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 looks at trends represented by two recent product releases.
 
Two new(ish) game products hit the shelves this week, so to speak, and both represent trends in the game industry, though each in a different way.
 
One of the runaway hits from last Gen Con, Gale Force 9's Firefly boardgame, finally made it into distribution. Firefly, which sold hundreds of copies within tens of minutes to eager customers has done quite well since it hit store shelves and represents trend number one:  a company that gets started in another area of the gaming industry moves into boardgames.
 
Gale Force 9 got its start producing a wide assortment of products to use in sculpting and modifying miniatures.  Until GF9 came onto the scene, miniatures gamers used whatever tools they could find in hardware stores or the tools available from either The Armory or Games Workshop.  Unfortunately, Alliance Distribution, which inherited the Armory line when Chessex Distribution and The Armory merged, does little to promote the line and Games Workshop sets a premium price point on its products.  Into the void between the two came Gale Force 9, offering a wide selection of basing materials and tools, with high quality display materials and decent promotion.  As time went on, the company developed serious in-stock problems but that's not germane to the discussion.  What's important is that a miniatures accessory company has decided to enter the boardgame industry following several others that started off in other parts of the industry, then moved into boardgame development.
 
AEG got its start with role-playing but it is probably better known for the Legends of the Five Rings TCG.  However, boardgames have accounted for most of the company's recent major releases.  Same thing with Fantasy Flight Games, which has almost abandoned RPGs.  A few years have elapsed as well since Steve Jackson Games has released a print RPG, choosing instead to Munchkinize the world, while Privateer Press, Paizo Publishing and Cryptozoic Entertainment have all released entries in the deck building genre, significantly removed from the areas in which they got their start.  While Paizo and Privateer still remain strong in their original fields, Cryptozoic has completely abandoned its TCG base to move into traditional and deck building card games.
 
Before leaving Firefly, I want to point out what a brilliant bit of marketing GF9 and ACD did with the game by making the Big D**N Heroes pack free but only available with copies of Firefly purchased from ACD.  GF9 did not make Firefly exclusive as some other companies have done with their products but instead worked with ACD to develop the expansion pack, which, while certainly not necessary for game play does give additional options and encourages retailers to purchase the game through ACD.  Kudos to both companies for a great promotion.
 
The other trend exemplified by a new product was this week’s release of the updated Sisters of Battle Codex from Games Workshop.  Unlike their other recently updated Codexes, this one is only available in digital format, meaning of course that most Friendly Local Game Stores cannot sell it, much like we can't with many other digital only products.  From a business standpoint, the digital only format makes sense to GW as the previous Codex was only a $10 book and the company likely didn't make this one much bigger.  Add to this that the Sisters of Battle figures are not part of the core Warhammer 40,000 line, meaning that stores must direct order them from GW as a smaller discount.  Due to the smallness of the line, I do not expect to lose much in the way of sales from this (though two completest customers have already bought the digital version) and, due to the discount, I expect few retailers to stock in the Sisters of Battle line, relying on special orders instead, but having the option to carry it would have been nice.
 
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.