Transcription
Welcome to Game Gaming Retail Ramblings, episode number 46. I'm your host, Travis Severance, coming to you live from Millennium Game Studios in Rochester, New York today. It's finally summer. We're all excited about that.
I want to talk about a really important topic today, one that I've sort of touched base on before in previous episodes, but I really want to give it as much attention as I possibly can. This is the longest script I've ever written, so apologies for the speed in which I talk. I'm going to be as conversational as I possibly can be, but we're going to talk about the predictable boom bus cycles of TCGs today. We're really going to focus on uh Riftbound, Lorcana, Star Wars Unlimited, and One Piece. We have seen this sort of production cycle and market influx and all the challenges that come into uh catastrophic success in the TCG world. So, I want to take you through sort of I guess the cadence or the journey for which this sort of happens and how it how it comes about. It's predictable and it's very predictable and I've had the conversations with a a number of the publishers that I'm mentioning here for these games ahead of time. Um, and despite those conversations and those warnings and those concerns and those issues, we we end up in this same spot over and over and over again. The names change, the intellectual properties change, the publishers change, but the cycle itself almost never changes. So, like I said, we we watched this happen with Disney Lana, Star Wars Unlimited, One Piece had it had some issues with this as well, and now we're right in the middle of watching it happen with Riftbound 2.
So, the first set comes out and it's a catastrophic success. You've got product that disappears instantly, prices skyrocket, players panic, investors flood in, retailers start chasing allocations, social media explodes with outrage, and everyone screams that there isn't enough product. And then eventually the conversation changes from why can't I get this game into why is this game struggling? This isn't random. Uh this is predictable. The TCG ecosystem is fragile and most companies entering the space don't fully understand how all the moving pieces interact together. And honestly that's understandable. Uh most licensing partners are used to sort of mass market consumer products. They understand brand awareness. They understand royalties. They understand merchandise. But the TCG ecosystems are weird. They rely on organized play, retailer confidence, secondary markets, singles ecosystems, tournament structures, player retention, and community building. As a licensing partner, somebody that's in charge of licensing these particular IPs, you probably don't have a base level of understanding of all of that because it's very rare that we have somebody that goes from the hobby space into the licensing space. Usually, it's the other way around. You can't just print cards and expect the machine's going to work forever. Uh, one of the biggest mistakes that I see companies make that are different that are larger in the space are that they try to comp themselves to Magic or Pokemon. And those are the games that have survived. But the reality is people just look at those and assume that success is normal. And what they don't see or they choose not to see is a graveyard full of dead card games that didn't survive long enough to become stable or they did survive for a period of time and then they burned out and then they went away and they they were lost forever.
So today I want to talk about why the cycle keeps happening, why it's predictable, why players misunderstand it, why retailers react the way that they do, and why publishers often accidentally damage their own ecosystems while trying to solve for shortages that aren't really a problem if they were to take a look at the reality of sort of where the things are in the market segment, where the players are, and where the actual marketplace is is positioned based on the success of set one versus where we're at on set three. So the first thing that happens is the launch explodes. And the important thing to understand is that once a TCG catches fire, the publisher loses the ability to accurately measure actual demand. That probably sounds strange, but it's completely true because once boxes start doubling or tripling in price, the market gets flooded with different kinds of customers. Now you have real players, you've got collectors that come along, you've got investors, you've got speculators, you've got scalpers, you've got content creators, you've got casual IP fans. Um, and you've also got retailers that are panic ordering late in the process as well. So, the publisher looks at the numbers and probably thinks, "We have 500,000 customers, but they probably don't. Maybe they have 150,000 real players and there's 350,000 opportunists chasing the hype." That distinction really matters. And a publisher can survive underprinting, but they cannot survive overprinting. or they cannot survive over printing if they're not willing to recognize that they've overprinted and just convince themselves that we will burn pallets of product rather than continuing to push it and flood it into the market.
One of the interesting things about the Hasbro stock call that happened last week was if you listen closely and they talk about print cycles and their print cycle changing and when the reprints are coming and stuff like that, it became very clear to me that Hasbro's business decision now and maybe in the last couple of years has been that they don't want to hold any stock themselves. They want to sell out completely to distribution and they want distribution to manage that product and then they want retail to have to deal with whatever they're doing. And part of the reason that I think that happens is because they've recognized that we're in sort of this bigger bubble than we've normally been. If you're in a bubble and you're concerned about when it's going to pop, the only people that can get damaged in that process are the ones that are holding on to inventory when the thing when the market collapses for that sort of thing. So, if they're just producing and they don't have an ability, unlike distribution and retail, to be able to increase the amount of money that they're making for the products that they're selling, like we do by market pricing or pricing up stuff, there's no benefit to them for them to hold inventory and wait to release it. They just print the demand and then they send it along.
What happens is in in the middle of a catastrophic success, you've got licensing partners that are attached to these large brands, whether it's Lucas Films, whether it's Disney, or whether it's Riot Games, and they just start to panic. There's fans that are screaming online. They can't get enough product. Stores are sold out. Prices are through the roof. Everyone is angry. So, naturally, the licensing partner says to the publisher, "Please print more." But licensing companies often don't understand deeply the TCG ecosystem. They understand mass demand. They understand merchandise sales. They understand royalty from revenues, but they don't fully understand organized play, retailer economics, singles markets, speculative bubbles, attrition, distribution manipulation, and player retention metrics that sort of come into play as well. Regardless of what their what their primary focus is as a publisher, as a licensing partner, as a as a creator of IP, that lack of understanding creates an enormous amount of pressure on publishers to massively increase supply before the actual demand is there for a long-term audience.
So, what we have is you have sort of this this thing that crops in, and I'm just going to call it a retention illusion. So, another huge mistake companies make is focusing launch excitement with long-term player retention. A licensed TCG attracts a ton of players very quickly. You get hardcore TCG players, you get the collectors, you get the investors, you get the casual fans, you get people trying the TCG for the first time [music] that maybe don't understand the economics of what a TCG is or what it means to be a player in a TCG community. And it's really important that people understand the last category. A a League of Legends fan may love League of Legends. A Disney fan may love Disney. A Star Wars fan may love Star Wars. That doesn't automatically mean they enjoy competitive trading card games. There's a big difference between that. So, what happens? They buy a starter deck. They attend a pre-release. They show up to locals. They get excited. Then they sit across from somebody who has been grinding TCGs competitively for 15 years and get absolutely destroyed. They lose repeatedly. They feel overwhelmed by the game and the game mechanics, especially if you're dealing with a game like Riftbound that's had issues with mechanics. You've got arata issues with cards. You've got so many different cards that had to change between set one and set two. You've got wording on cards from set one that'll no longer be in the game based on the way that the rules changes are. And a huge percentage of these players just quietly disappear. They're they're gone in the ecosystem. The publisher sees launch attendance spikes and assumes they've created long-term players. In reality, a lot of those players were just temporary participants. So, if you go through that list of folks that I'm talking about, the investors and collectors are there and the casual fans of the IP are there in the beginning because everybody gets excited about the beginning, but to retain them takes a lot more work and a lot more effort. Investors aren't going to continue to invest in something if the investment is a loss. Most licensed TCGs dramatically overestimate how many fans the IP actually want to become a long-term competitive card game player. and holding and retaining those people, especially ones that are linked to already a pretty hardcore game to begin with, is is a challenging thing to do. They quit organized play completely. Uh they they may still buy cards, they may still play with friends, they may still collect, they may still engage casually, but publishers often only have visibility into your tournament software metrics, event attendance, organized play metrics when it comes to certain things that that they can measure on the retail segment or their own conventions. And then distributor reorder velocity is another thing that comes into play if they haven't sold out of everything on that initial wave. They don't really have an an idea what the total player health is in the equation when everything's going the way that it is. Some games look healthy in stores but are collapsing at kitchen tables. So the there's a tournament structure. The tournament player is there but you don't have a lot of casual play. I think the closest, you know, one for one that I can make on that is probably flesh and blood. I don't know how many casual flesh and blood players there are out there. I think there's some, but the majority of that community tends to be competitive players focused on a competitive game and not really casually centric. It just the game doesn't tend to lend itself all that well to that. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's there's there's plenty of people that play the game and enjoy the game and the game continues to sell well. It's just that it's competitively leaned and it doesn't it doesn't lend itself truly that well to to more of a social gamer. The mistake of a temporary launch tourist for permanent players is one that's significant. you end up printing for a player base that really just doesn't exist. And that's where the problems start to begin.
So once shortages hit, distribution incentives start getting warped. And this is the part players rarely understand. When product becomes impossible to get, scarcity itself becomes profitable. Not every distributor behaves badly. Some distribution partners are excellent long-term partners, but structurally the incentive exists. And why does that incentive exist? Well, because you've given all the product to a small number of people that are in distribution and they've seen that the market is continuing to charge along and it's continuing to go up. There's different contracts with different publishing partners and things like that and some of the publishing partners, they don't care what the distributor wants to sell the product for. Personally, I'm I have no problem with that. I think when you look at the economics of of TCGs and you look at the marketplace and you look at the money that's being made, I'm not somebody that thinks that all that money should go to retail. None of it should go to publishing. None of it should go to distribution. So, I have absolutely no problem with distribution deciding to do, you know, their version of market pricing as it is. And then as a retailer, you can decide whether or not you want to participate in that or not. I don't I don't have an issue with that when I'm looking at collectibles stuff. I can't have an issue with that because my business model is based on market pricing as well and supply and demand. Now, there's plenty of times when distribution goes the other way, too. So, when when the market is down on something, they will go below rate to get rid of some stuff as well. Um, not everybody acts that way, but when you have a small number of publishers that can control the majority or small number of distributors that control the majority of the of the stock, does it make sense for them to not push it all out to retail and hold some of that back and then just decide to to limp some out, limp some out, limp some out? Like, of course it does. Now, that's not their fault. This is capitalism 101. Publishers need to understand that that's going to happen depending on how they decide to allocate their product. So allocations can be manipulated. Obviously, large accounts get prioritized, small accounts get squeezed. Uh some distributors start selling product effectively out the back door at inflated prices. There are distributors right now that have their own TCG player stores and they have their own relational retail businesses. It's just fact. Retailers panic because they don't know if they're going to get if they'll ever get enough product again. So they start to overorder because they're getting allocated a percentage based on that. And then players accuse stores of being greedy because the prices rise. Well, the prices rise because the demand is there and the supply isn't. I see players all the time on various Facebook groups and various places talking about the price of TCGs and how you're not going to go out and you're not going to buy them. I will tell you firsthand, whatever the price is you're seeing for some item out there, it's only there because sales are happening. If sales weren't happening at whatever rate you're seeing that at, the rate would not exist. It would go down. That's supply and demand. So, whatever you think the price should be in your head, if it's priced at a different level, the reason it's priced at a different level is because it's going to sell at that level or it is selling at that level. Now, it may sell for more than that. It may sell for less than that, but whatever that level is at that time, it's not like somebody's decided that, don't get me wrong, there is a ceiling price that exists. there's the maximum amount that somebody will buy an item for. But it's always interesting for me to see a group of players in an ecosystem that singles run be able to very much understand the commoditization of singles and how singles prices go up and down based on supply and demand and what's happening in the meta. But they don't put the same calculation towards sealed product as well. It's just something that exists flatly. You should understand that the reason why it's selling for that is because it continues to sell at that. If it didn't, it would come down. And there's really no amount of kicking and screaming or yelling or torches and pitchforks or whatever you want to do that's going to change that. It especially in a situation where supply is levels is at a scarcity. At the end of the day, that's just retail is reacting to supply and demand. Now, not all retailers do that. That that's their choice. People can decide to run their businesses however they want they want to run their businesses. If community happiness is more important than their business's long-term survival, then that's great. run run your business that way. If it's effective for you and you're happy doing it and that's the way that you want to run your business, then I then I applaud you. Carry on. But I'd also say I'm not looking at you in a derogatory way. So for you to then look at another retailer in a derogatory way or saying they're doing something incorrectly is kind of asinine to go the other side of it. But again, everybody can run their business how they decide to run their business. If one game is making dramatically more profit than another game, retailers naturally shift attention towards it. That makes sense. If it's easier to make more dollars doing something else, then they're immediately going to move to whatever that new thing is. It's not emotional. That's just an operational decision. It's the reason why the lights are still on. When retailers shift focus away from a game, events in that game shrink, singles inventory shrinks, tournaments disappear, buying slows, shelf space shrinks, player recruitment slows, players think the game the games die when the cards get cheap. A lot of games actually die when retailers stop investing attention into them. That's the dangerous part. That's what you run into when you get into an overproduction or if you're not controlling your marketplace, you're going to run into a situation where it's less about the market and it's and it's as much about the attention that retailers want to put towards games. It's part of the reason why in a perfect situation, publishers would have an idea after their game is up and running, how many boxes a particular store needs to be able to get their organized play off the ground and would put in some scaffolding to make sure that each of those boxes are being sent to those stores so that they can have a healthy relationship. When a product is selling above MSRP, every retailer in the country wants to have it on their shelves. So, you have to make some distinctions between what that particular retailer is doing for your game by looking at their event calendar and looking at what they're putting into other parts of their store.
The most predictable part of the entire cycle is the second set trap. I've talked about this ad nauseam. Set one usually has the longest development time, the strongest design, the clearest vision, the most testing, and the highest production attention. You want to launch clean. You you invest a bunch of time into it. There's more design. there's more development as a game ages. Maybe you add more people into those roles, but rarely are you ever going to see the amount of time in design and development after set one if a card game is successful because it's just not the way that the it's not the way that the games are produced. It's it's so suddenly the the game explodes unexpectedly or maybe even expectedly, right? Like Cyberpunk's an example of a game that exploded and just the expectation is already there. That explosion had already occurred because it's crowdfunded. Now suddenly a partner has the publisher has enormous pressure to print more, move faster, satisfy licensing, satisfy distributors, satisfy investors, satisfy retailers, satisfy players. So there's a whole bunch of people that are there. They saw set one, they saw what happened, and now set two is there. Set two and set three often get compressed development cycles because everyone's trying to capitalize on the momentum. So there's probably not as much time put into it because we're just really trying to run the printer. Second and third sets are often weaker. Design quality drops. The mechanics are less refined. Card quality can soften. Balancing becomes a little shakier because you've got a larger card pool. Themes become a little less cohesive unless they're built into the theme of the set already. And even then, sometimes it can be disastrous. I'm looking at you, Star Wars Unlimited. At the exact same time, print runs massively increase because everyone is still emotional reacting to the set one shortages. And here's the problem. People keep chasing set one pricing while the publisher is printing for set one hype instead of actual long-term demand. Okay. So, if I look at set one riffbound right now pricing and set two riffbound pricing and set three riffbound pricing, we see this occurring. We saw it a [music] week ago. We saw it at launch. Set 3 launched at a different level than set two, which launched at a different level than set one. You know, is at 30% regression in in what that pricing was on the market on the day one when it released. That's an adaptation of of more [music] product being in there. and a decision to adjust the distribution model or to have more product produced because there's more demand or at least there's the pretense of demand. Then set three hits, supply floods the market, speculative demand disappears, retailers get stuck holding inventory and then the prices collapse and we're in the middle of sort of seeing that. Now, I'm going to use collapse as lightly as I possibly can. Again, I think if we look at TCG player right now, the market price is probably around 10 between $100 and $108, right? Normal MSRP, I think on the boxes is supposed to be 120. I think Spirit Forge is sitting around 120 or 130 maybe. The creme de la creme set one origins is I think at 190 or maybe 185 somewhere's in there. How did this possibly happen? You know, we've got we've got this third set. Well, I I I discussed a lot of that, right? We if we take a look at the discipline that it takes for publishers to hold back the floodgates to let things go. Sold to the market is not sold through the market. And collectible products have all of those concerns and issues that I talked about earlier with all the different ways where there's expectation and there's problems and there's challenges. So most companies end up failing because of that because they they've just printed and printed and printed and printed and they don't have the discipline to sort of pull back.
So if I [music] look at Riftbound as example, and they're not the only ones that are guilty of this because Lorcana tried to do the same thing. Set one came out, Lorana, they got really pissed off at what the market prices were. So they decided what they were going to do is they were going to go live with a DDC drop and they're going to sell a bunch of boxes at normal MSRP. Well, everybody in the world got on to that thing and it immediately crashed it and they tried it like two or three different times finangling e-commerce to do direct consumer or whatever to be able to appease what level of people there are. The reality of it is though there were also hundreds of thousands of retailers that were in that thing too trying to get product at that cost because they couldn't get it from distribution either. So they've created this sort of ground swell and and chaos and then they got themselves into a section of the market that they're not familiar with. Well, set three, there was ecom that was direct from Riot as well. So, a bunch of boxes went out from Riot. And you can look on Reddit and you can see the boxes that were shipped by Riot were damaged. There's a bunch of beat up boxes. They're trying to handle their own sort of direct to consumer stuff. So, there's a bunch of sales that were part of that ecosystem that were carved off of retail. So, retail didn't make those sales. I'm sure that the boxes that were sent out that way had an impact on the money that was made by the local retailer in all those different areas. For what? to satisfy something that wasn't a problem because if their goal is to be able to get the product to be at market price at close to or similar to MSRP, they're there. They didn't need to sell those boxes. Now, they're getting into the economics of what retailers are doing and stuff and it and it creates this real big problem.
One Piece is interesting um because structurally it behaved completely differently and part of that is this. Despite what I've said about the process for Bandai games before in the past, when you order Bandai games, you have to order set one, set two, and set three before you've sold the first pack of set one. The way that their business is set up and the structural nature of it, they produce a certain amount, and that's how it many boxes are produced. And they do it based on what the pre-orders are that are submitted [music] through the distribution. They don't do this ramp up, ramp up, ramp up. So, when One Piece came out, set one sold well. Set two was a little bit weaker, but it still continued to sell well and they didn't crush the market on it. And set three was a little bit better than set two, and they didn't overproduce during that period of time despite what they saw for the market price on set one. Now, they did come back and they did a reprint on set one that had some impact on the market, but it allowed a bunch more product to get in there, but they had a better understanding of what the player base was and how much they needed to be able to absorb that kind of thing. Their incentives were just much more aligned with a healthy game. At the end of the day, they're not trying to squeeze additional royalty dollars through an outside licensing relationship. Another huge difference is that when we when we place those orders in, we knew there was going to be some level of allocation that was going to be there. So, we we would move some of the ordering to other suppliers that we didn't have necessarily accounts or um relationships with before. But retailers feel like there's a future pipeline. There's a continuity. There's a roadmap that's there that changes ordering behavior. Compare that to the situation where a licensing partner suddenly sees explosive success immediately starts trying to maximize short-term revenue extraction from the ecosystem. They're just very different environments that they're talking about. Right? So, going back to what I said before about, you know, publishers sort of looking at the marketplace and going, "Oh my god, holy retail's making all this money." A lot of times what they'll do is they'll have a tendency to take a look at what their pricing is and go, "How can we make more money ourselves?" and you'll have a bunch of weird behavior that'll end up coming into play. That's why we have this e-commerce thing where they're doing some DTOC selling because there's no distribution partner in the middle of that. They're just selling off of their website directly. One Piece still had shortages. It still had speculative behavior. It still had some chaos, but structurally it avoided all of the issues that we talked about earlier with this overprinting.
Tournaments are retention tools. There's another area where I think both publishers and retailers regularly make mistakes. One of the biggest misconceptions in organized play is thinking tournaments only exist to determine the winner. A new player walks into a store, buys a deck, pays an entry fee, gets excited, sits down, goes 04, loses to experienced players, and leaves empty-handed. That player often never comes back. Now, some of this has to do with retail behavior as well. If a player feels like they gambled on an event and lost, retention just completely collapses. They there's only so many weeks that they're going to come in. And some of the publishers try to solve this by having this this entry pack thing. And I think that's okay until a certain point when those cards there are so many of those cards on the market that it doesn't equal the value of what they're looking to pay. Participation support matters so much. So if you don't have packs to give away on entry, participation promos, achievement systems, league rewards, or raffles, you're just killing yourself on the casual prizing aspect of what you can do to try to retain those players. The product players take home softens the emotional impact of losing. Um, and that matters enormously because they don't feel like their time was wasted despite what the results were. A retained average player is often more valuable long-term than a hardcore competitive player that burns out in 6 months. The other thing, too, is the value of a more social player, somebody that's a less competitive player to the local retail store is probably significantly more, too. They're not spending quite as much time on the game. They're not out there combing for, you know, a dollar cheaper here and a dollar cheaper there. they're pretty much happy or excited to deal with whatever the environment is that the local game store has because it's not a lifestyle for them. They're coming in to to buy singles, trade some cards, do that sort of thing. So, the value that those players have for a local retailer ends up going exponentially compared to perhaps a tournament grinder that goes around the country and just wants to try to find the best EV for whatever they possibly can do. A lot of times the retailers have to be able to try to find that balance or build that into their tournament structure. Stores cannot run organized play as a charity forever. Events cost money. Staffing judges space utilities uh price support opportunity costs. Retail needs events to financially make sense for them as well. If retailers optimize events only for immediate margin extraction, they damage player retention and eventually damage the ecosystem themselves.
So if I get to Riftbound and I and I end it towards sort of talking about where we are as far as behavior cycles go and things like that when it comes to Riftbound, uh I don't think Riftbound is uniquely is uniquely failing. We we talked about that in the beginning when I talked about all of those other examples of those card games that are out there. I sent this script to a publisher that I'm working with that's developing a TCG and said this is a really really sobering take on the reality of how these things happen and it's completely predictable. It's predictable because I predicted it was going to happen with all of these other games. The first set exploded, prices went crazy, everyone screamed for more product. Now we're seeing from Riftbound falling prices, softer excitement, uh, retailers pulling back, direct sales pressure from them specifically, [music] a lot less confidence in the marketplace, and a little bit of market fatigue. And when Riot sells heavily through direct channels, they may look at retailer margins and think retailers are making too much money. If they took a look at the work that we had to do to be able to manage these communities in the way that we do, it's good that we're making what we are making, and if we made less, it would be really, really detrimental, and we start looking towards other places. One of the things that you want to think about as we're looking at that specific product is set two was weaker, set three was weaker. And it's easy to be able to say that because we can look at a the bannings and where the bannings came from. And b you can take a look at any of the recent organized play high attendance events, the Sydney event, um, and some of the other stuff. And 80% of the decks are still set one product. It's the other reason why despite the fact that there's been a bunch of set one that's been thrown out in the marketplace, it still maintains the cost that it does. Because if players want to play the game, they have to buy set one product to be able to do it. There's fundamental cards in set one that aren't there. And while set three visually to me was the most appealing set, it looked the nicest and it felt the most like League of Legends to me, there were a bunch of misses that were there. You know, Baron was an exciting card and still is an exciting card, but I think we can all agree that the the location didn't do or hasn't done right? And if we take a look at the deck list from last week, it's it's the meta is going to be what the meta is. But if you look at and you were to deconstruct with regard to the deck list and the top list for the last three or four events in this environment, and you can take a look at China, too, you're going to see that 80% of the cards in each of the decks are going to be from set one. So, there's a problem in design. There's a problem in development that's there where these sets are weaker or fundamentally less sound. And when you run into that, you're going to have this value problem and it's going to be exacerbated. So now you've got sets that are printed significantly more, thrown out into the market more aggressively, and the cards in them are weaker than the previous sets. It's just of course we're in this situation that we're in because the environment's been created and it's the same way as it was before. So if you go into this thing and and you look at this, what's going to happen is you're going to lose serve. And when you lose serve, retailers are going to start looking for either the next best thing or the most stable thing that they can try to find rather than exerting all this energy after they've already had to feel like they've gone through a marathon with trying to get product before. There's ways to be able to manage this thing on a structural level, but most publishers aren't being honest with themselves about how to be able to be disciplined. I mean, the answer, I think, for set three would have been to produce less than set two and see what the market looked like and be ready to be able to restock some of that or do wave printing. Retailers are not loyal to games specifically. Some retailers are. They're magic fans or whatever. But most retailers that are successful are are loyal to sustainability. If a game stop moving, if it stops generating singles activity, if it stops driving tournaments and it stops maintaining margins, of course, we're going to look somewhere else, right? So, at the end of the day, we can love all these publishers. We can love all these games, but we still got to keep the lights on. We still got to pay the bills. And we have to have enthusiasm and excitement for each set that's coming. It's not emotional. It's just business reality. And once retail attention moves away, it's really hard to get it back. There's fewer tournaments that happen because you just not going to use your play space for that. There's fewer players that enter. There's less singles inventory that exists. The community weekends, they're definitely not doing learn to play events and that sort of stuff. And the spiral just happens really, really fast. And it's really difficult to get served back. and and it doesn't happen most of the time. Most of the time, you know, TCGs do this thing or sometimes they start up here and then the this is just the the life cycle of their entire game. It just it just goes into hell.
Now, maybe I'll come back and I'll do another episode after I get back from the ACD Expo this week and talk about Lorana and how Lurana has managed to buck that trend. That'll be another half hour. So, in closing, uh the important thing to understand is that none of this is new. Um, we keep treating every single launch like it's going to become the next Pokemon or Magic, but those games are just the exceptions, and comping towards them is really difficult to do. You can do it for a second, but you can't do it over a 30-year cycle unless you figure out a way to be able to maintain that enthusiasm. The survivors are of decades of market cycles, retailer investors, organized play, infrastructure, and player retention systems are few and far between. The real goal of a TCG is not explosive launch success. The real goal should be sustainable growth, retailer confidence, stable organized play, measured print runs, long-term retention, healthy singles ecosystems, and disciplined expansion in print runs. And honestly, the hardest thing for a publisher to do after a breakout success is to stay disciplined while everyone around them is screaming for more. So, I'm going to end it here. Uh, I hope everybody appreciated the talk. I'll stay on for another 26 minutes to do an AMA uh like I always do. Uh, happy gaming to everybody. Thanks.