Title: Cyberpunk Trading Card Game

Title: Cyberpunk Trading Card Game

URL Source: https://cyberpunktcg.com/blog/collectibility-insight

Markdown Content: Trading card games are for everyone. Some people love to play games with friends or compete against rivals, while others get more enjoyment from building an appealing or valuable collection. For a TCG to achieve true long-term success, it needs to meet the needs of both these groups simultaneously. And that’s where things can get tricky.

Leaning too far into collectibility can cause secondary market prices to become so high that the game becomes inaccessible. Equally, leaning too heavily into printing for availability's sake can flood the market with cards, and erode the excitement that comes with pulling a chase card. With Cyberpunk TCG, we’re doing everything in our power to try and get that balance right.

What makes a collectible?

Rarity and scarcity are important levers in building collectibles. The simplest way to make an item desirable to a collector is to create something that’s appealing to a large number of people, then deliver fewer of those items to the market than the market demands. But those levers alone don’t create products that are collectible in the long-term. In fact, used in isolation, they typically create short-term bubbles and fads that burn out extremely quickly.

What truly builds a collectible is trust. Collectors must be able to trust that a publisher isn’t going to flood the market with additional products and destroy their collection’s value. They also need to trust that a publisher will act as a responsible steward of that collectible and make decisions that continuously grow the game and the community around it.

Finally, they need to trust in a product’s quality. Will a publisher continue to deliver engaging gameplay experiences for players, and incredible-looking pieces that thousands of people want to display in their collection?

Trust takes time. It’s built by doing what you say, not breaking promises, and showing people that your word has weight. So, in the spirit of building trust, we want to lay out exactly what you can expect from WeirdCo in terms of our printing practices moving forward.

Our supply commitments to Cyberpunk TCG players and collectors

1. We’re committed to reprinting cards, not packs

We care about availability. If you can’t acquire the cards you need to compete in Cyberpunk TCG at a reasonable price, that’s a problem. So, we’re going to target specific cards for reprints if they become problematic from an accessibility point of view.

Crucially, we won’t achieve this by printing additional Booster Packs. We want to increase the availability of a few key cards without flooding the market with additional copies of our highest rarity chase card variants.

Instead, we’ll lean on other reprinting mechanisms, such as adding desired cards into supplementary products, reprinting them as widely accessible promos, or adding them to our various tiers of Organized Play prizing.

2. We’ll use all of the data available to us to make informed print run and supply decisions

We’re taking a data-driven approach to help us make informed decisions on exactly how many Booster Packs we print of each of our sets.

This was one of the big reasons why we decided to run our Kickstarter campaign. The campaign was invaluable for helping us understand initial die-hard Cyberpunk fan demand for this TCG, and obviously, your demand hugely exceeded our expectations.

We’ve been able to use Kickstarter data to have informed discussions with distributors and retailers and build a clear picture of expected incremental demand. All of this together has helped confidently lock in the print run numbers for our Welcome to Night City Beta and Retail releases.

We’ve also decided to use exclusive distributors in every region to give us the clearest view possible of where our product ends up. This will help us accurately track consumption and demand, and will form the basis of all future set print run decisions.

We’ll use our data to tightly align our print runs with market demand, and after that’s done, we will not reprint the same set or configuration again.

3. We’re committed to hobby stores and the meaningful human experiences they enable

Hobby stores are the center of our distribution strategy for Cyberpunk TCG. We want players to visit stores, share pack-opening experiences, and play and enjoy the game together in the same spaces. So, within our retailer program, we’ve prioritized approving stores with physical play spaces and a commitment to supporting in-store Organized Play experiences.

By distributing primarily through these stores, we can ensure a high volume of our products reach players’ and collectors’ hands at MSRP. Stores that support Cyberpunk TCG Organized Play will always be prioritized in our distribution plans. They are where friendships and memories are made, so that’s where our focus is — though we don’t have any kind of policy explicitly preventing online sales.

Of course, we also want to explore exciting partnerships and promotions, with channels such as conventions or the CD PROJEKT RED Gear Store, for example. And we’re open to exploring new sales channels in the future if the right opportunity comes along.

4. We will not run further Kickstarter campaigns for Cyberpunk TCG

Our Kickstarter campaign was a huge success in helping us better understand and forecast demand for Cyberpunk TCG before launch, and it has been extremely helpful in that regard.

Moving forward, we’ll have retail sales and Organized Play engagement data to draw on, so we won’t need to run a campaign like this again. You can expect a much more traditional delivery model for Cyberpunk TCG from here on out. New sets and products will land directly in local game stores, and those stores will be your primary destination for all things Cyberpunk TCG.

If we consider the needs of players and collectors together, both can thrive

Perfectly balancing the demands of engaged players and collectors is no small task. We know exactly what challenges lie ahead of us. But we’re confident that we’ve got the right plan, processes, and people to make both players and collectors of Cyberpunk TCG very happy.

As you can hopefully tell by now, transparency is key for WeirdCo. You’re just as invested in this game and its success as we are. So, we want to make our decision-making processes as transparent as possible, and let you know exactly what to expect from us.

We’re in this for the long haul. And we’re extremely glad to have you along for the ride with us.

Catch you again soon, chooms!