Can we talk about the Tarot Decks? The Arcana Tarot Decks. I’m proud of them. It also ends in a painful memory. They are, all in all, the high and low of my time at Nix Hydra
In short: I’m one of the main people that made Arcana Tarot Decks a reality.
My job was answering emails, monitoring the Arcana social media tags, and generally having my finger on the pulse of the community. I knew that, by a wide margin, Tarot Decks were the biggest request. My coworker (who shall remain nameless for their privacy) was part of the team that made the Arcana and knew how much Tarot resonated with fans. This co-worker and I fought for about 1-1.5 years getting them greenlit.
In all honesty, they were a completely audacious idea. Nix Hydra didn’t make much money from merchandise. Maybe $100 a month. The cost of an *initial* run of Arcana Tarot Decks would take something like $25,000 to get going. This is because of creating the art, securing people to help package/ship them, actual costs of packaging/shipping itself, and more. Also, my partner on the project was very insistent that we work with a company that produced them at an extremely high quality with gold trim edges. Gold trim edges was important (they were right).
So, the Nix Hydra merch store made less than $200 a month, and my coworker and I were trying to pitch something that would COST $25,000~ to get started. If it made $25,000 back, that’s still a waste of time because it means we would have made the same money just skipping the whole thing.
This next part is fuzzy, but if I remember right, we tested the waters with stickers. We stocked Arcana stickers to see how quickly they sold. They sold fast. Like… fast. This was good. It was our test case to at least prove that “People want Arcana Merch”. It heated the iron, and my coworker and I struck. We got the approval!
So here’s the most nerve wracking moment of my career here. I’ve been in the game industry 12 years, but I’ve never run a merchandise store Nix Hydra. Even after that, I sent out a few sticker sheets every month. Forget about convincing a company to invest $25,000~ into my mad idea. And then… if they DID sell. What, then!? I always have a lot of anxiety, and I kept thinking of ways it could go wrong. What if I broke some international shipping law? What if I did the math wrong and operated at a loss? What if the site charged people the wrong amount? I KNEW the Tarot Decks would sell, but that was scary, too!
The day came that we flipped the switch. I was so excited. I was so excited! I was so… scared. At this point, all that was left was to see if we could make above the starting amount…
We made about $200,000 in the first 24 hours. Now, this was 3-4 years ago, so I may be SIGNIFICANTLY off. But my point is that we made six digits very quickly. By this same time tomorrow, this went from “Gunpowder and Coworker’s brassy, sassy idea” to “Merch is a hit! What’s next?”
Over the next few months and weeks, we had a joyful hectic hell of the best anxiety. Problems would come up. We’d knock them down. We’d run out of storage space in the office and it would look almost comical. We’d have truckloads of shipment issues. I soon found out that simply taking the packages to the post office was its own complicated project. All of this expanded into hiring people to help with merch. These people were extremely passionate about The Arcana and began to be advocates for what merch to add next. I could gush about how amazing they are for hours, but for privacy’s sake, I’m refraining from saying much about my coworkers.
So like that, we went from “Merch doesn’t sell” to “We need a merch department” in a few months. By the time I left the company, the CEO (you’ve seen his name around) projected the Merch alone to be a $1M a year revenue stream. I don’t know if we ever hit that goal. My point was that he felt it was possible, which made me happy.
… which brings me to how the story ends painfully. I have moderate ADHD. I personally think it’s severe, but my doctor says moderate, so hey. I tend to fall behind on assignments a lot. I also tend to get distracted super easily. It can ruffle feathers in a work environment. I did not realize how much. See, this project was in full swing, my work was going well, and I had also designed all the gameplay of Heart Hunter (that was me! I’ll write a post on that later). I felt good about all of this. I had a meeting with the CEO and was going to ask him for a raise.
“[Name], just so you know, I sometimes sit and my desk and go over the pros and cons of letting you go.” He said it conversationally. It was casual to him. My stomach fell out. I asked him why, and it turned out that he was being very, very literal.
See, he made a pros and cons list of every thing he likes about me and every thing that he doesn’t. I’ll spare you the whole list, but in the Cons side was “Doesn’t focus on work all 8 hours of the day”. I was flabbergasted and told him “But… I do a lot of projects. And YOU said the merch store is estimated at $1M a year!” At this point, it is extremely important to note that nothing about the merch store was in my job description besides “Ship stickers and answer emails”. Literally everything I mentioned above were things I did in my spare time without being asked. Out of love for the company.
“Yes, I agree that you’re very passionate and creative. See, I put that on the list!”
He points to the Pros and Cons list. “passionate and creative” is cancelled out by “doesn’t focus all 8 hours of the day”. It was a tie. The project I co-led started a whole new department and seven-digit (estimated) revenue… it wasn’t even the only one I did (Heart Hunter was also a side project, albeit one I was assigned). And all of that, in his mind, was cancelled out by “doesn’t work all 8 hours a day”.
I never got a raise. I never got a bonus. I never even got job security. None of it mattered to him.
I started looking for a job the next day.
There’s more to the story, but I think this is the main point. This is the best and worst of Nix Hydra. It was a place where people like my coworker and I would make extra time to work on new things simply because we believed in our work that much. Where players joyfully supported our work because it resonated with them. Where new employees would be so passionate about their work that they would keep an entire department afloat on their own fantastic ideas. It was also a place where none of this could even amount to job security or recognition. It was frustrating, and it was joyful.
I meant every single smile at a public event. So did every member of the team that was there. It was never “just PR”; it was people who were over the moon to get to help create these stories and worlds and moments. We loved it. But management never loved us back. And that stung.
Thank you, every single person who posted their tarot decks. Who put them into your cosplays. Who did readings.
Thank you everyone who posted your Heart Hunter moments. Who shared the postcards I fought tooth and nail to see in the game (It was SO difficult to convince some people that “postcards would be the type of reward players want”).
My entire life, I’ve had joyful moments in games and game communities. My lifelong dream was to help make those moments come alive for others. When you all celebrated this game and those aspects of it, that was very genuinely a lifelong dream come true.
Thank you for reading this. And also The Arcana.
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