Trading Card Freebie

After spending a lot of time on free-to-play, I’m shifting to a game industry that is getting no love. Together with the wizkids over at To Be Continued, LLC I’m been working on a white paper that we plan to launch into the world in a few weeks.

Trading Card Games (TCG), roughly the same size as casual gaming, are a natural extension of currently emerging free MMOs. For one, trading card games attract the same demographic. The immensely popular Yu-Gi-Oh!, which dominates with about 50% of the entire market, is hot sh*t with 12 year olds.

Also, big ticket publishers are paying attention. The people behindDungeons & Dragons (Wizards of the Coast) created a TCG for Nexon’sMapleStory, World of Warcraft rakes in about $9 million or so with its TCG version, and Sony’s Free Realms will be launched with one as well. 

Anyway, it seems to me that in a consumer market which is increasingly characterized by virtual items, a tangible product really stands out. More and more, toy makers are combining an offline with an online experience. Companies like Webkinz and RideMakerz are aggressively experimenting with this idea and already seem to garner some success. (Webkinz also has a TCG, by the way.)

Lastly, TCGs like Chaotic allow you to buy a deck, punch in the unique card codes online, and play online. Effectively, this means that those two oddballs on your school’s playground who actually play these nerdy TCGs now have access to a much larger crowd of opponents. Network effects, baby!

Anyway, here’s a snippet from the Introduction:

This white paper describes the history, present and future of trading card games, and is made up of the following sections. In the first part we explain the main concepts of TCGs, offers a definition and a glossary. Following, we present a concise history on the TCG industry and its larger trends. In the third section, we look at the current industry by describing its core demographics, second market, key brands and companies, and a quantitative look at the overall industry’s revenues and forecast. In section four we lay out the various aspects of the TCG business model, and finally, in section five, present the industry’s opportunities and most urgent issues. 

More to come later.