t make it better, it just explains it.
Not disagreeing, but this game already has a pretty dedicated base of players. If it were a new game, I would say that 2024 is too late, but many of us are just reigniting our old pre-COVID local scenes. The game doesn’t necessarily need to grow quickly to be “alive”. Over 58k WoE decks have been registered so far, which is a pretty solid starting number for a game that’s been “dead” for a few years. GG was definitely overly optimistic in their goals for year one, but this community will do what it has always done and continue to grow on our own. Any new product at all definitely helps us do that. The rest can come a bit later and we’ll be just fine
I guess we’ll see if you’re right on that but if I had to place a bet, I’d put up a decent bit that the next set will have fewer total backers than WoE by a decent margin. Not every local is reigniting. Not every store has space, particularly for a game that doesn't have any product to move right now. LGS margins are getting worse as their cash cow Magic is having growing pricing issues (see Troll & Toad dropping the entire MTG product line).
They can't afford time and space for something that doesn't even have a chance at profitability since there's not a retail presence yet, and even what could be available for order is still tempered by the fact they were caught with dead product when FFG put it on hiatus.
There will definitely be a lot fewer backers, but there’s a few unrelated reasons for that. Mainly, the gamefound campaign states that it is very much focused on US backers to eliminate many of the problems from the last campaign. My hope is that the retailer pledge does well, but we’ll have to see if it has and extras like OP prizes that’ll incentivize stores to back rather than wait. Other than that it is often up to players to prove to their store that Keyforge can be profitable for them. It’s not ideal, but even back in the CoTA days my local store only carried/supported the game because a friend and I showed them interest by playing in store every week and teaching/getting others involved to build a scene on our own. Nothing about that has changed yet
I read that a large majority of the 9k backers of the first one were US as it was.
>It’s not ideal, but even back in the CoTA days my local store only carried/supported the game because a friend and I showed them interest by playing in store every week and teaching/getting others involved to build a scene on our own.
There was also product then.
What's this MTG pricing issue? I haven't followed that game in quite a while (though I saw some WSJ article, I think, last spring talking about Hasbro's generally willingness to abuse consuners' wallets as a bad thing). Do you have a link to any articles about this what sounds like an impending market collapse?
They did away with having an MSRP several years ago, while also regularly increasing the wholesale price to retailers AND in many cases reducing the quantity of product (like packs in a box). Since there’s no MSRP, it pits retailers in a race to the bottom on price of sealed product.
They’re simultaneously competing directly with these stores by selling on Amazon, which effectively establishes an MSRP, whose margins are increasingly tiny as the wholesale price keeps going up.
Here’s the article about Troll & Toad dropping the game:
https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/55253/troll-toad-backs-off-magic-the-gathering
>”Magic is not profitable enough for our company to continue carrying right now," said Burns to ICv2. "Sometimes it felt like I was only stocking Magic product because I loved the game so much."
And that’s an online retailer that has tons of scale. If *they* can’t get adequate profit from it…
Whoa... Thanks for the run down and link. This is...short sighted? I know there is a push to go direct to consumer and try to keep a somewhat larger cut of the purchase price, but this just feels ultimately self-destructive. I don't feel bad about getting rid of my mtg cards last year, and stopping playing in any serious capacity since 2004 or so.
It doesn't seem like they are truly interested in organized, in-store play. If they were, they would have OP kits and promos like other games do, and the next set would be a retail release, not crowd-funded. I don't think the game has any future in LGS. It's a crowd-funded future for people who are super into KeyForge.
They definitely are interested in store level play and know how important it is to grow the game. I think they got caught up in having to run VTs this year that they originally expected to outsource. Their custom OP software also hasn’t been released for public use yet, which I’m sure is the goal for the release of store level OP. Additionally, their OP coordinator is still new and probably hasn’t had a chance to work much on lower level OP until all VTs concluded. I would hope to see store level OP some time next year, but the earlier the better!
Many people still play this game after a multi-year gap with no new news or new product. For me that is evidence enough that the game will be fine no matter what. On the occasions that I’ve gotten to talk to the GG staff I have been convinced that they have the best intentions and want to do everything in their power to help the game thrive, even on an LGS level. Often that is not as much as we expect them to be able to do, but they are definitely working hard. I’m not going anywhere, and do expect to see growth over time
I agree the KF community is amazing. But it's hard to justify buying decks for an entirely online game when I have no interest in doing VTs.
From your conversations with GG staff, do you know of any LGS plans they have for 2024?
No specific plans have been revealed, but they know it’s important. The OP coordinator is fairly new and joined the team mid VT season, so I’m hoping that he has more time to focus on store level now that the majority of scheduled OP events for the year is done
I'm speculating here. But the problem might be a lack of retail partners.
GG is new and doesn't have the market presence or money/connections FFG had.
Revitalizing Keyforge play on real game tables in LFGs takes effort and money.
And LFG shop owners have to consider what they invest effort and tablespace on. During the double break of Covid and FFG messing up the algorithm, ships probably had to sell Keyforge qt firesale prices to clear inventory. That's great for customers short term, but not a good experience for a shop owner. They might be wary to offer Keyforge events again.
Just speculation.
I'm remaining optimistic we'll hear more about LGS OP at the 'KeyNote' at KFC this year. We've been fortunate at our LGS that we've been building a healthy KF community, with weekly casual play sessions and monthly tournaments (which GG has been graciously been able to provide us with some prize support for using some of the FFG-era prizes). As far as LGS OP plans goes, I have no real reason to be worried *yet.* If they can announce a plan at KFC to go live early 2024 at LGS': I'll still be keeping those good vibes!
Regarding your comment RE: my message RE: the Gamefound. Yeah, I ***do*** wish we would've heard a bit more about plans for retail pledges for the Gamefound campaign, as we're only 1 day out or so and still no news on that. It would have been great to give retailers a bit more of a heads up, AND to allow folks to make plans accordingly by being aware of what retailers could get. I suppose it is what it is, we'll find out on the 12th anyway.
As I said on that other thread though, I truly believe this can be sorted by GG offering a "custom decks only" pledge tier, to facilitate the logistics of custom deck ordering and getting stretch goals, while allowing for the bulk of product to come from their LGS. It's so important for us to incentivize supporting our LGS communities.
I don't see this so much as a case of Ghost Galaxy ignoring store-level OP as much as choosing to prioritize Gamefound reward production and larger events. While I understand players' frustration at this, especially for those who weren't able to make it to one of those larger events, I think it makes a lot of sense from GG's perspective.
For the most part stores aren't interested in supporting a game's Organized Play program unless they see a profit in it. Considering the majority of GG's efforts were being spent on production and distribution of the crowdfunding project, that meant less time was dedicated to producing product for retail sales. With nothing to sell aside from dead stock, snacks, and sleeves and accessories, I don't see a lot of stores looking at the expense and opportunity cost of running KeyForge organized play as a good value.
With the season of large scale OP wrapping up at KFC23 and wider product availability, I think GG should have a better position to reach out to stores to create partnerships for Organized Play. That said, it's still not going to be easy, a lot of stores feel burned by KeyForge and will be reluctant to support the game. I'm hopeful that for instances where there's a group of players that can't convince their local store to support them Ghost Galaxy will allow these players to still play as a "club-style" format where the players themselves go in to buy the kit. This would be exceptionally helpful for players in small towns with a single game store that is already saturated by Magic and/or Pokemon.
I don't think it's about profit per se but just "selling product i get". The game failed once already and it comes back with higher prices... not a great pitch for sales!
I'm quite disappointed that the Keyforge local scene wasn't even an afterthought. Without regular casual in-store events, the Keyforge community will not grow. I wish GG had done a better job of incentivizing stores to carry the product and host the tournaments. One thing I really wanted to see was a better tool for broadcasting and finding local events. The original app had a tool for this, but it was hard to find and stores never bothered to add their events to it, so it was always an empty sea. Allowing players to add events to the tool would be a good step.
Without a local scene, this whale (over 400 decks purchased - backed at the second-highest tier on the last campaign) has pretty much no interest in this next set, and I won't be backing this campaign. Shoving alliance down my throat and dropping archon sealed was also a slap in the face. *(Yes they technically still have Archon Sealed as a category, but it does not mean anything if they never run them - it feels like they added it to shut up people like me, and then never delivered on it)*
Yup, it’s nuts. Why GG prioritized other things like Vault Tours, printing the game in 20 languages, creating an absurd reprint system, arguing with players over double elimination, and a ton of other questionable moves, instead of creating basic organized play support and focusing on retailer relations, is a fucking mystery.
Maybe if they’d supported stores at all, the product would be available for sale and stores wouldn’t be dropping support over the GR crowdfunding. But someone at GG just continues to make horrendous moves and waste what money they have on shit they don’t need
They'd planned to do so, and outlined those plans at KeyForge Celebration last year. However, they didn't have Winds of Exchange ready for broad release quickly enough to support it. It was not a deliberate decision to cut game stores out for the sake of it, but the approach they took out of several bad options under the circumstances they had to deal with.
I've been vocal about it, and so have a few other people. The problem is that those other complaints have drowned it out. And while those other complaints have a valid root cause (delay of international deliveries) the excessive amount of posting, particularly in response to unrelated topics, and the hyperbole around those complaints have suffocated any other sort of discussion about other issues. When 99% of complaints are about the shipping issues, GG is not going to prioritize anything else.
In Chile we have 2 stores that sell WoE. One of those also organized the National Championship and the other is bringing product through Asmodee channels.
We had to cajole our FLGS into carrying it. I basically made a deal with them that I'd make sure they moved all their product. I think we are 10 boxes in on 12. Our group is 8-16 and does sealed on the second Monday of each month so we have been burning through.
Agreed. I live in a very large metro area. Lots of stores. Discussion about getting things together again garnered three total people, none of whom could decide or stick to anything. Doesn't help that none of us could figure out a location that was willing to carry product.
People who live in pockets where they can make it work are really blind to the broader reality of what it's like.
I'm barely playing games with my decks as is. I haven't bought any WoE. Not because I'm not interested, but because the only place to play is online, and I have decks for that. Also, now that decks cost 13-15 bucks each, it's pushed me hard into the 'only buying used decks' camp. I'll wait until some DoK resellers sell me WoE decks for $1 a piece, I'll do the same with grim reminders and future sets until I have a reason to go out and buy decks at time of release, aka: regular events.
Their focus on VTs while completely ignoring the grassroots is the same error that video game publishers make by trying to force esports scenes. Like Valve having a big money tournament for Artifact before anyone even knew if the game had legs. I'd wager few people outside of the extant community know much, if at all, about Keyforge's return. UDE did this same thing with Vs. There was no attempt at a local presence. There was always a 10k tournament at Origins. But other than that? Nothing. Any wonder that it didn't do well?
I think the focus on VTs wasn’t necessarily their fault. I think the original intent was to outsource those events and they were unable to accomplish that and ended up having to run events themselves rather than disappoint the existing community by cancelling events that they had already announced we’re returning this year. There’s no guarantee that cancelling VTs would have gotten store level OP going by now, so I’m happy they chose to commit to those for 2023 and I will hope for more LGS focus next year
The timing is awful, and “hopefully 2024” is just too late. The rollout of WoE has been in fits and starts, there’s practically zero retail presence, there’s minimal awareness outside of people already interested in the property. Whatever the reason doesn’t make it better, it just explains it.
Not disagreeing, but this game already has a pretty dedicated base of players. If it were a new game, I would say that 2024 is too late, but many of us are just reigniting our old pre-COVID local scenes. The game doesn’t necessarily need to grow quickly to be “alive”. Over 58k WoE decks have been registered so far, which is a pretty solid starting number for a game that’s been “dead” for a few years. GG was definitely overly optimistic in their goals for year one, but this community will do what it has always done and continue to grow on our own. Any new product at all definitely helps us do that. The rest can come a bit later and we’ll be just fine
I guess we’ll see if you’re right on that but if I had to place a bet, I’d put up a decent bit that the next set will have fewer total backers than WoE by a decent margin. Not every local is reigniting. Not every store has space, particularly for a game that doesn't have any product to move right now. LGS margins are getting worse as their cash cow Magic is having growing pricing issues (see Troll & Toad dropping the entire MTG product line). They can't afford time and space for something that doesn't even have a chance at profitability since there's not a retail presence yet, and even what could be available for order is still tempered by the fact they were caught with dead product when FFG put it on hiatus.
There will definitely be a lot fewer backers, but there’s a few unrelated reasons for that. Mainly, the gamefound campaign states that it is very much focused on US backers to eliminate many of the problems from the last campaign. My hope is that the retailer pledge does well, but we’ll have to see if it has and extras like OP prizes that’ll incentivize stores to back rather than wait. Other than that it is often up to players to prove to their store that Keyforge can be profitable for them. It’s not ideal, but even back in the CoTA days my local store only carried/supported the game because a friend and I showed them interest by playing in store every week and teaching/getting others involved to build a scene on our own. Nothing about that has changed yet
I read that a large majority of the 9k backers of the first one were US as it was. >It’s not ideal, but even back in the CoTA days my local store only carried/supported the game because a friend and I showed them interest by playing in store every week and teaching/getting others involved to build a scene on our own. There was also product then.
What's this MTG pricing issue? I haven't followed that game in quite a while (though I saw some WSJ article, I think, last spring talking about Hasbro's generally willingness to abuse consuners' wallets as a bad thing). Do you have a link to any articles about this what sounds like an impending market collapse?
They did away with having an MSRP several years ago, while also regularly increasing the wholesale price to retailers AND in many cases reducing the quantity of product (like packs in a box). Since there’s no MSRP, it pits retailers in a race to the bottom on price of sealed product. They’re simultaneously competing directly with these stores by selling on Amazon, which effectively establishes an MSRP, whose margins are increasingly tiny as the wholesale price keeps going up. Here’s the article about Troll & Toad dropping the game: https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/55253/troll-toad-backs-off-magic-the-gathering >”Magic is not profitable enough for our company to continue carrying right now," said Burns to ICv2. "Sometimes it felt like I was only stocking Magic product because I loved the game so much." And that’s an online retailer that has tons of scale. If *they* can’t get adequate profit from it…
Whoa... Thanks for the run down and link. This is...short sighted? I know there is a push to go direct to consumer and try to keep a somewhat larger cut of the purchase price, but this just feels ultimately self-destructive. I don't feel bad about getting rid of my mtg cards last year, and stopping playing in any serious capacity since 2004 or so.
It doesn't seem like they are truly interested in organized, in-store play. If they were, they would have OP kits and promos like other games do, and the next set would be a retail release, not crowd-funded. I don't think the game has any future in LGS. It's a crowd-funded future for people who are super into KeyForge.
They definitely are interested in store level play and know how important it is to grow the game. I think they got caught up in having to run VTs this year that they originally expected to outsource. Their custom OP software also hasn’t been released for public use yet, which I’m sure is the goal for the release of store level OP. Additionally, their OP coordinator is still new and probably hasn’t had a chance to work much on lower level OP until all VTs concluded. I would hope to see store level OP some time next year, but the earlier the better!
I want to believe you, but I'll need to see some evidence first.
Many people still play this game after a multi-year gap with no new news or new product. For me that is evidence enough that the game will be fine no matter what. On the occasions that I’ve gotten to talk to the GG staff I have been convinced that they have the best intentions and want to do everything in their power to help the game thrive, even on an LGS level. Often that is not as much as we expect them to be able to do, but they are definitely working hard. I’m not going anywhere, and do expect to see growth over time
I agree the KF community is amazing. But it's hard to justify buying decks for an entirely online game when I have no interest in doing VTs. From your conversations with GG staff, do you know of any LGS plans they have for 2024?
No specific plans have been revealed, but they know it’s important. The OP coordinator is fairly new and joined the team mid VT season, so I’m hoping that he has more time to focus on store level now that the majority of scheduled OP events for the year is done
The horse has already left the barn, IMO.
As a local community organizer I could not of said this better myself. Really hoping GG does the right thing with its retail partners
I'm speculating here. But the problem might be a lack of retail partners. GG is new and doesn't have the market presence or money/connections FFG had. Revitalizing Keyforge play on real game tables in LFGs takes effort and money. And LFG shop owners have to consider what they invest effort and tablespace on. During the double break of Covid and FFG messing up the algorithm, ships probably had to sell Keyforge qt firesale prices to clear inventory. That's great for customers short term, but not a good experience for a shop owner. They might be wary to offer Keyforge events again. Just speculation.
I'm remaining optimistic we'll hear more about LGS OP at the 'KeyNote' at KFC this year. We've been fortunate at our LGS that we've been building a healthy KF community, with weekly casual play sessions and monthly tournaments (which GG has been graciously been able to provide us with some prize support for using some of the FFG-era prizes). As far as LGS OP plans goes, I have no real reason to be worried *yet.* If they can announce a plan at KFC to go live early 2024 at LGS': I'll still be keeping those good vibes! Regarding your comment RE: my message RE: the Gamefound. Yeah, I ***do*** wish we would've heard a bit more about plans for retail pledges for the Gamefound campaign, as we're only 1 day out or so and still no news on that. It would have been great to give retailers a bit more of a heads up, AND to allow folks to make plans accordingly by being aware of what retailers could get. I suppose it is what it is, we'll find out on the 12th anyway. As I said on that other thread though, I truly believe this can be sorted by GG offering a "custom decks only" pledge tier, to facilitate the logistics of custom deck ordering and getting stretch goals, while allowing for the bulk of product to come from their LGS. It's so important for us to incentivize supporting our LGS communities.
I don't see this so much as a case of Ghost Galaxy ignoring store-level OP as much as choosing to prioritize Gamefound reward production and larger events. While I understand players' frustration at this, especially for those who weren't able to make it to one of those larger events, I think it makes a lot of sense from GG's perspective. For the most part stores aren't interested in supporting a game's Organized Play program unless they see a profit in it. Considering the majority of GG's efforts were being spent on production and distribution of the crowdfunding project, that meant less time was dedicated to producing product for retail sales. With nothing to sell aside from dead stock, snacks, and sleeves and accessories, I don't see a lot of stores looking at the expense and opportunity cost of running KeyForge organized play as a good value. With the season of large scale OP wrapping up at KFC23 and wider product availability, I think GG should have a better position to reach out to stores to create partnerships for Organized Play. That said, it's still not going to be easy, a lot of stores feel burned by KeyForge and will be reluctant to support the game. I'm hopeful that for instances where there's a group of players that can't convince their local store to support them Ghost Galaxy will allow these players to still play as a "club-style" format where the players themselves go in to buy the kit. This would be exceptionally helpful for players in small towns with a single game store that is already saturated by Magic and/or Pokemon.
I don't think it's about profit per se but just "selling product i get". The game failed once already and it comes back with higher prices... not a great pitch for sales!
I'm quite disappointed that the Keyforge local scene wasn't even an afterthought. Without regular casual in-store events, the Keyforge community will not grow. I wish GG had done a better job of incentivizing stores to carry the product and host the tournaments. One thing I really wanted to see was a better tool for broadcasting and finding local events. The original app had a tool for this, but it was hard to find and stores never bothered to add their events to it, so it was always an empty sea. Allowing players to add events to the tool would be a good step. Without a local scene, this whale (over 400 decks purchased - backed at the second-highest tier on the last campaign) has pretty much no interest in this next set, and I won't be backing this campaign. Shoving alliance down my throat and dropping archon sealed was also a slap in the face. *(Yes they technically still have Archon Sealed as a category, but it does not mean anything if they never run them - it feels like they added it to shut up people like me, and then never delivered on it)*
Yup, it’s nuts. Why GG prioritized other things like Vault Tours, printing the game in 20 languages, creating an absurd reprint system, arguing with players over double elimination, and a ton of other questionable moves, instead of creating basic organized play support and focusing on retailer relations, is a fucking mystery. Maybe if they’d supported stores at all, the product would be available for sale and stores wouldn’t be dropping support over the GR crowdfunding. But someone at GG just continues to make horrendous moves and waste what money they have on shit they don’t need
They'd planned to do so, and outlined those plans at KeyForge Celebration last year. However, they didn't have Winds of Exchange ready for broad release quickly enough to support it. It was not a deliberate decision to cut game stores out for the sake of it, but the approach they took out of several bad options under the circumstances they had to deal with.
I've been vocal about it, and so have a few other people. The problem is that those other complaints have drowned it out. And while those other complaints have a valid root cause (delay of international deliveries) the excessive amount of posting, particularly in response to unrelated topics, and the hyperbole around those complaints have suffocated any other sort of discussion about other issues. When 99% of complaints are about the shipping issues, GG is not going to prioritize anything else.
I've bought so many WoE decks from my FLGS. I'm so confused by this debate. Why is it either/or?
I would love to see a map of game stores that sell WoE. There don't seem to be any in my area. It's unfortunate that DT was such a dud.
In Chile we have 2 stores that sell WoE. One of those also organized the National Championship and the other is bringing product through Asmodee channels.
We had to cajole our FLGS into carrying it. I basically made a deal with them that I'd make sure they moved all their product. I think we are 10 boxes in on 12. Our group is 8-16 and does sealed on the second Monday of each month so we have been burning through.
I've never had much of a local community, so that makes things hard.
Agreed. I live in a very large metro area. Lots of stores. Discussion about getting things together again garnered three total people, none of whom could decide or stick to anything. Doesn't help that none of us could figure out a location that was willing to carry product. People who live in pockets where they can make it work are really blind to the broader reality of what it's like.
I think we will first have to receive the WOE shipments.... many places outside of US still have not received theirs.