Taking our TTRPG to Origins, part 7
Part 1 here
Okay, I promised a summary after we got back to Portland and I had a few days to rest. If you're interested in conventions or self publishing and selling TTRPGS you may find this interesting. I've added in some of my Yeld art just to break up the post.
First, here's the recap: My brother Nick and I took our self published TTRPG The Magical Land of Yeld to Origins earlier this month. Origins is one of the largest table top gaming conventions in the US. It has a great rep for being a place where people come to discover and play games, and it has an absolutely enormous sales room. The show was very expensive for us to attend, but we thought it would be worth it. We expected to do very well, but... we didn't. We had very poor sales, and struggled to get any attention at all. (Also, Columbus, OH was suffering from a heatwave like you wouldn't believe. The entire city smelled like a swimming pool and even the air conditioned convention hall was hot and sweaty.) After the show Nick and I were feeling pretty bad. Our game is a labor of love. Its a full time job for both of us, but we don't really make any money. Every bit of cash the game makes goes back into the game. So investing so much into Origins only to have it sputter and fail felt like a real defeat. And it was. For real. Sigh.
Sometimes you get defeated. And sometimes that's it. You can't go on. You're out of energy and money and motivation. I think, for Nick and I, we were close to that. Putting out the second edition of our game has been hard. Nothing has exactly worked like we hoped it would. So coming back from Columbus on a torturously cramped and hot flight, I was as close as I've ever been to giving up. But after a few days of rest I can see that the show was NOT as bad as I thought, and we still have levers that need to be pulled before we admit defeat. Some of those are big levers too! Okay, so WHY did we even thing Origins would be good for us? Well, here's some context. Our game, The Magical Land of Yeld, is a big $60 400 page hardcover book (we sell it for $50 at cons). $50 is ALWAYS a tough sell. For a new game you've never played? Or heard of? You KNOW how much gamers hate trying anything new. You know how much gamers will say that CAN'T spend money on a new game, and then turn around and spend 50 bucks on dice and pizza right in front of you while you watch. We're all gamers. We all know how it is. So Yeld is a tough sell at conventions. But we sell it! Why? A few reasons. 1. Yeld is excellent. Its an awesome game. Don't take my word for it, watch a review! When people hear about it, they want to learn more. They want to try it. And when they try it they love it. 2. Yeld looks awesome. Its a big nice looking hardcover book full of amazing art and comics. Yeld has more art than any TTRPG you've ever seen. That's not an exaggeration. I spent years illustrating this book, and its jammed full of comics and drawings. We use comics to engage our readers and teach the game's rules. Yeld's illustrations are bright and engaging, and it does not take much to get someone to come over to our booth and open a book to see more. In an industry where games often only have 1 piece of engaging art (on the cover) or are filled with kind of sameish art, Yeld stands out hard. Even people who hate the game's visual style (they're out there. I hear it all the time) notice the book. 3. We're good at selling our game. We're very good at it. We can convince you to drop $50 on a game you've never heard of. Well, we can convenance SOME people. Selling is always an uphill battle. But Nick and I have gotten very good at showing people why our game is amazing and what parts of it they'll enjoy. The last part is important. We've been selling our games at conventions since 2006 when we first released Panty Explosion and Classroom Deathmatch. Over the years we've noticed some patterns.
First, there are good cons and bad cons. But things average out. If we do 6 shows in a year, we'll get 2 good ones, 2 mediocre ones and 2 bad ones. We had to learn to accept that. Second, on average we sell about 1 book for every 100 show attendees. I started tracking this number around 2016, and that's what I've come up with over the last 9 years. Its a very rough estimate, and it falls apart at very large shows and very small ones. But we base a lot of decisions around it. For example, late last year we did 3 shows back to back over about 4 weeks (which was an awful grind, btw). Their attendance was about 2000, 3000 and 1200. So we hoped to sell about 62 books over the three shows. We sold 0 at the first show, about 30 at the second and 25 at the third. So the first one was a bust, but the second was right on and the third was much better than expected. Overall, we performed less than we expected, but not much less. And as an average all three shows were really good for us, even though the first one sucked. Origins had a projected attendance of 18000 people this year. From what I've heard it was closer to 20K. We hoped our average would hold out and we'd sell about 180 books. But really, that seemed unlikely. We shot for a safer 120 book goal. And to be clear, even though that would have been less than expected based on our experience, it still would have been a very nice number of books to sell. We decided we'd be happy only selling about 70 books, and 50 was the minimum we felt like we HAD to sell in order to recoup much of the expenses for the show.
(I'm sure you're doing the numbers in your head and wondering if a 50 book minimum would actually cover expenses. It wouldn't. But sales aren't everything at a con like this. I'll talk about that more below.) We did not sell 50 books. We sold 25, plus some expansions, GM screens and miniatures. 25 books is not nothing at all. That's 25 people who decided to make an investment on our game. 25 people who got excited to try something new and didn't' think a fat price point was a deal breaker. That's good. That's undeniably a good thing. We had hoped for more. We had expected more. And I think our expectations were reasonable. But sometimes you have bad shows.
So, what went wrong? I don't know. Nick and I spent a lot of time talking about it. I also spent a lot of time talking to our booth neighbors and other sellers in the hall. It seems like the sales hall got a lot less traffic than anyone was expecting. Big booths seemed to get a lot of attention, but a lot of smaller booth didn't. Walking around the show, I noticed so many small booths weren't getting any traffic at all. Our aisle was often very slow. Sometimes we'd see less than 100 people down the aisle in an hour. That's a very small number. I think, for us, the bigger problem is that we just weren't able to engage with many people. Yeld is an eye-catching game, but people were not looking. Eyes were locked forward. People were not stopping to look or chat. I'm not sure why. I said before that we usually expect to sell 1 book for every 100 attendees at a show. That doesn't mean that we get to speak to every person at a show. My guess is at most shows we talk to about 3 out of 10 people. And we usually end up selling a book to 1 out of 30 people we talk to. That's a GOOD rate. For a $50 book? That's fantastic. Ask anyone who does this. At Origins we were selling books to 1 out of 10 people we talked to. I'm not joking. 1 out of every 10 people would either buy a book right there or come back later in the show to buy one. That's astounding. I've rarely had sales like that. The problem was that we were barely talking to anyone. In a show of 18-20K people, we maybe spoke to a few hundred people over the 4 days show. That's ridiculously low. By comparison, at GameStorm (a local show of about 2500) a few months ago we probably spoke to half the people that attended the show. At ECCC a few years ago I kept a tally and spoke to almost 3000 people over the weekend. I have never been to a show of any significant size where I spoke to so few people! Have you?
So...
Sales were poor. But sales aren't everything. One of the big values of large shows like this is getting to show off your game to a larger audience. And that's something we were really interested in! So how did that go? 1. Well, as I said, our at-booth-engagement was very poor. I think the people we actually spoke to really liked what they heard. I mean, so many bought the game on the spot, and some that didn't bought miniatures instead. So even though we spoke to FAR less people than we hoped to, the ones we did talk to were very positive. 2. Nick ran several Yeld games over the week. They were apparently a mixed bag, but the game itself was well received each time.
3. Yeld was featured in a day 0 retailer and press event, where stores and media got to come and talk to us and see our game. It went really well. Nick and I did several interviews on the spot, handed out Yeld catalogs to several retailers and met a number of media people that have since contacted us. So that was good! Over the show we also gave a few short interviews at our booth. So overall, while sales were poor, reception was better. We did some promotion, and we've seen some post-con sales and attention. I think this was also not as successful as we hoped. But we've decided to take what we can get.
We're home now. I've rested. I feel better. Origins was a BIG investment, and it looks like it just hasn't paid off. As a company that just doesn't make money at all, that sucks. But we're not done yet. We still have some levers to pull: 1. Gencon. The other half of our large convention investment this year is Gencon. We've never taken Yeld to Gencon, but I have taken games there twice in the past, and both times did very well. I just don't know how this will go. My confidence is... rattled. I think its likely that, even if Gencon is a wild success, we probably will not continue to do large cons. They're just too expensive for us. And one bad con costs too much. But I'm also not going to give up until we give Gencon a try! After all, the money is already spent. 2. Stores. We've been struggling to get Yeld into more stores, and having a small amount of success. Of course, the game is available through Indie Press Revolution! We've also been looking for other distribution partners. We attended the GAMA trade show earlier this year for exactly that reason, and met with 8 different distributors. Of those 8, we've started working with 3 (and hope to work with 2 more). But the process is SLOOOOOOOOOW. My hope is that by the Fall retailers will be able to order Yeld through several of these distributors. It would be very nice to see sales pick up in the Fall and Winter. 3. Sales. Our book released in late 2024, and while our sales have not been amazing since then, they also haven't been bad. We're making enough most months to cover expenses (although Nick and I just don't get paid), and we've had a few months where we did well enough to finance our two big conventions. That's pretty good! We really need to get to the point were sales are more steady and Nick and I can make at least a LITTLE money each month. But we are seeing very slow progression. 4. Small Conventions. Smaller shows are (on average) going great for us. They're a minimum investment for often a large financial benefit. And a great place to meet players and grow our community. We have several more small shows scheduled for this year, and I think that will be our focus next year.
So that was Origins. Would I recommend it? No. Absolutely not. It was an absolutely devastating experience, and a real blow to my confidence, motivation and sense of self worth. The small gains did not equal the cost, or even come close. It Hurt.
But things hurt. I'm 20 years into making games and comics. I don't know if I'll ever be in a position where its easy or comfortable. I won't stop. I don't know what life looks like when you stop doing what you love. We have a good game, and we have some levers to pull. So we'll keep going. We'll keep trying. Hopefully Yeld will continue to grow and sell. Hopefully our audience and community will expand. If not, the game is already made. It won't go away. It will always exist, even if Nick and I move on to other things. We'll still make other comics and games. And we're not done yet. - J
If you're interested in Yeld: The Yeld Site Yeld on IPR Yeld on DrivethruRPG Yeld on itch Yeld Patreon Yeld Discord (As a side note, I found Origins mostly well organized and comfortable, aside from the heat. Staff was friendly and everything we easy to find. I wish I had time to actually enjoy the show, because it seemed like a fun time.)
