Of course there are more players then 100 in germany but how many of them buy more then one display a year? To support the tournament structure that was in place last year UDE has to sell at least 650 per expension, probably more. And I simply don't see the market for that in germany.

I tend to disagree with that.

1) PCQs tend to pay for themselves.

2) $10Ks attract an International attendance in Europe, which means that we can't just count Germans in the number for that tournament.

But even if 1 is false, and 2 is exaggeration, we still have to remember to look at Europe on a continental scale and not a country by country scale. We would have to count up every PCQ and $10K across Europe, then figure out how many boxes or cases need to be sold all across Europe to equal it out.

And, honestly, selling 650 boxes (if you mean booster boxes when you say 'display' which I assume you do) is NOT an impossible 'goal' in a country as large as Germany. If you have 100 hardcore fans, what about all of the players who AREN'T hardcore but still play the game?

I don't think it's as unlikely a number as you think...

Of course the specific costs and numbers are all speculative, which makes the argument seem moot anyhow...

I just had to chime in in response to this post. I judge and play in Edmonton, and we are actually damn lucky to get the amount of support we do considering how small our player base is.

The fact that we get PCQs and Sneak Previews at all is nothing short of amazing.

Our situation is hardly comparable to that of Europe's.

And I totally agree with this statement.

I still don't understand how such a good game, with so much potential, can fall so down like VS in Europe has?

If the main reason is poor sales, those can be only attributed to poor marketing; you cannot expect for the product to sell itself.
Although comics aren't popular in the EU as they are in the US, you can still sell the game with a good OP system, since the game is one of the best on the market. But all this has been said a million times, is there any point in going through this again?


What I would like to know, when will the damn new tournament format for EU start?

And will the MHG and the subsequent Sneak Previews also have poor prize support?
Or we're going to hear the same old story "this happened only this time, the next time it's gonna be better?" :disappoin

Did you guys have less marketing then we did in the US? Cause in the US there was essentially no marketing except through sites like this and the sell sheets that the distributors run around with.

Well you are certainly correct there. Of course no one really knows whether or not the new OP will be good or not.

Well its a bit late for this....

Maybe you should play Inuyasha or Dot Hack for a while and tell us what "poor" prize support is...:disappoin

I'm not one to complain about the prize support at sneak peaks. they're awesome tbh
I think the correct thing to complain about is the lack of information over the difference in prize support ;)

Now with that out of the way I would like to reitterate the point of how could this game feel like it's dying?

There's a serious mourning type feel going around where I play and I don't think at all that it's only my area that's affected.

the only way the game dies is if people stop playing.

There are actually quite a few games that get by just on fan support.

If you like the game then keep playing it. Who cares what UDE does?

Correct me if i'm wrong, but what the company does about the game makes a big influence on the players.

Before i moved to VS, i was a huge fan of the LOtR CCG by Decipher. After 2 years, my interest died. Why? No tourneys, poor promotion and poorly designed cards.

if UDE cuts down on the number of tourneys, the number of players will definately drop.

i hate to admit it but right now it looks like the game needs the people who play but dont give a crap about the characters.
because these are the people who play for prize money. without the tourneys, you lose this player base.

here in the RP our biggest problem seems to be a lack of support (i.e. promotions and prizes. poor tourney organization, and lack of support from shop owners, heh or shop OWNER, as 1 man has a virtual monopoly on CCG imports) This has hurt the game here immeasurably.

But despite our Vs population of around mebbe a hundred people, We still have our PCQs and Pre-releases.

Now comparing ourselves to Europe, people in Europe can drive or commute to tourneys outside their area. here, if you arent from Manila, its a boat ride (roughly $10-$20, 1 way) which is a big deal around here.

If UDE Europe dies however, i can see UDE SEA dying soon after.

UDE is in a no-win situation I think. Perhaps their biggest mistake was taking the game global from the beginning. I t may have been smarter to pour all the resources into the US market early and then try to branch out. All these thing that are happening sound like they spread their resources to thin. They can't pull out totally at this point and ever hope to regain the players they will burn by doing this if their market share ever strengthens. Unfortuately, they seem to be choosing a slow death in the international market, but I dont see any other option at this point. They clearly aren't willing to spend the extra $$$ to grow the game and in fact it seems to me now that they may be losing traction here as well.

I've been optimistic about the game, even a few months ago, but I think real problems are starting to surface. Things may be worse than we thought. The seemingly universal decline in attendence at the sneak peeks was a worrisome sign for sure.

I'm not too worried about any sneak peek decline yet - DC sneaks almost ALWAYS get a lower turnout than Marvel - and X-Men will get higher numbers just because it's X-Men.

We'll see how the Heralds sneaks do before Chicken Little-ing.

on a side note, I'm going to france this summer july, and was wondering if anyone can give me some info on vs in or around paris and dijon?

eg hobby leagues, city championships, stores

i already have some info, any more woiuld be appreciated.

have a nice day.

How so? To participate in a PCQ costs 5 Euros. It will only pay for itself if you have at least 50 participants, which never happens here.

Germany is the biggest market in Europe (1200 players out of 5400) and if you take into consideration the sales from all the other countries you also have to count those 10K's which makes the situation worse and not better.

right and I guess this is exactly what UDE did and the reason they changed the tournament structure.

Of course this is all guesswork, but from what I have seen so far of players I would say that even the hardcore players only by very few boxes, they mostly try to get the singles they need. Only very fw players buy more then 2 displays from each set.

Lets not get all testy and negative over the situation I think we're all just trying to debate the title of the topic here

Firstly I have to say 5 Euros for a PCQ is ridiculous You are surely taking the piss with that claim.
Our PCQs used to have an amended price for Constructed if you dropped from the Sealed PCQ rather than enter Constructed outright but even then it was not the equivilant of 5 Euros.

Evilbaby - I don't care what UDE do really but I do still want to play competitively and tournaments and my playgroup playing more and more MTG doesn't excatly help me! If I've no one to play with locally then I'm screwed right?

Ben - yeah we hat about 30 people in Glasgow for XMen, 11 for Crisis :) It was to be expected really.

bigpoppalicious - I find it a little funny that you're asking for info when most of us Euro guys just winge and whine on about not being told anything :) hopefully someone will give you the info you need though. If not then enjoy your stay regardless :)

Just to clear that up. 5 Euros is only for constructed PCQ's. A Sealed will of course be more expensive.

The best marketing for a CCG are tournaments that encourage people to play the game and bring new players to it; you can make a thousand web sites, run promotions in magazines, etc, but you'll never have better promotion than tournaments.
You cannot deny that the PC/10K/PCQ system attracted lots of MTG/random other game players to VS. And it isn't about the fact that there were no premium tournaments in Europe, the major problem was that info about them was poor, there was no official info about the new tournament structure other than the mails UDE sent to local distributors (and the local distributors that felt like it shared the info), etc.


Like someone said before, it's more of the fact that there was no info for the prize support. Before the MXM preview, UDE didn't release anything official about the "new" prizes, and instead sent an email to the local distributors, telling them to communicate the good news to the players. Imho, that's really low. Also, they said that it will never happen again, and look now, at the DCR prerelease the same thing happened, we even got less stuff (no door prizes, etc).

I have no problems if they give us only boosters and EA's as prizes. Or if the shirts/mats/tins/other random stuff will be sent later.
It would just be nice that we have an official statement with an explanation. The majority of the players I talked about feel cheated, and even though they'll continue to play the game, they have less and less enthusiasm, that brings us again to the fact that the best marketing you can have is word of mouth (if it's the correct way of saying) and good OP system (that we don't have any info when it will start).