Boards›Mechs vs Minions

Hindsight is 20/20 (Or quick analytical case study on Supply vs Demand)

RiotRiot Rikey·10/13/2016, 9:34:10 PM·3 votes·1,919 views

Hey there! I am Newrikey! I am a Gold V Riot hopeful currently training my analytical skills with Amazon! My goal is to join Riot's analytics team and I've made it up to the 5th interview with them before being shot down and given some great feedback as to how to improve myself back in march! As a result when Mechs vs Minions released and I saw all the information as well as how big their first wave order was. My brain strated thinking about how much they could potentially sell and whether 30k was enough, too much, or not enough. As such, I spent 15 hours spread over a week doing simply analysis to see what the outcome would be!

Rather than drown you in all the info I thought I'd share bits and pieces and if people are really interested I could release the whole thing! I am holding onto it dearly though for experience as well as giving to Riot Games when I reapply. Apart from that lets get into quick tidbits and info and see what the result was!!!

  1. First let's preface this by saying that a game's first printing selling out instantly is normally unheard of. As well as framing this to say that a good first run is 5k. That makes MvM 6 times larger than the norm with a 30k first printing. Wowza!

  2. Let's start off with League's initial possible market of 100 million players. This means that for MvM to sell out they'd only need .03% of the playerbase to buy the game. That's roughly 3 out of 10,000 players or 1 in 3,333.33333. With a ratio like that it almost seems like a foregone conclusion it'd sell out!

  3. However this game isn't shipping everywhere. Using this site https://www.unrankedsmurfs.com/blog/how-many-lol-players-are-on-each-server we are able to extrapolate and assume using riot's available shipping addresses that the possible initial market space is approx 50 million instead! This makes the ratio more like 3 in 5000!

  4. Using this infographic(http://majorleagueoflegends.s3.amazonaws.com/lol_infographic.png) and assuming static linear progression, we see that 85% of the player base is 16-30. Furthering that we could say 7.5% are younger than that and 7.5% are older. Through assumption of age and who can actually buy the game. We can further limit the market space to approx 33 million and as such are down to 3 in 3333 or 1 in 1111!

  5. Afterwards we look at groups of friends and couples who will most likely buy 1-2 games per group and 1 per couple. Using Riot's previous infographic in point 3 to get the % of female players (10%) we assume that half of them are in a relationship along with how many groups of friends there could possibly be to bring down the possible market space to 25 million or 3 in 2500.

  6. At this point it got tricky, how many league players would play board games? Using Gen con and Pax as markers, it can be assumed that people who went to gen con are much more likely to play video games than people who went to pax are more likely to play board games. As such gen con's most recent attendance rate 60K and Pax while refusing to state theirs can easily be around 120k, can be used to somewhat get an idea.

  7. Using point 6 we can assume most if not all of gen con goers play video games and that means that a rough estimation of 50% of league players would probably not be interested in board games if we were to subtract that from pax attendees. It's not the cleanest assumption but chances are more than 50% of league players are not interested. Either way this changes for the most part the final markt spact to 12.5 million or 3 in 1250. That drops down to 1 in 316.66!!!! That's actually very low.

However this only addresses League players as that market space and we still have natural board gamers who never played league of legends before as well as looking at previous historical data to find out what's actually possible.

  1. The darksouls kickstarter sold 29k copies of their board game before the kickstarter ended. This is a video game board game that had almost 30,000 pre-orders for a game that would not release for approximately 1-2 years!!!

  2. http://wccftech.com/dark-souls-series-sold-8-million-copies-40-pc/using this link from a year ago we see that dark souls as a franchise sold over 8 million. That number alone would impy that .375% of the community pre-ordered the board game. However that is an incorrect assumption as the 8 million signifies all games bought across the series, meaning we could either assume everyone who bought a dark souls game bought all three games in the series or assume there were people who dropped it and those who picked it up later in the series. Either way this would signify the amount of unique gamers is more along the scale between 2.66666 million to possibly 4 million or more!

  3. However this doesn't account for board gamers who never played league of legends and that could be a lengthy discussion. However suffice it to say this kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jameystegmaier/scythe/description offered a very value driven deal and was able to get a 17k pre-order for board game that was relatively obscure but well worth the price signifying how board gamers are very likely to jump onto a board game if it looks fun and is well priced.

  4. MvM is more than well priced and there are no ifs ands or buts about it. 75$ for the board game is an absolute steal. As a result this game will heavily appeal to board gamers as well.

  5. As I further dug into this rabbit hole looking up info as well as trying to hone my own skills. The further I came out believing whole heartedly that riot's 30k order despite being massive and basically unheard of in the tabletop world. Would more than likely not be enough for everyone who would possibly want the game.

Thank you for reading!

Tl;Dr: I dun think 30k was enough.

10 Comments

Elder Zeekutar10/13/2016, 9:50:26 PM3 votes

none of this means anything when you consider scythe and dark souls allowed people to PRE ORDER over the course of 30 days. not this clusterF that is 300k+ people logging in at the same time to grab 15k copies

Crawford88110/13/2016, 10:53:22 PM2 votes

For what it's worth, it's not clear that the demand exceeds the supply of games, only that the website is crashing. Someone could be DDoSing the merch store, or automated bots could be trying to buy the game and crashing the site.

Toriko Uzumaki10/14/2016, 3:36:29 AM2 votes

I've never played League of Legends, or even seen it played, but I fought for about 3 hours to buy this game before I was able to get through checkout. I don't play video games much (board gamer) but I'm tempted to try out LoL now.

Stexe10/14/2016, 2:15:49 AM1 votes

They wanted to err on the side of caution. The difference with what Riot was doing is multi-folded. The fact they've never done much in the board game scene before, don't have a lot of employees who have been in the board game development production scene (at least as heavily as publishing / designing multiple titles goes), and the fact that they wanted to do a big order before the launch (I assume to build up hype) means they were under a very different pressure than normal.

Imagine the game doesn't sell and they put down 30k orders. That's over a million dollars in losses.

I think their plan was sound overall, minus the execution of the server capacity. Plus, they are set to start production on more copies (with a few very minor fixes and improvements) the moment they want.

Granted, had I been in charge I probably would have gone for pre-orders and then created an order run based on that to better satisfy people. But Riot usually likes to deliver big and fast without much notice now. It is different from how they used to operate (huge notice), but they often went radio silence and left a bad impression with people (Magma Chamber, Ao Shin, etc), so they tend to not do that any more.

Overall it seems like it was a fine first start for them.