Origins Game Fair After-Action Report

For Immediate Release
June 19, 2017

ORLANDO, FL -

Greetings! We just closed the book on our first Origins experience — and what an experience it was! We’ll be talking more about some of the specifics, and posting pictures, in the coming days, but we wanted to get something out in the Monday newsletter about the results of the show.

We’re presently in our hotel in Columbus waiting on the monsoon to die down before we begin the trek back. We’ll be driving back to Florida all day Monday, and most of Tuesday will be spent processing Origins financials, getting the stock re-situated in the warehouse, and catching our breath, so the warehouse and customer support will remain closed until Wednesday, June 21.  

Minions will be glad to know we’ve got some new games and expansions in the truck, which will be in the inventory when we get home. Fans of Brotherwise Games, Shoot Again Games, Breaking Games, Cohio Games, Noble Quest, and Leder Games should get their Loot Points ready!

We’d like to welcome a few new members that joined us at the show: Purple Potato Games, Flatworks Games, and Noble Quests. Noble Quests dropped off a few copies of their RPG, Mystic Forces. Flatworks and Purple Potato both have Kickstarters in progress now — Dwarven Smithy and Burst My Bubble, respectively. Links are in the newsletter and on indiegamealliance.com; check them both out! We also recruited a few new Minions at the show; welcome to you as well!

Victoria and I would like to extend an extremely warm thanks to Jason Gough, Nathan Knight and Mark Miller, who made ridiculously long drives of their own on very short notice to help us staff our Origins presence. You guys are all-stars! Thanks also to all the Minions and members who dropped by the booth to say hello – there’s too many to list you all, but we enjoyed meeting, or reuniting, with you all!

We had a few very productive conversations with some of our existing partners, the fruits of which I hope to be able to announce soon. We also had four or five very good conversations with potential new partners, and will be following up with them after the show to put the final touches on new discounts and benefits we’ll be able to offer our members in short order. We also chatted with several convention representatives that invited IGA to exhibit at their upcoming shows, which we’re excited about as well.

We didn’t intend to run a game library at Origins, so we brought only open copies of what we had to sell so that we could show potential buyers the components. However, our 10×10 booth was pretty cramped, so we had nowhere to store those games. We ended up having more Minion support at the show than we anticipated on short notice, so we ended up using the games and the extra team members to run an impromptu game library in the main gaming hall. Our team will be submitting demo reports and photos of these efforts when they get settled back in at home, probably no later than Thursday or so.

Sales were, generally speaking, quite weak at this show. We did very little business Thursday and Friday (which we heard was nearly universal) but picked up steam a bit on Saturday and Sunday. We’ve got about $1900 in payouts going out to a variety of members as soon as the credit card payments get deposited into our account from Square. If you received a real-time sales notification, we owe you money! Please take a moment and review your payment information on file — we’re missing it for about half the members who had games sell. Without this information, we cannot pay you! We’ve had a request to offer a “daily digest” mode for the sales notifications, and I’ll see if I can get that done on the site before Dice Tower.

We are pleased to report that IGA is already booked for Origins 2018 with at least another 10×10 booth, if not more. Hopefully knowing a year in advance will translate to a stronger presence, and a better bottom line for IGA.

That’s the good news. The bad news: while we haven’t done the final numbers yet, it’s looking like IGA took a beating financially by attending Origins this year. This is in part due to the short notice of the show, and as a result, very few in-booth demo sales. We’re planning on posting a more detailed breakdown of this in a few days when all the numbers are done. Members can, of course, help us out by purchasing demo time in our dedicated IGA demo and sales room at Dice Tower Convention in three short weeks and Gen Con in August. We’re still looking for volunteers for both shows as well.

That’s a wrap on Origins until we get home and get everything processed. See you next year, Columbus!