Quoted from Whysnow:
I think last year (with a million NIB show games) may be a hindrance on this year?
I know I was somewhat waiting to see show deals before deciding on what to bring as a second game. The show deals are not as appealing as a price from past years, and nothing new so I did not jump in.
That means the community needs to really step up and decide on what to bring to make this show as awesome as it has ever been.
Without 50+ Stern and the 100+ games kingpin brought (along w Troy) then we have big holes to fill.
Being honest, I do think last year's NIB thing is affecting us in a weird way. The biggest thing is that as of right now, with the exception of Stern, we do not have any games available from anyone that wasn't available at last year's show. JJP's most recent game is Wonka, Chicago Gaming's is Monster Bash, and American's is Oktoberfest. That isn't to say that any of them are bad games, just that we always see that games that have been out longer see a decrease in demand a year later. The next round of games is being influenced by factors outside of basically everyone's control with the extension of the Chinese New Year thanks to coronavirus concerns being perhaps the largest unknown on exactly what is going on.
Based on conversations I've had, I still expect there to be a solid representation of new games from manufacturers, but I expect that it will be closer to the prior year when we had about 50 than last year when we had 100 NIB machines for play. And, what is crazy is this number could change a lot, based on these uncontrollable factors.
The good news is that we have plans already to cover whatever shortfall here happens - not with NIB machines, but with machines for play in one way or another. However, we're short on collector games - which as I stated in the other thread, has happened at this point in the show before and we've been fine, but it's making me put out the call today... If you're planning on bringing something, please do register it! Even if it changes, I'd like to know so that we can properly plan for whatever will be there.
If things come together *juuuuuuust* right, this will be a REALLY exciting year. If they don't, it'll still be an ultra fun year.
I do understand that some people have had concerns about the game move-out scenario from last year. I typed up before how we intend to fix this for this year, and have worked with the Center for the plan already. Everything appears solid, and we expect an incredible improvement on this on our end. If anyone wants to talk more specifically about this, I'm happy to fully explain the plan to see if there are any other ideas that we need to look at to improve it even further.
Hope to see you up here!
(Going to add this, I realize the point I started to make I never did. What I think is going on is because we haven't had many new game announcements, we have more people than ever waiting to see what is announced before committing to *anything*. It's less that we had 100 NIB machines last year, and more that we have only had Stern announce new games since then that would have any availability in my opinion. And, since Stern's most recent announcements have been vault editions of already existing games, while they have had three great releases since last year's MGC, I think people are more focused on "what's next" at the moment than they were last year. And, thanks to the above stuff, at this point, no one FULLY knows what is next.)