How is HERO selling?

[Powerhouse]

I hope no one minds me asking the question, I was just curious.

I haven't seen too much lately in my WOTC store but then again it reorganized to be more general games and cards. On the other hand, there seems to be a number of products that are planned.

Personally, I am pulling for the line (I've bought the Hero 5th edition, Champions genre book, Champions Universe, and CKC with plans for others possibly) since it's a great system and the best to simulate super hero comics.

Thanks.

[Monolith]

DOJ does not release numbers or anything you might consider "firm" in regards to sales but my general understanding is that most of the products have sold fairly well; at least well enough that DOJ can continue to hire new people like Allen. I have heard that the scifi material is not selling as well as the superhero material, but I think that is to be expected due to the disparity of the fanbase and the fact that the HERO System is firmly rooted in the superhero market in most people's minds. I also have a feeling that the Fantasy material will also be a very good product for DOJ (fantasy being the largest and most played genre of them all).

[Steve Long]

We don't release hard sales numbers. All I can tell you is, better than some game lines out there, not as well as we'd like. ;)

[Lupus]

HERO's selling real well down in Australia. That's what I hear from one of the mainwholesalers here, anyway. Apparently, they can get 30 books in and sell out inside of a week - that's a lot better than any other line. I thought for ages that they just weren't stocking books, because I could never find a copy of Champions. Then I found out they /were/ getting in copies, they were just selling out.

[Killer Shrike]

The anecdotal evidence indicates that HEROs product is moving well.

[Al_Beddow]

Hero is doing well in Spokane WA even though D&D reigns supreme. Where HackMaster (formely the local #2 RPG) has slacked off considerably Hero 5th seems to remain steady.

[Derek Hiemforth]

Originally posted by Monolith
I have heard that the scifi material is not selling as well as the superhero material, but I think that is to be expected due to the disparity of the fanbase and the fact that the HERO System is firmly rooted in the superhero market in most people's minds. I also have a feeling that the Fantasy material will also be a very good product for DOJ (fantasy being the largest and most played genre of them all). I think the genres other than Supers and Fantasy will gradually attract more players as more and more of the other genres get genre books and support products released for them. In other words, the more the HERO System products look like a fully-fleshed out universal game system line, the more people will see the HERO System that way, and the better the other genre's products will sell. :)

[Killer Shrike]

Actually the last 3 new converts to the HERO System Ive talked to or corresponded with got involved with the system because of Star HERO. They glanced thru StarHERO in a store, went bug eyed, and bought into the game.

The only complaint Ive heard from them was that to play StarHERO they also needed to buy FRED, which is funny to me in an ironic back-asswards sort of way ;)

[JmOz]

Originally posted by Steve Long
We don't release hard sales numbers. All I can tell you is, better than some game lines out there, not as well as we'd like. ;)

I expect you to say no comment to this (or just ignore it)

How are you doing according to your plan? What I mean is are sales what you expected, less than expected, more than expected?

[Monolith]

Originally posted by Derek Hiemforth
I think the genres other than Supers and Fantasy will gradually attract more players as more and more of the other genres get genre books and support products released for them. In other words, the more the HERO System products look like a fully-fleshed out universal game system line, the more people will see the HERO System that way, and the better the other genre's products will sell. :)
I agree completely. For many people, especially newbies, the more support material there is the greater likelihood that people will play the genre. It is always easier to scale something in a book up or down than it is to create it from scratch. Heck, I have been spending the last month trying to work out the best way to incorporate some of the new Fantasy Hero information into our Terran Empire game. :)

[Dr Rotwang!]

At my store, we sell it somewhat slowly, but my frequent, honest pimping of the game helps it out the door.

For a while there, though, I couldn't get it back in. I was worried. But that problem's over.

I expect to move more of 'em come Fall, when the students come rolling back into town with their quaint inablility to drive and their charming need to do something when they're not drinking.

[CorpCommander]

Originally posted by Dr Rotwang!
I expect to move more of 'em come Fall, when the students come rolling back into town with their quaint inablility to drive and their charming need to do something when they're not drinking.

Interesting. You seem to have the unusual notion that students will only play when they aren't drinking! While I've never played while drinking (actually I don't drink but I used to) I know it can be quite common to have a beverage or two on hand while playing. In my opinion drinking leads to bad die rolling. Don't drink and die. Or something like that!

[Dr Rotwang!]

A bit of clarification: Indiana University (IU), here in Bloomington, IN, was recently voted "#1 Party School in the Whole Universe" or somesuch by A Very Important Periodical with a Masthead. Ergo the comment about students and their propensity towards slobbering, vomitous drunkenness, thing which I abhor in much the same way that bunnies hate lawnmowers.

Or vice-versa.

Bunnies, I like.

Gooooooood buniiiiiiiies...

POST OVER!

[Steve Long]

How are you doing according to your plan? What I mean is are sales what you expected, less than expected, more than expected?

I'll give you the answer you expect: No Comment. ;)


At my store, we sell it somewhat slowly, but my frequent, honest pimping of the game helps it out the door.

In my experience, this is true with just about any game. A retailer who knows and genuinely likes a game can convey his enthusiasm to customers and convince them to buy it. My local game store did bang-up business in Deadlands products for a while a few years ago because one of the employees as a big DL fan and pushed the game.

So, it's good to know at least one retailer out there is on our side! ;)

[MarkusDark]

my hardest problem is trying to make the owner of my FLGS understand WHAT products to buy. He purchased just two copies of FReD without any of the cool support materials. I FINALLY got him to purchase CKC and USPD which, I feel, really helps to sell the game - seeing the examples and such things.

He's absorbed into the Clix market at the moment so I have to use a soft baseball bat to get things across.

[Nightshade]

My brother owns a gaming store and he has stated that HERO was actually outselling d20 for a while. Of course, he and his business partner pretty much only play HERO, so that may have had something to do with it...

Nightshade

[Ndreare]

Game stor owners can also destroy a market.

Here in Burlington the owner of the local game stor speeks ill of HERO and only has one HERO book on his shelf the Champions Source book. So I imagine that the sales here will suck. While in Musoula Montana I found a game store owner who liked the game and as such recamended books to people and things like that.

[Derek Hiemforth]

Originally posted by Ndreare
Game stor owners can also destroy a market.

Here in Burlington the owner of the local game stor speeks ill of HERO and only has one HERO book on his shelf the Champions Source book. So I imagine that the sales here will suck. While in Musoula Montana I found a game store owner who liked the game and as such recamended books to people and things like that. To be perfectly blunt, this just seems mind-numbingly stupid to me. If I was a game store owner, I'd endeavor to find something worthwhile to say about every book I carried. I'm not saying I'd try to pass off junk as gold or anything, but almost no books are worthless, and I'd try try to emphasize the worth in all of them. Why on earth would a game store owner want to convince people not to buy his merchandise? And yet, this does indeed happen frequently. :confused:

[Steve Long]

It happens because many game store owners, like many comic store owners, aren't businessmen -- they're hobbyists who decided to try to turn their hobby into their job (often with no more real business plan than "I can get all that cool stuff I buy for wholesale prices!"). Not being businessmen, they don't understand how to run a retail business professionally -- for example, they don't grasp that running down a product line, or failing to carry it, simply because you don't like it personally is, generally speaking, a poor business decision.

There are many highly professional, very cool game store owner/operators out there who don't do this sort of stupid stuff. Sadly, they're not nearly as common as they ought to be; if they were, I suspect the gaming industry would be in at least a little better shape.

[MarkusDark]

My FLGS is a Gaming Store/Comic Book Store/Gaming Center hybrid. The back third of the store is for the Gaming Center, leaving the front two thirds for the games and comics. He has VERY limited shelf space so he needs to pick what will sell and what won't. Luckily, the game I play in/run is just two blocks from this store so I have managed to talk a couple of my friends into buying from him as well. Hopefully, this will boost more sales and thereby have a nice stock in stock.

The trouble with a new store is that they usually will only buy what sells and I had to guarantee them (with a deposit) that I was going to buy Fantasy Hero before they would order it.

[Hugh Neilson]

Nothing sells like success. If the retailer orders it, and it sits on the shelf, why would he order more of it? Get your friends, your co-gamers, etc. to ask for the product. Then buy it when it comes in.

Hero is at a disadvantage here, in my opinion. They produce HUGE books, which is great for you and me because we get lots of material. It's not great for the store owner because it means higher cost, which means a bigger risk if it sits on the shelf.

The store I patronize stocks comics and games, and RPG's are not their main line of business. I go on the Hero web site, and give the owner a list of the product I'd like when it comes out. He knows I'll buy it, so he brings it in. And he gives me a pretty fair discount, since he knows whatever he orders on my behalf will be cash in his hand within a week of receipt.

I could order it off the website, but that doesn't give my game store much reason to stock the product, does it?

[Tim]

I've done something similar. I just told the owner of the FLGS I frequent, to just order me one of each Hero product that comes out. I made it simple for him that way.

Hope Steve doesn't mind me taking the easy way out.:D

Tim S

[Ben Seeman]

Originally posted by Hugh Neilson
I could order it off the website, but that doesn't give my game store much reason to stock the product, does it?
That's one of the main reasons we wait at least a month after shipping to sell our new books online.

[Kara Zor-El]

Ummmm, retail, I assume.

Hah! Like anyone reads my posts since I've gotten the new avatar! lol

[aylwin13]

Originally posted by Kara Zor-El
Hah! Like anyone reads my posts since I've gotten the new avatar! lol I..... read..... them...., every.... word....

< I end up only being able to read one word between each bounce. > :D

[Steve Long]

Hero is at a disadvantage here, in my opinion. They produce HUGE books, which is great for you and me because we get lots of material. It's not great for the store owner because it means higher cost, which means a bigger risk if it sits on the shelf.

Not strictly true. Look at the size of one of our $24.99 books, like the HSB or USPD. Then look at the comparative number of pages -- 256-272 -- worth of products from other companies, such as AEG. You'll often find that it's cheaper for the retailer to stock our product -- 272 pages of Hero material costs less than 272 pages' worth of books from other companies. Furthermore, because he's only dealing with one product, it's easier on the retailer, which reduces his administrative overhead. Stocking our line is actually a better risk for a retailer in many respects.

[TheEmerged]

RE: Something I noticed in the original post. You're basing this on sales at a WotC store? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the WotC stores recently adopt an effectively "nothing but d20" mandate?

[Hugh Neilson]

Steve, I'm not down on the Hero products - I'd rather spend the $25 (US - more like $40 up here in Canada!) and get a product with meat to it. Hero does a thorough job on its products, and there's no padding in a 272 page book (unlike SOME companies who seem to need third-rate material to fill 48 or 64 pages).

But the per unit cost is higher, so the retailer takes a greater risk if he buys a shelf copy and no one picks it up. He can buy 4 $10 supplements (in my dollars) and, if a couple sell, he's at least broken even. With the big Hero book, he risks the whole amount sitting unsold.

Of course, Hero also has the advantage of being a known name - why buy a bunch of stuff from some "d20 open license" startup which may turn out to be junk, when we can get some recognized Hero product that sells through. This makes more of a difference to a store that focuses on games than to one that just dabbles, I suppose.

I always like to ask in any store where I don't see Hore products - if enough people ask "Why don't you carry this?" that translates into "Hey, you lost an easy sale" and they start looking in to the product. Hey, it's in my best interest - more sales for Hero = bigger print runs = lower costs, and more players = more demand for product = more reason for Hero to put out more good product. And I always like getting more product from Hero!

[Now if you could send my gaming store the name of some distributors...seems he really has to search for some of the product - he does, because he knows he has a sale the day it arrives, but he often has to check with several distributors.]

[Hugh Neilson]

I do like the logic of getting more pages per $$ (one reason I like Hero's products) - I'll have to raise that to the naysayers. Why pay $10 for a 32 page sourcebook? For $40 you can get a 256 page Hero book - that's twice as much for the same price!

For those who frequent the traditional "comic shop with the occasional game as a sideline", it never hurts to point out that Champions is a Super Hero RPG - do you think your comic reading customers (who come in every week) will more likely "Impulse buy" a product with a guy with a sword on the cover, or one with a four colour super battle? Comic readers are more likely to branch into a Supers RPG.

Your comic store owner may not know anything about RPG's (some do; some don't), but he does know that any new product a customer gets interested in translates to more sales.

[Steve Long]

[Now if you could send my gaming store the name of some distributors...seems he really has to search for some of the product - he does, because he knows he has a sale the day it arrives, but he often has to check with several distributors.]

The "Hero Retailers" page here on the website has a listing of all the distributors who receive our solicitation information. Alliance, ACD, and GameBoard, among many others, all buy lots of our books and would be glad to sell 'em to your local gaming store. ;)

[Bazza]

Originally posted by Lupus
HERO's selling real well down in Australia. That's what I hear from one of the mainwholesalers here, anyway. Apparently, they can get 30 books in and sell out inside of a week - that's a lot better than any other line. I thought for ages that they just weren't stocking books, because I could never find a copy of Champions. Then I found out they /were/ getting in copies, they were just selling out. Which wholesaler is this, Walrus & Carpenter? My FLGS has ordered stuff from them for me both HERO and Chaosium's Call of Cthulthu Fiction. It usally takes at least one month or 2 from when I place the order, from when they mail out the order sheets to FLGSs. But at least they come through...but the agonizing waiting. :(

[KawangaKid]

It gets from a distributor in the U.S. Can an e-mail or private message be sent to me as to which distributors are being used?

There's this WEIRD excuse that goes like: "Our distributor has difficulty getting the older stuff, but can bring out the new releases easier."

This is problematic since you need the main HERO book to play everything else. The only thing they're getting is the crossover thingy, and other stuff that I want. But they're NOT stocking HERO because they're concerned about not having the main book.

[tesuji]

Originally posted by Hugh Neilson
I do like the logic of getting more pages per $$ (one reason I like Hero's products) - I'll have to raise that to the naysayers. Why pay $10 for a 32 page sourcebook? For $40 you can get a 256 page Hero book - that's twice as much for the same price!


Bulk != value.

Not meant to slam hero, but IMX overall size doesn't make for better... gaming. I have plopped down $32 for a 300 page book and $25 for a 400 page book and gotten both home and within half a day realized the 400 page book was nigh on useless and filled with padding and the 200 page book was marvelous and sparking new ideas and games right away. The 400 page book is now just filler on my shelf while the 200 pager is a campaign in progress.

lean and mean has a great deal of merit IMO.

[Hugh Neilson]

Originally posted by tesuji
Bulk != value.
...
lean and mean has a great deal of merit IMO.

Agreed. However, as I said in an earlier post, I generally find the Hero products have solid material throughout. Also, I'm sure that, like me, you've seen 32 page products that still manage to include a lot of padding - the fact that it's smaller doesn't mean it's not padded to get as "large" as it did.

[Killer Shrike]

Originally posted by MarkusDark
The trouble with a new store is that they usually will only buy what sells and I had to guarantee them (with a deposit) that I was going to buy Fantasy Hero before they would order it. Wow. Sounds like they are operating in the red.

[Hugh Neilson]

Originally posted by Killer Shrike
Wow. Sounds like they are operating in the red.

Or they've been burned before. "Oh, order this for me and I'll buy it when it comes in." When it arrives..."Oh, I bought it somewhere else last week" or "Oh, I forgot to tell you I don't want it any more."

[Al_Beddow]

Originally posted by Hugh Neilson
Or they've been burned before. "Oh, order this for me and I'll buy it when it comes in." When it arrives..."Oh, I bought it somewhere else last week" or "Oh, I forgot to tell you I don't want it any more."

I hate it when people pull that crap.

Personally I have no problem with paying a deposit to get something special in to a store. I've never been asked for one but when I first moved here I offered it to be polite.

[Hugh Neilson]

Originally posted by Al_Beddow
I hate it when people pull that crap.

Personally I have no problem with paying a deposit to get something special in to a store. I've never been asked for one but when I first moved here I offered it to be polite.

I suspect the fact you offered is a primary reason they didn't ask for one. It makes it clear you understand the guy's in business and you're making a commitment when you ask him to order something special.

[No, I don't own or work in a game store, but I do know business.]

[Killer Shrike]

Maybe its because Ive always lived in cities with multiple game stores, but it seems alien to me that a store would expect a deposit upfront for product -- particularly in this day in age. I mean, really, if its a hassle to get a product in person it can be ordered online.

I personally buy everything the HERO System puts out in a local game store becuase it helps HEROs and encourages the store to carry the product line, thus ensuring that it is on the shelves and browsable by potential converts. But Ill be honest, if it was a hassle I'd order it online.

[MarkusDark]

Originally posted by Killer Shrike
Wow. Sounds like they are operating in the red.

Nope. They are making profits and simply put it back into the areas that are selling - such as the clix. Until there is a bigger need for Hero, they won't purchase it. Afterall, you don't stock up on swiss cheese if 99% of the people buy gouda.

[Al_Beddow]

Hugh, I suspect you are right. I never thought of it that way..



Originally posted by Killer Shrike
Maybe its because Ive always lived in cities with multiple game stores, but it seems alien to me that a store would expect a deposit upfront for product -- particularly in this day in age. I mean, really, if its a hassle to get a product in person it can be ordered online.

KS,
I live here in Spokane Washington, the east side of the state, sharing a crappy economy with northern Idaho. All Business is tight here, and the gaming business is even worse.

I explain the economy to the folks from Seattle this way:
"When it's good in Seattle, it's GREAT! When it's bad in Seattle it's still OK.
When it's good in Spokane it's ok. When it's bad in Spokane it's down right AWFUL!!!"

So, when someone goes to one of our two local gaming stores, orders something special, and then doesn't pick it up (pay for it), it's worse for one of our stores than say for a store in a city with a better economy (and more profits to help cushion taking a hit like that).

[Hugh Neilson]

Originally posted by Al_Beddow
Hugh, I suspect you are right. I never thought of it that way..

So, when someone goes to one of our two local gaming stores, orders something special, and then doesn't pick it up (pay for it), it's worse for one of our stores than say for a store in a city with a better economy (and more profits to help cushion taking a hit like that).

The player base will also have an impact.If the store has a big customer base, they may be more comfortable that someone will buy it, even if you don't. The popularity of the system would have an impact as well - the stuff he's sure will sell is probably already on the shelf.

And if half a dozen people ask him to order in, say, Ultimate Vehicle, he's probably going to consider a shelf copy or two for the guys who would buy it, but won't order it. [Hence, always ask your game store why they aren't carrying Hero products.]