Good News: Dark Vengeance Releasing This Week
This just in: Dark Vengeance is said to be shipping out from Games Workshop, with an official release set for this weekend.
Which is, of course, a full week delay past their previous scheduled release of September 8th.
Current on Games Workshop’s site Dark Vengeance is still set at “Advanced Order”, but if patterns hold true, they should go live this Friday around 12 midnight GMT.
Accordingly I’m sure copies of Dark Vengeance will start trickling though to retailers and e-tailers, alike; and for distribution to consumers shortly.
So what happened? Why the delay?
Word on the street is they made too many of the Limited Editions, and had to “force them out”. Some stores have reported receiving two shipments of “allocated” Limited Edition box sets without even being billed for one of those shipments.
Plus, I know of more than one occasion of stores just straight up dumping those “extra” Limited Edition starters for wholesale prices to customers just so they could afford to pay the unexpected duplicate bill!
I know, I know we all just want our mini – why does any of this matter MBG?
Well, just bear with me a second, let’s take a look at the big picture for a second, and how it may have affected all of us.
September is the slowest month of year in the game store cycle, with everyone going back to school (or already being back in regards to college students), which also affects the parents that game.
Another gaming company, Wizards of the Coast, tries to combat this sudden lack of interest with a global event called “Magic Celebration” which offers free booster packs to games store participants basically to either introduce them to Magic The Gathering, or to keep veteran players’ interest.
Guess when that event was… September 8th…. the original release date for Dark Vengeance being released.
I can tell you right now that if you FLGS is similar to the the one I run, then there was a ton of Magic players in store all day last Saturday, which would have made things a bit difficult logistics wise to run two premier events on the same day.
Think of it as if two Hollywood blockbusters opened on the same weekend, which would obviously be bad for both their sales, as the theaters showing the movies would be hard pressed to accommodate the volume of viewers for both.
I think all of these things (rumored “force-outs” and event overlap) led to a perfect storm of both confusion and anticipation for this product. I hope the majority of you out there could see how the apparently lack of perception and planning may have led to a lot of disappointed people, both retailers and customers alike.
What do you think of the delay? -MBG
