[Spiel Essen] Numbers and impressions

[Frank T]

Hi everyone!

So, back from Essen. It was a lot of fun and also very exhausting. I am at work right now, so I don't have time to post extensively. I'll eventually provide you with analysis on every game we demoed at the booth, and how the booth went overall.

First and foremost, however, what you are waiting for: Sales numbers. You'll find that we have reseller sales for most titles. These are not retailers, but two different things: First, Nexus e.V. is running a booth at Stuttgart game fair next week and bought some books to resell there. Second, after closing down the booth on Sunday evening, we offered the left-over stock for sales to the booth monkeys at reseller discount.

It had been discussed previously to "give something back" to the booth monkeys, and the idea of offering them to buy stuff at a discount had been brought up, but not really decided upon. Eero and I resolved to just go ahead and rule that sales from left-over stock to booth monkeys should be done at reseller discount. Unfortunately, there was no time to counter-check with you authors, so I hope you are all fine with this. Booth monkeys who bought titles that sold out before the end of the fair paid the full customer price.

Now, without further ado, the numbers:

Breaking the Ice: 10 customers (sold out).
Capes: 7 customers, 3 resellers (sold out).
Covenant: 15 customers, 14 resellers.
Dawning Star: 3 customers, 5 resellers.
Death's Door: 3 resellers.
Infinite Armies: 1 customer, 1 reseller.
Mortal Coil: 10 customers (sold out).
My Life with Master: 19 customers, 9 resellers.
Polaris: 7 customers, 7 resellers.
Sorcerer: 6 customers, 4 resellers (sold out).
The Roach: 8 customers.
Universalis: 10 customers (sold out).
With Great Power: 7 customers, 1 reseller.

I'm especially sorry that Dawning Star, Death's Door and Infinite Armies performed poorly, since Justin, James and Greg were among the most enthusiastic and engaged authors. I have some thoughts as to why, but of that, later.

I think we could have sold about 5 more copies of Breaking the Ice and Universalis each, and at least 10 more copies of Mortal Coil. I also think we can do better next year if we move earlier and get a booth at a good spot, as opposed to at the last corner of the hall. The left-over stock is with Eero, save for a few copies of Dawning Star and Polaris that I took home to offer to retailers in Hamburg. We will contact the authors privately about this.

So far.

Best, Frank

[Jason Morningstar]

Those numbers exceed my expectations and I'm very grateful to the entire Spiel Essen crew.  I totally support your command decision to offer a discount to booth monkeys (of course none of them took me up on it, so I would, right?)

Well done, all - next year let's use this empirical data to get more sellers involved and more designers to Germany.

[Justin D. Jacobson]

Principally, my involvement in the booth was to support it and the Forge generally. Any sales are a nice bonus in my book.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Some random thoughts to add to what Frank and Harald have already said:

The convention: I'm told that Spiel boasts 300k visitors, which is a hundred times larger than anything I've been to before. Consequently, the convention was a pretty new kind of experience for me. On the other hand, the general crowd quality was poor for the Forge when compared with actual roleplaying conventions. I estimate that around one percent of the visitors were actually roleplayers or interested in the hobby.

Location: the booth location was pretty bad, but I don't think that our methods and overall approach would have benefited from a more central position. As it was, I believe that most of the potentially interested people surely walked past at least once. A more central position would mean more walk-bys, but not necessarily more sales, unless the presentation technique were improved.

Work quality and booth spirit: I was very impressed by the level of dedication and skill the German booth monkeys brought to the mix. On the other hand, I'd never been to a language-barriered convention before, so I felt personally frustrated with my inability to work the crowd to my full potential. A majority of the crowd could converse a bit in English, but at least some would disengage because they were intimidated by having to. Also, most Germans wanted demos in German, so I ended up pretty useless compared to the Germans, who luckily carried their weight and more.

Sales material, booth construction: The booth was constructed of good materials, no complaints. We could have had some more colorful and informative posters/banners, though. Also, Spiel is clearly a walk-by convention (at least for roleplayers; boardgamers apparently move in a more of a target-seeking mode), so I think we would have got better results by doubling or tripling the length of the display table and removing one demo table. As it was, our visual effect was so minor that many borderline customers ended up simply walking by because they didn't have time to get interested before already being past.

One major benefit of our position was that we had plenty of room around the booth. Indeed, we kept one demo table in the opposite booth, and used two tables of our opposite neighbor whenever they didn't need them, which increased our effective booth size to double the nominal. Can't plan on that, though.

For sales material, my opinion of flyers remains the same: they don't really lead to anything. My only impression of the abundant slips of paper was that they mainly got in the way of using the tables. Annoying, that.

Crowd dynamics: Thursday and Friday were both relatively slow in our part of the fair. The only time I'd characterize as busy was a couple of hours on Saturday. Consequently we had empty tables now and then, and we had more roping potential than the flow of the crowd allowed. This was excarbetated by the crowd quality problem: a majority of the passerbys were clearly not interested in dialogue, so we had to pick and choose targets.

To give some idea of the quality of the crowd, I'll compare to Ropecon, a 3500-visitor roleplaying convention in Finland. The flow of the crowd at our Essen booth was most of the time comparable to what you'd get at Ropecon. The sales were around what I'd expect to make at Ropecon with a 3-4 man crew and a sales table with no demoing. On the other hand, I wouldn't make any more if I had ten people, so I guess we sold at a level that represents the maximum for a Ropecon-style rpg convention.

Sales profiles: selling games was a bit harder than I initially expected. My lower range expectation was 120 sold games, and I wouldn't have been surprised by 200 (= more and earlier sell-outs in practice) before seeing the convention, so you could say that I was slightly disappointed in my personal expectations. The main culprit here was the crowd quality: practically all sales went to the marginal minority of roleplayers on the lookout for new games; while these are a major part of the constituency at a roleplaying convention, here they had to be hand-picked from the crowd. I actually believe that our penetration in this target audience was a bit weak to boot, as the booth was a bit grey and didn't communicate that we were selling roleplaying games very effectively. Taking a number out of my ass, I'd say that we reached 30% of the roleplayers who both passed the booth and were receptive for new games.

For individual games, Dawning Star was a hard sell, as expected. It was demoed hard, though. Death's Door got into the booth on Saturday, and suffered from it's borderline looks: the game requires one or more dedicated demonstrators who actively suggest it to potential customers, otherwise it leads to demos only rarely. Breaking the Ice was, as usual, my favourite lead-in for generic sales-pitches. Infinite Armies proved problematic because it lacked synergy with the other products at the booth, even more than DS does; most people dismissed it out of hand.

For the future, I suggest that individual authors consider the prospects for their games carefully beforehand, keeping in mind that the convention rate for their game can be significantly different if there is no dedicated sales. My Life with Master is an example of a game that does not suffer from this at all, as many people end up requesting a demo based on how it looks and a short description. Death's Door is an example of the opposite, as it almost never led to demo requests on it's looks and description only. I'm rather certain that the latter fares much, much better if a sales-person pushes it specifically, instead of letting the customer indicate interest.

Social aspect: It was fun to meet the various German roleplayers who manned the booth. Matt Machell was also a very nice and interesting guy, I recommend getting down with him in regards to design and publication if you get a chance. I freely admit that I'm a bit of a singular person, so my social interest was mostly in playing games and talking play, design and publishing. Consequently I was a bit disappointed that I only managed to spend around two hours in those activities during the whole convention (we talked about game design with Matt at our hotel on Friday night, to be more exact). If I were in a position of choosing, I'd have spent less time at restaurants and more in talking business.

Personal conclusions: I got everything I was looking for from the convention, so I'm happy in that regard. Spiel proved very large and demanding, though, so it's no simple thing to turn a profit. For the future, my primary objective towards Spiel would be to figure out a source of revenue. While it was midly amusing the wander the convention floor, there really was nothing there that would justify another trip in the category of entertainment; if I'm going again, it will be with some kind of profit plan that'd at least cover the flight and accomodations. I'm mildly pessimistic about managing that, but we'll see how things develop during the next year.

Improvement: The main question about Spiel in my mind is: how to make the Forge booth experience relevant for the 299.000 visitors who don't fall into the target audience as currently defined. Without solving that puzzle Spiel is just a 1000-visitor roleplaying convention nested inside a huge distraction. While that can still be interesting for the locals, it's difficult to make it worth the time trip for non-Germans, especially with the language barrier. As for answers to that question, let's take them elsewhere, as this is not exactly the thread for speculation about selling to family boardgamers.

A concrete improvement that doesn't require tailored game design or fundamental reworking of the concept is to add more display space and banner props. The booth should make it obvious that it sells roleplaying games by having them on prominent display in both props and on the counter. Most customers came to the booth in travel-mode, just perusing the different booths, and it proved difficult to catch their attention with our relatively grey and demo-oriented profile. The latter is of course the point, but to those not in the know it doesn't really give any reason to stop at the booth. (The idea that actual play attracts walk-in audience was floated at the booth a couple of times, by the way; I disagree about that, but again it's not nearly the topic here.)

Anyway, properly speaking we probably shouldn't start planning improvements in this thread, so I'll just stop here and let others tell of their impressions. I have some games from several authors, so expect me to contact you today or in a couple of days about them; I'm going to retail most of them here in Finland if you have no objection.

[Frank T]

Some conclusion to four days and a half at Spiel.

The fair: I would like to hope that there were a few more than 1000 role-players, but if you consider that NordCon, the biggest convention in Germany, has some 7000 visitors, Spiel will probably not have more than 3000-4000. We are guessing wildly here. Role-playing games are together with minis, LARP stuff and some trading card stuff in hall 6. There is something of an "RPG alley", and I do think that having a nice spot somewhere around there would have helped. I already read several comments on forums of role-players who visited the fair and did not see our booth.

Running the booth: I understand Eeros frustration, but it is beyond doubt that the Fins share a major credit for the booth's success. They prepared fantastic boxes with demo material, including laminated sheets, pens, dice and other props, that could be just taken from the shelf to the demo table. These proved invaluable. Also, Eero showed a lot of demos to the German booth monkeys which they eventually ran in German.

Most of the PrO people were very interested in the Forge games, participated in lots of demos and started pitching the games themselves. By Sunday, Daniela was running more demos than anyone else. In general, the PrO people were pacing themselves better over the course of the whole fair. While they would take their time off on Thursday and Friday, you would find them still burning on Sunday afternoon when we n00bs from the "Forge crew" were totally on the ropes. Still, I am very content with the performance of "my" crew, and all of them said they had great fun and would like to join again next time.

We were very lucky that the Lodland people offered us to use two of their demo tables as long as they were vacant, which ended up being most of the time. I really don't know how well we would have done without those.

Cash and stock: We had a cash book and an inventory, both of which we checked every evening. That went pretty well, and we have kept track of every single book. We even have a little more cash than we ought to. On the other hand, we gave a few discounts to people who bought lots of books, and we made a few pricing errors in the heat of battle, so we'll probably end up with a few Euros negative as compared to what the authors ought to get for their books. I would like to cover this difference out of the general budget.

Later, on the different games.

- Frank

[Paul Czege]

Frank, I just have to say that you, Eero, and the booth ninjas just made my week! You managed all the details, kept this thing on track, and you got the job done. You all totally kick ass.

Thank you. I love this fucking hobby! All of you.

Paul

[Frank T]

Thanks, Paul! Here's some more conclusions:

Demoing in general: Agata rocked the floor. She was responsible for Breaking the Ice, Universalis and My Life with Master on the German side. Look at the numbers, they're not just coincidental. Whenever you were looking for Agata, you'd probably see her at one of the demo tables with some wide-eyed people gathered around her, enjoying themselves. On Thursday, she stayed two hours longer than she had intended to, cancelling her Karate training, because people were waiting in a line for her demos. That's not to diminish the performance of the other monkeys, of course. Gerd, Harald and Daniela also ran a whole bunch of demos, and Eero and Matt were keeping busy the customers that were willing to take an English demo. There were of course a few customers to whom English was a no-go, but the problem was smaller than I had expected.

One argument that was repeated for not buying the games was: "I don't have anyone who'd play it with me." But you probably know that line from GenCon.

Flyers: We had some neat flyers the size of a business card, with the names of the games and the URL of www.pro-indie.de on them. Many people who liked the demos but could not bring themselves to buy something took the flyer with them. One should not expect too much from that, but I would like to think that you'll get a few sales from Europe over the next weeks thanks to this.

Customer Requests: Most customers did not know any Forge games. Some who did were asking for the Sorcerer supplements. One guy showed up early on Thursday with a shopping list including Contenders, Hero's Banner and Perfect.

The Games

Breaking the Ice: BtI sold through demos. Most demos were run by Agata and Gerd, which was fortunate because Agata is a chick and Gerd is a hip guy. Some nerdy role-player running the demo would probably not have worked as well. Still, pitching the game was difficult, you had to basically just pull people to the demo table, and once they were two minutes into the demo, they were won over.

Capes: Capes also sold through demos, which were run by Harald and Eero. I did not get a chance to participate, but I gather that Tony's standard demo is pretty strong. We were not getting that many customers interested in Super Heroes (Europe, you know). And we had to pitch both Capes and WGP to them. Many people frowned at the competitive note of Capes, because German role-players are not very used to the idea of competitive role-playing being fun, but I think most demos sold at least one copy. Harald?

Covenant: Covenant proved that it's a big bonus to have the author at the booth, even if the author isn't fluent in German. I don't know how many demos Matt ran, it must have been 30-40. Having him at the booth motivated the rest of us to pitch his game, and many people were roped by the prospect of having the game demoed by the author himself. Also, the book is looking pretty neat. On a bazaar like Essen, it's really important to have a shiny book.

Dawning Star: Dawning Star also has a shiny book, and many people picked it up and asked about it. Jörg was really busy presenting the game to people, but it being d20 proved a bigger obstacle than I had expected because we really got very, very few d20 players as customers. There were some D&D players not interested in Sci-Fi, but that was all. The three customers that bought the book were about the only three fitting the profile of "looking for an alternative to Star Wars d20" we got over the whole fair. Many people liked the setting and were thinking about buying it to play it with their own "house system", but in the end, you just need d20 players to buy the game. I think that Dawning Star would have profited most from a more prominent booth spot, since most d20 players at the fair were probably just hunting for a good bargain around the retailer booths.

Death's Door: Eero already said it all. The book looked pretty cheap among all the shiny covers, which sadly was a big disadvantage. Pitching the game also didn't work, but maybe that was just bad luck. Gerd only ran two demos for booth people, which sold three games to the booth people, but of course we would have preferred customer sales. It was also unfortunate that we did not get the books in time for the fair. Harald and Markku printed four copies at a copy shop on Saturday morning, but that was probably too late since Saturday was too busy for pushing a particular game, and Sunday we were all too strung out.

Infinite Armies: Infinite Armies was giving me a very hard time. I tried to pitch it to the customers of the Magic shop next to us a few times, but those guys play Magic and nothing but Magic. People that stopped at our booth were role-players, not card-gamers. And the few none-role-players that stopped wanted to know about role-playing games. Andreas pitched Infinite Armies to one guy who really liked the idea, but wasn't confident he'd find anyone to play it with. I demoed it to two guys who really enjoyed it and looked disappointed when I wrapped up the demo before the game was over, but they did not like the prospect of printing and cutting the cards. One customer did not want to wait for us to burn the CD (after that, we kept one ready-burned). It's a difficult product to sell at a fair, even more so at a role-playing booth.

Mortal Coil: Mortal Coil was an easy one. I think Eero sold half the books with the first two demos. The "Roman Gods" demo is just too cool, and the book looks gorgeous if a little tiny. I do expect some online orders as a result of Spiel for Mortal Coil.

My Life with Master: MLwM is probably the easiest pitch among all the games we had at the booth. The cover is very evocative and the tag line gets people at once. The demo also seems to be pretty strong (again, I did not get a chance to participate). Agata and, especially on Sunday, Daniela ran lots and lots of demos of MLwM with smashing success. The margin of 19 customer sales is probably a good indicator of sales potential at Essen, since we really could not have done much better with MLwM.

Polaris: Gerd ran some very good demos of Polaris, one of them with two kids who never heard of role-playing before. I demoed it to a couple of DSA-player kids, who liked it well enough. We were also offering a German cheat sheet as an add-on. Given all this, I'm a little disappointed with the performance of the game, though the numbers are okay if compared to most other games. I think that the game being priced at 20 Euros, whereas other books with similar production value were priced 17, might have been an influence. Also, the plain white cover was looking cheesy among the color ones, even though I like the artwork very much.

Sorcerer: People were not asking for Sorcerer demos very much. 4 of the 6 customer sales were done without a demo. I ran 4 demos total, and Eero one more. The demo is great, but suffered from two problems: Firstly, "Baltic Swords & Sorcery" does not work as a tag line. Germans know what Blatic means, but they don't know Swords & Sorcery. Secondly, the demo was Sorcerer & Sword, and we were not selling Sorcerer & Sword at the booth. I gather that this was a misunderstanding. Next time, we should run a contemporary demo or, which I'd prefer, have some copies of Sorcerer & Sword to sell.

The Roach: The Roach pitched very well and demoed with mixed results. Harald and Eero discussed the demo, reasoning that reputation should probably play a more central role. On the other hand, the hand-outs worked pretty well. Harald had made some very solid black paperboard cards with the NPCs on them, and hey, sales were fair enough! One customer either forgot his card deck, or we forgot to give it to him. I have it here with me and will mail it to him if I find out who he is.

Universalis: None of us expected Universalis to be the second title to sell out. It obviously pitched very well to people frustrated with thick rules and settings. It's true that it does not demo well in just 15 minutes, but on Friday where we sold most of it, the booth was not that busy and Agata took the time to run longer demos, which was probably crucial to Universalis' success.

With Great Power: Most of the few people looking for super heroes grabbed WGP first, probably because of the cover. Some did not like the "melodrama" aspect, but again, Harald pitched and demoed well. He seems to have a hand for super heroes.

- Frank

[oliof]

Some conclusion to four days and a half at Spiel.

The fair: I would like to hope that there were a few more than 1000 role-players, but if you consider that NordCon, the biggest convention in Germany, has some 7000 visitors, Spiel will probably not have more than 3000-4000. We are guessing wildly here. Role-playing games are together with minis, LARP stuff and some trading card stuff in hall 6. There is something of an "RPG alley", and I do think that having a nice spot somewhere around there would have helped. I already read several comments on forums of role-players who visited the fair and did not see our booth.

As far as I have heard, our booth was not present in the fair catalog, because we booked it so late. This should work better if we decide on booking a booth earlier for next year.

Running the booth: I understand Eeros frustration, but it is beyond doubt that the Fins share a major credit for the booth's success. They prepared fantastic boxes with demo material, including laminated sheets, pens, dice and other props, that could be just taken from the shelf to the demo table. These proved invaluable. Also, Eero showed a lot of demos to the German booth monkeys which they eventually ran in German.

The demo boxes were the best thing that helped people learn the demos and run them quickly. Also, people at the booth could give out demo boxes quickly without needing to know what the games were all about.

Most of the PrO people were very interested in the Forge games, participated in lots of demos and started pitching the games themselves. By Sunday, Daniela was running more demos than anyone else. In general, the PrO people were pacing themselves better over the course of the whole fair. While they would take their time off on Thursday and Friday, you would find them still burning on Sunday afternoon when we n00bs from the "Forge crew" were totally on the ropes. Still, I am very content with the performance of "my" crew, and all of them said they had great fun and would like to join again next time.

We wouldn't have a working booth on sunday where we did about 20% of our sales without the tremendous help of the PrO people.

We were very lucky that the Lodland people offered us to use two of their demo tables as long as they were vacant, which ended up being most of the time. I really don't know how well we would have done without those.

We probably would have done a lot less demos. Some of the demos were very impractical to be done on the standing tables we had (Mortal Coil, Capes especially). We did not have Tony's newest demo using index cards only, which could have helped.

Cash and stock: We had a cash book and an inventory, both of which we checked every evening. That went pretty well, and we have kept track of every single book. We even have a little more cash than we ought to. On the other hand, we gave a few discounts to people who bought lots of books, and we made a few pricing errors in the heat of battle, so we'll probably end up with a few Euros negative as compared to what the authors ought to get for their books. I would like to cover this difference out of the general budget.

If I'm not mistaken, we are talking about less than 50€ here.

[Frank T]

If I'm not mistaken, we are talking about less than 50€ here.

I've not done the calculating yet, but I'd guess it's more around 20 €.

[oliof]

Demoing in general: Agata rocked the floor. She was responsible for Breaking the Ice, Universalis and My Life with Master on the German side. Look at the numbers, they're not just coincidental. Whenever you were looking for Agata, you'd probably see her at one of the demo tables with some wide-eyed people gathered around her, enjoying themselves. On Thursday, she stayed two hours longer than she had intended to, cancelling her Karate training, because people were waiting in a line for her demos. That's not to diminish the performance of the other monkeys, of course. Gerd, Harald and Daniela also ran a whole bunch of demos, and Eero and Matt were keeping busy the customers that were willing to take an English demo. There were of course a few customers to whom English was a no-go, but the problem was smaller than I had expected.

Agata has earned herself the 'forge rock star of Spiel 2006  award' if you ask me.

One argument that was repeated for not buying the games was: "I don't have anyone who'd play it with me." But you probably know that line from GenCon.

This was especially true for Polaris, which is a shame. I joined one Polaris demo by Gerd which hooked me up instantly.

Flyers: We had some neat flyers the size of a business card, with the names of the games and the URL of www.pro-indie.de on them. Many people who liked the demos but could not bring themselves to buy something took the flyer with them. One should not expect too much from that, but I would like to think that you'll get a few sales from Europe over the next weeks thanks to this.

I had one guy working for Wizards of the Coast (online stuff) who claimed to know Clinton, who was very interested in the forge games. He knew some titles we did not have at the booth, but I got some blank stares when telling him about Sorcerer, for example. He was very interested in the forge and said he'd look into the site.

Customer Requests: Most customers did not know any Forge games. Some who did were asking for the Sorcerer supplements. One guy showed up early on Thursday with a shopping list including Contenders, Hero's Banner and Perfect.

I felt it was harder to sell games to the people who knew the forge and did not decide on getting those on our counter than to generate interest in people who encountered forge games for the first time. In the german rpg forum grofafo, one member mentioned that the demos were what made the booth special.

The Games

Breaking the Ice: BtI sold through demos. Most demos were run by Agata and Gerd, which was fortunate because Agata is a chick and Gerd is a hip guy. Some nerdy role-player running the demo would probably not have worked as well. Still, pitching the game was difficult, you had to basically just pull people to the demo table, and once they were two minutes into the demo, they were won over.

Nota Bene: The last four copies sold on sunday morning within the first hour of the booth. This game has some serious shit in it.

Capes: Capes also sold through demos, which were run by Harald and Eero. I did not get a chance to participate, but I gather that Tony's standard demo is pretty strong. We were not getting that many customers interested in Super Heroes (Europe, you know). And we had to pitch both Capes and WGP to them. Many people frowned at the competitive note of Capes, because German role-players are not very used to the idea of competitive role-playing being fun, but I think most demos sold at least one copy. Harald?

I did not sell Capes as being competetive, but being collaborative - basically I told people that one of the fun things in Capes is that you need to create goals the other people are interested and that you are willing to lose to get more influence. I also mentioned the website at every demo and told people to have a look at the flash demo and try to prepare a session as opposed to just start out free-wheeling. click'n'lock alone sold the game to one customer for sure.

Covenant: Covenant proved that it's a big bonus to have the author at the booth, even if the author isn't fluent in German. I don't know how many demos Matt ran, it must have been 30-40. Having him at the booth motivated the rest of us to pitch his game, and many people were roped by the prospect of having the game demoed by the author himself. Also, the book is looking pretty neat. On a bazaar like Essen, it's really important to have a shiny book.

In addition, Covenant is a cool micro game and positioned itself clearly as what it is. Matt had an awesome demo running.

Dawning Star: Dawning Star also has a shiny book, and many people picked it up and asked about it. Jörg was really busy presenting the game to people, but it being d20 proved a bigger obstacle than I had expected because we really got very, very few d20 players as customers. There were some D&D players not interested in Sci-Fi, but that was all. The three customers that bought the book were about the only three fitting the profile of "looking for an alternative to Star Wars d20" we got over the whole fair. Many people liked the setting and were thinking about buying it to play it with their own "house system", but in the end, you just need d20 players to buy the game. I think that Dawning Star would have profited most from a more prominent booth spot, since most d20 players at the fair were probably just hunting for a good bargain around the retailer booths.

Sci Fi and Superhero are really minority topics in the german rpg market.

[...]

Mortal Coil: Mortal Coil was an easy one. I think Eero sold half the books with the first two demos. The "Roman Gods" demo is just too cool, and the book looks gorgeous if a little tiny. I do expect some online orders as a result of Spiel for Mortal Coil.

Eero's theory is that the heavy mechanics of the game appeal to german gamers. I really like that it has suspense without randomness. We decided with a heavy heart to not demo games we cannot sell copies of, or interest would have been even higher (the same is true for Universalis).

My Life with Master: MLwM is probably the easiest pitch among all the games we had at the booth. The cover is very evocative and the tag line gets people at once. The demo also seems to be pretty strong (again, I did not get a chance to participate). Agata and, especially on Sunday, Daniela ran lots and lots of demos of MLwM with smashing success. The margin of 19 customer sales is probably a good indicator of sales potential at Essen, since we really could not have done much better with MLwM.

It also speaks volumes that the owner of Leisure games bought a fat stack.

Polaris: Gerd ran some very good demos of Polaris, one of them with two kids who never heard of role-playing before. I demoed it to a couple of DSA-player kids, who liked it well enough. We were also offering a German cheat sheet as an add-on. Given all this, I'm a little disappointed with the performance of the game, though the numbers are okay if compared to most other games. I think that the game being priced at 20 Euros, whereas other books with similar production value were priced 17, might have been an influence. Also, the plain white cover was looking cheesy among the color ones, even though I like the artwork very much.

On the other hand, Polaris is not only a different kind of sports, it needs a whole different stadium. That said, it's performance is only poor when measured with our expectations. in comparison with the other game titles, it did reasonably well.

Sorcerer: People were not asking for Sorcerer demos very much. 4 of the 6 customer sales were done without a demo. I ran 4 demos total, and Eero one more. The demo is great, but suffered from two problems: Firstly, "Baltic Swords & Sorcery" does not work as a tag line. Germans know what Blatic means, but they don't know Swords & Sorcery. Secondly, the demo was Sorcerer & Sword, and we were not selling Sorcerer & Sword at the booth. I gather that this was a misunderstanding. Next time, we should run a contemporary demo or, which I'd prefer, have some copies of Sorcerer & Sword to sell.

There were some more customers who asked for the supplements. They were available at one other booth, but at 150% the price of the main book!

The Roach: The Roach pitched very well and demoed with mixed results. Harald and Eero discussed the demo, reasoning that reputation should probably play a more central role. On the other hand, the hand-outs worked pretty well. Harald had made some very solid black paperboard cards with the NPCs on them, and hey, sales were fair enough! One customer either forgot his card deck, or we forgot to give it to him. I have it here with me and will mail it to him if I find out who he is.

I already talked about my learnings from the demos elsewhere. Some people were unhappy that the demo material (especially the npc cards) weren't part of what they could buy. So, while cool demo material may sell a game better, it also may put people off the game.

Universalis: None of us expected Universalis to be the second title to sell out. It obviously pitched very well to people frustrated with thick rules and settings. It's true that it does not demo well in just 15 minutes, but on Friday where we sold most of it, the booth was not that busy and Agata took the time to run longer demos, which was probably crucial to Universalis' success.

Cheers again for Agata!

With Great Power: Most of the few people looking for super heroes grabbed WGP first, probably because of the cover. Some did not like the "melodrama" aspect, but again, Harald pitched and demoed well. He seems to have a hand for super heroes.

I actually demoed WGP only twice. It was one of the things Eero did as well - most people who like super heros and super hero rpgs have good english skills, so it was easier for Eero to do that as well.

One additional note: There were a handful of people who had to wait for demo slots to become available (either because a given demo was already running, or no booth monkey available could do the demo). Thankfully, they either waited patiently and had us tell them more about the other games, or they took another round through the hall to return later.

What was great about the 15 minute demos (I wasn't convinced of the idea before the fair) is that it is short enough to show the important thing about the game and almost always leads to a phase where people ask more questions about the game. So, most demos led to booth monkey/customer interaction that lasted for about 20 minutes total (with some exceptions, like the people who got two or three demos in a row).

[TheTris]

Hey!

I was the guy who bought Infinite Armies!  I didn't realise I was the only one at the whole fair!

I think that the demo style you need to pitch a card game is different from that you need to pitch an RPG.  The demo I played of the roach was cool, (although perhaps a bit too short) - getting into character and having fun.  The demo of Infinite armies just taught the rules.  I'm not sure how else you could do it.  Certainly I'd emphasise the variety of armies you can get - the demo decks look pretty similar, I'd have been tempted to fight Modern German vs Giant Robots as a demo. 

I bought the game because I really liked the clever RPS thing, plus I've ALWAYS thought a ccg with a formula for making your own cards would rock.  Plus when I found a forge booth I thought "awesome, these guys probably like what I like", which helps.  So I guess the forge "brand" works too.

The stall was a little hidden, but crowded with enthusiastic cool people.  I wish I hadn't been so busy with the rest of the fair - I would have liked to hang around and talk to you guys a lot more.

Tris

[StefanS]

Regarding possible improvements, I'd like to add some items from customers point of view. (Sorry that I didn't tell them on site so that they could be worked in during the fair - I didn't think of them yet before reading the other posts here.)

Initial talk to potential customers: I don't know if this point was already changed during the fair or if it depends on the booth monkey, but at least from what I've seen on Friday, this needs some improvement.
First, you'll really need a catching phrase as the first sentence when you talk to possible customers. If I recall it right, the introduction I and my two friends got when we showed up at the booth the first time was "games which are directly published and distributed by the authors themselves".
It is technically correct, but think from the customers point of view... I don't care if a product is directly distributed by the author, if it comes from the classical three-tier-distribution or if it's the product of a communist combinate. This point doesn't satisfy any need of me, so if this seems to be your unique selling position, you might easily loose me.
The first point in successful marketing is knowledge of the customers needs, so try to find something that is directly related to the customers needs. Give him the impression that the products sold at the Forge booth offer something special that he won't find anywhere else, something that satisfies his needs better than anything else.
So, "innovative designed games" might be better, although "innovative" is an attribute which is a bit overdone and has a tendency to be a hollow buzzword. "Games which are customized for their purpose" seems to me both true and appealing, so I would use that. Maybe someone can even come up with a better attribute for Forge booth products in general.

Overview of the products: This is another point of which I don't know if it was changed during the fair or if it depends on the booth monkey. Anyway, what I got was an overview over all products, which quickly turned into a long monologue.
Think again about your customers needs... If he is on the fair and stumbles by fortune in your booth, he is probably generally at the look-out and won't spend too much time on a single booth. So try to show the products more punctual. Ask the customer in what kind of games he's interested (maybe by genre... I don't have a good idea here how to ask, it's still a bit of brainstorming), and then leave out what probably won't sell to him.
You can still return to those left-out products if he stays to seem interested, but the customer with the tight schedule might so be more easily catched. At least, you can turn things from a monologue to a dialogue this way, which makes the overview more interesting and less boring to the customer so that he might be more willing to buy from you.

What I also would like to add: Think about how you introduce the various games, or in other words: Think about the customers needs. You need a special advantage over competitors products, so make sure that the customers knows of this advantage. Make it to the main point of your introduction.
For instance, MLWM was introduced to me (if I recall it to 100%) as "a horror RPG in which you play the minions of a evil master". It may be correct, but I don't think that this is the special advantage of MLWM - I could as well think "ah, so this is like Vampire which I already have got - you're part of a bunch of monsters, your superior elder commands you around, and what you do is the mission of the week. So what - why do I need this one if I already got VtM?"
Instead or additionally, show what makes MLWM unique. I'd think here of the mechanical importance of love etc and the event table which get's triggered by hard rules - these aren't things which you won't find in many RPGs, so this might be the way to catch the customer.

Presentation of the books: The books laid low on the table, as you can see *here*.
This was a bit disadvantagous - to be able to take a look at them you had to stand in front of the table, what a.) blocked the sight for passerbys and b.) demanded to wait while other people were examining. Both is bad - if I don't know what is sold at a special booth I might simply walk further and never come back, and since I don't want too spend too much time at a single booth, I might also walk away if I have to stand around idle.
So, you might look for some kind of book-holder (I don't know if they're called so... I don't even know how they're called in German) on which you can put the books, so that they stand and can be examined from more far away.

Additionally, it might be useful if you make two diverted spots on which books are laid out: One for the introduction by booth monkeys, and one where customers can take a look on the books for themselves. Having a single spot for both purposes turned it into a neck of a bottle on which both usages get stuck and force the other one to be idle and wait.

[Frank T]

Thanks Stefan!

Yes, most of these occured to me as well. I fixed what I could for my own approaches on customers, but we did not have a "sales directive" for all booth monkeys to follow. This is also a question of what is really doable with an endeavor like this. Bear in mind that none of us (save for Jörg) are professional sales people, and that even I have only played about half of the games we offered for a full session, and most booth monkeys played considerably less. Anyway, suggestions are of course welcome.

I think MLwM was not usually introduced as a "horror rpg", and I don't think that description really fits. But you may have been talking to someone who did not really know the game by Friday.

- Frank

[StefanS]

Frank,

I don't wish to offend anyone of you. Each one of you who showed up to help to get the booth running did a great job for promoting indy games, and I appreciate everyones effort in this regard.
I only try to help to improve the fair presence, and unluckily to be able to do that, I have to point out mistakes and to make criticisms.

Regarding sales directive... You could do a short list of unique selling points and specialities for each product. Give that list early out to the booth monkeys, so that they can memorize it and get able to market every product effectively, even if they don't know it well. This might help to get potential customers excited about the product.

Regarding MLWM... Please don't nail me down on the exact wording. I readily admit that I might not recall it 100%, but that isn't the main point. The main point is that I didn't get the unique selling position of MLWM, so if I hadn't knowledge of it before showing up at the booth, it would have seemed like just another RPG.

- Stefan

[Frank T]

No offence taken!