The future of V:TES

We will probably need vampire-only packs anyway: if the starters are to be playable, they will only contain a sample of one or two groups. The rest of the crypt choice needs to be distributed somehow too.

It could be sorted by group and clan, group only, expansion,... I think group/clan would make the most sense.

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

@Diadalos: Without the need to print 'random boosters' the publishers would actually save money... less printing = less costs. So I'd say that on a the whole the profit-cost ratios should be approximately equal.

Unless you know what the costs are, how can you know any of this?

Juggernaut1981 wrote:

The Starters would be the deal-maker for allowing Princes to really expand their playerbases.

There are, literally, thousands of boxes of starters available RIGHT NOW. why aren't those enough to expand your player base?

I think, we forgot something....The new product(s) have to be available and sellable in general shops!! It's great to support the community, have the thing POD, but the general distributors also have to be pleased imho. There's have to be a way, where both the existing, restarting, newcoming players are pleased and the general distributors also rediscover the game, and starts selling again. You all know that they are still the top marketers and if they're not selling the game again it'd be a lot harder to find newbies, because they can't buy it everywhere.

Preconstructed decks are good, but you cannot make 15 different ones (of course there could be 4 or such, but not that many). If you have POD and everybody can have every card for buttons it's almost not better than proxying.
Kickstarters should be introduced anyway (like a 50 crypt cards, and 50 general cards, like dreams, pentex, gb, villein and of course some others), and there should be sabbat, indie, cammy and laibon ones, for a start. I'm still in favour of a new large expansion, like the one i'd mentioned: 100ish reprints from various sets and decided by polls and 50ish new cards (the new DM expansion would be good for this). This would take literally no further developing, just the distributing concept to be figured out. The rarity system should stay but rethinked (I don't want to see only enkil cog based high-cap decks or ashur madnesses everywhere).

Anyway, this is still a CCG and a reckless PoD would kill the secondary market, the shops and the ebay stores both. That's not exactly what the game needs.

Poci wrote:

I think, we forgot something....The new product(s) have to be available and sellable in general shops!!

You know, general shop may very well not be interested at all. Distribution to local retailer is a major pain in the ass, is pretty costly, and shop will sell them at more expensives price because they have to gain money and cover the fact they won't sell everything.

Also, don't forget that this will start small : most likely some 10th anniversary-like pack with the Dance macabre expansion and the most vital reprint possible, so as to not gamble too much money on the initial offer. In the future, maybe the 24 clan will have a preconstructed deck, but this will be far in the future, once the machine will be working as intended.

That's right, but if you load the market with cheap cards, it'll deteriorate the distributors for the future and that's not good. Maybe the reprints can be distributed like the 10th ed., or as kickstarters, but the future expansions should retain the Precon-booster type distribution in some form.

Trying to get individual shops to buy whatever gets released is possibly too much of a long shot initially. starting higher in the pipeline, like with distributors, is probably more prudent initially, so people can still obtain things at shops if demand is high.

also, I've said things before about having cheaper but still decorative vtes sized deck boxes as special items. the reason I didn't say tins is that I've heard white wolf actually lost money on the tenth anniversary ones because the physical tins themselves were fairly costly to have made compared to the retail of each unit with cards.

I think precons aren't the outlet for special boxes, but reprint sets would be. as for the number of precons, some are simply better outlets for reprints and new players than others.

if each of the three sects get four or five precons and each sect has a box of eight or ten decks, two of each, I think it would be appropriate.