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GeekStack as Trading Card Game?
Posted on | November 21, 2008 | 1 Comment
From the beginning, I liked the idea of making GeekStack not just trading cards but a collectible trading card game like Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon. After all, those games are fun (addictive?) and using a rare card to help you win is more motivation than just getting the rare card to complete your set. But it seemed too hard to create, like it was something beyond my grasp, so I let it go and focused on just working on trading cards.
I got kicked back into the card game space at the Fast Pitch Event earlier this week. I didn’t win (you’d know if you were following me on Twitter) but I did get a chance to talk to three of the judges afterward. The questions they asked me during the pitch and after the competition helped me pin down answers to a couple questions I had been avoiding.
1) Who is your target market? In my head I kept telling myself that it was “Geeks of all ages, everywhere!” but knew it wasn’t that simple. On the spot, I had to answer that the people most likely to buy GeekStack cards are the same people that buy most trading cardS: junior-high school boys, age 10-14. Younger than that it’s a little over kids’ heads, and older than that it’s just not cool enough. So once I admitted to myself that ‘tween boys were my market, other questions got answered as well.
2) What will the cards look like? I had pictured straightforward photos on the front of the cards, with some graphics around it representing that person’s accomplishments and affiliations. Then I realized how boring this would look to a 12 year old. It works for sports cards because the players are usually in an action pose and are literally larger than life. So rather than getting pictures (which I thought was one of the biggest threats to the project), he recommended I either feature the cool thing they did (ie, for Dean Kamen, show kids building robots) or give a visual representation of the effect they had on tech or business (like having Linus leading a charge of siege engines against a castle). make them cartoons, make them anime, but please, please, pretty please don’t show pictures of pale, flabby old men! I’m not sure how they will end up looking, but I know that my first idea ain’t it.
3) How will you make it fun? For any set based product, there will be people that will buy more until they complete the set. Two problems: when they finish the set, they stop collecting, and there aren’t enough of these people. The appeal of making a game is that even if someone has one of every card, they still collect to get multiples of the best cards to make a better deck. Also, because multiples are valuable, there’s more room to trade. “I already have one of those, but I could use another. I’ll trade you these three for it.” Plus, it adds a viral element because people want to play against other people so they recruit their friends. Plus it “sticks” in their mind and attention long after they complete their set.
Given my limited resources for marketing and advertising, “acceptable” will get me a big fat diddly squat, I need to shoot for “ridiculously exceeds expectations.” Trading cards would be cute, but a game would be enticing. It would be better for customers, better for business, and it gives a much more dynamic feature for the website (online tournaments, anyone?). It has created a lot more work, but if that twice as much work makes me 10x more likely to succeed, then it’s worth the time. I don’t know how this affects my “early 2009″ release time line (I’m guessing … postponing it), but I like the direction it points the product. It does answer my question about which cards to make rare.
And the funny thing is, once I was determinedd to make GeekStack a game, the “designing a game” problem went away and I started having all kinds of insights and ideas about how to do it. Suddenly becoming a GeekStack beta tester got much more appealing…
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December 22nd, 2008 @ 11:35 am
[...] importantly, I’ve been stewing over the issues raised in my last post, about how to make GeekStack a card game. The more I thought about it, the thornier the problem [...]