By the way, I stole this post from the wow site because it is relevant to vs players as well.

"Ok, just to be honest, this post is likely to be pretty dry and boring unless you happen to be interested in how UDE is performing in regards to selling product, or have an interest in card store operations, etc.

That said, I just wanted to give a 'shout out' to UDE for Top 8'ing the sales charts in August, with their 3 core products. According to the December 2007 issue of Comics & Games Retailer magazine, the Top 8 products in August were:

Game: Company: Boxes sold:
1: Magic: The Gathering Wizards of the Coast 18.1
2: Yu-gi-oh Upper Deck 7.5
3: World of Warcraft Upper Deck 5.9
4: Pokemon Nintendo 3.8
5: Legend.. Five Rings Alderac 3.1
6: Naruto Bandai 2.5
7: Univ.Fighting System Sabertooth 2.1
8: Vs. System Upper Deck 2.1

To give some significants to those numbers, the top 3 selling companies, in CCG/TCG games are:
1: Wizards of the Coast 35.01%
2: Upper Deck 29.84%
3: Nintendo 7.27%

Data is compiled from stores that voluntarily submit data, so it may or may not represent the local market for everyone.

And for those curious on what selling 50 boxes of product on average in a month means to the normal gaming store, it represents about $2700 - $3000 in net profit. Which, sadly, isn't really a lot when you look at the cost of operating a store.

Again, I just wanted to grats UDE for their Top8."

we lost to UFS.

ouch

Looks like more of a tie to me.

This is down hard from our position in July, where we beat everything but MTG, WOW, Yugio, and Pokemon' (lynch the traitors). But it did state that some of those games pulled ahead due to full month releases on new products where others fell due to half month releases and I think MVL released late Aug. though my recollection of that time is foggy.

This is exactly what I was thinking. I want to see the September totals now - those should be a lot better in terms of Vs. sales. Everyone I talked to about buying Vs. around August were waiting for MVL instead of buying more DWF (myself included...and then I ran out of money and couldn't buy any MVL anyway :().

Actually this assumes that Retailers do not discount anything for a sealed box, as well as sell all the boxes they purchased.

This number is just incorrect. At the low end, it represents a gross (not net) profit of $54/box. Given what the wholesale price of a box is, a store would have to charge ABOVE $4/pack (= $96/box) to have a $54/box margin.

so uhh... out of curiosity, just exactly what is vs ahead of?

The '24' CCG, the Star Wars card/miniature-thing game, the Transformers card/thing game.

Bella Sara.

My personal opinion - the fact that VS has stayed in the top 8 consistently is a great thing. When you consider all the players who quit last year, this leads me to beleive that newbies are coming in to fill those gaps. Think about all the other choices out there and all negative stuff that was everywhere until we got our OP announcement. Yet even with all the changes last year and, unfortunately, pros dropping like flies vs is still consistent. I'll take 6 to 8 among ALLLLLLLLL the other products out there -a consistent 6 to 8 at that.

Is that number large enough to maintain the licensing cost?

What's UDE's status with the licensing, anyway? How long do they have it for?